How much things can change
rodneybrooks.com
rodneybrooks.com
Here you have massively visible physical manifestations—mountains, earthquakes, and volcanos—that have shaped human history and played prominent roles in culture since the beginning of humankind, and we didn't have agreement on a good explanation for them until after Rubber Soul was recorded by the Beatles.
https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3Aoreskes+kw%3Atectonic...
Gross continental geography, radioactivity (energy release, isotopes, clocks), bathymetry, magnetic fields analysis, seismic surveys, nuclear testing (more radioactivity), fossil-record analysis, vulcanology, earthquake analysis, stratigraphy, core sampling, and so much more.
All were parsimoniously explained best by plate tectonics.
This would seem to imply to me that plate tectonics isn't a good explanation for volcanoes. How are volcanoes best explained by plate tectonics?
1. Volcanoes are caused by Circumstances X, Y, Z, whatever.
2. Collision of two tectonic plates causes Circumstances X.
That is, I want the model of "volcanoes" to account for all volcanoes, not just most volcanoes. If we describe circumstances that are necessary and sufficient to create a volcano, we're done; the fact that the interaction of tectonic plates often creates those circumstances -- and even more often doesn't -- isn't really part of the model at all.
Plate tectonics describes and explains the overwhelming majority of known current volcanos and volcanic regions. Mantle plumes, which themselves drive tectonic activity, much the rest.
The overall structure of the Earth, with a thin crust, plastic mantle, and hot core with temperatures resulting from both latent heat of gravitational formation and ongoing radioactive decay itself explains much and is entirely consistent with plate tectonics.
The principle further exceptions might be simply thin crust, or penetrations by impactors --- the universe is complex, volcanos result from escape or exposure of interior magma to the surface by some mechanism. Gods hurling thunderbolts or smithing armour for other gods, for example, has scant evidence.
I'm unaware of any specific terrestrial volcanoes not explained by tectonic or plume mechanisms. There are minor craters (e.g., Ubehebe crater in Death Valley) resulting from steam rather than magmatic bursts, but still driven by geothermal processes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubehebe_Crater
Further we've now had evidence of similar mechanisms (or their lack) on other bodies, including the Moon (little tectonic activity, some faulting for other reasons, possibly validating Tethys impact formation hypothesis, possible recent volcanism https://coolinterestingstuff.com/volcanoes-erupted-on-the-mo...), Mars (extinct volcanos, former tectonics), Venus (active volcanism, possible tectonics), Mercury (mixed, some faulting thought due to cooling and contraction), and Io (tidal-force induced volcanism), as well as other moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
GPS came later.
The reason why people will not trust scientists (or journalists for that matter) is because other people, who are also not scientists (or journalists) want to manipulate them into acting against their own self interest.
See also: lobbying, the tobacco industry and many other examples besides.
I can improve on this.
Cosmology:
If there isn't any dark matter out there, there must be gremlins pushing stuff around to make it look like as there is. Otherwise there's no sensible way to explain the Bullet Cluster for starters.
If the Universe is not expanding, there must be much bigger gremlins stretching homogeneously everything everywhere out, otherwise there's no way to explain the observational Hubble's law.
If the Big Bang is wrong, there must be very naughty and ubiquitous gremlins matching somehow the primordial nucleosynthesis ratios and the CMB distribution everywhere you look at.
It's one thing to have a problem with whatever you think you know after reading pop sci, but there's textbooks and papers. That's way harder, but it's all there, the arguments, the counterarguments and more importantly the observational/experimental facts. You can't allow yourself to have problems with facts, if your intuition gets in the way of accepting them, just get rid of it.
I'm sorry, but there's a pattern here. Whatever kind of scientific topic that drives "common sense" folks out of their comfort zone has to be wrong, because well, it has to be. It doesn't matter that there are actual measurements and heaps of relevant technical literature full of excellent reasons for this or that theory (I mentioned a few). Whatever the people working in a field find convincing just can't be right because after having spent a few hours trying to fit the headlines to what they think they know about reality, they just can tell it can't be and that's that. Well, saying that something is wrong in science isn't enough, you have to include your convincing reasons for it or else your proposition turns out to be as valuable as saying that gremlins did it (but less fun).
It's been a while now that new pieces of knowledge in physics fit over the old ones. That's because data exist and it's the result of measurements, not subjective numbers, so new theories can't disagree quantitatively with the confirmed predictions of the old ones. The anomalous magnetic moment of the electron won't change the day we find the mythical theory of everything (if such a thing exists), and the mythical theory of everything will have to include within itself a scenario in which plain QED first and then the full-blown SM happens, otherwise it's unlikely that you could predict its value to such an amazing degree. Again, there are technical reasons for this that you can find in texts about effective theories.
To be honest and IMO true and false belong more in mathematics than they do in science. Newton's gravitation theory isn't false, it's a good approximation to a better theory that won't be false either if we come up with something even better. About true theories as in involving the things in themselves, I don't think we're doing that after Kant.
Dark matter assumes gravity is uniform across the universe. What if it isn't?
Measuring the expansion of the universe relies on the speed of light being a constant. What if it isn't?
Then it's the job of the alternative theorists to come up with working models with better descriptions and/or predictions. To my knowledge neither MOND nor VSL theories do that, but I wouldn't have any inner conflicts if they did. We're here to learn about the Universe, not to dictate how it works.
Actually, I agree with you. "Gremlins" is a great way for unknown unknowns or necessary assumptions that are impossible given current observations. I'll start using the term in that way, if you don't mind.
If we find proof that there's no dark matter then there must be something else like dark matter that behaves in the way that dark matter has been described (something with gravitational pull).
Since gravity requires mass then a universe where there's no dark matter (conceptually as matter) would completely invalidate Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
That would completely break modern Physics. Right? I'm not expert and this is conjecture from my interest in cosmology and physics, so could someone with knowledge chime in and explain if what I'm saying make sense?
No, it could also turn out that Einstein's field equations require modification at certain scales or in certain situations.
"Dark matter" is just a term to describe hypothetical matter that would cause the observed deviations from General Relativity – if it were actually there. People have proposed other ways to explain those deviations, though, like MOND, f(R) gravity, entropic gravity and many others, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Alternative_hypoth... .
Or...we completely reconfigure how we understand gravity. That solution seems more likely to me, as we know far less about gravity than we do about matter and relativity.
> completely invalidate Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Only in the sense that general relativity invalidated the Newtonian model. That is to say that the two theories had to agree, within experimental uncertainties, in domains where the Newtonian model was known to work. Where the Newtonian model was known not work, such as the discrepancy in the precession of Mercury's perihelion, is where general relativity has value. It can be argued that dark matter is general relativity's analog to the precession of Mercury.
> That would completely break modern Physics. Right?
No. It could alter certain parts of modern physics, but it can only do so where the observational evidence contradicts current theory, current theory is supported by weak evidence, or the evidence is incomplete. The important thing to realize is that physical theory is based upon mathematical models. Mathematical models are predictive, and observations can be made to support the model or disprove it. Even then, claiming that observations can disprove a model is too strong. Contradictory evidence in one domain does not automatically invalidate supporting evidence in another domain (though it may encourage people to go back to examine the validity of that evidence or improve the accuracy and precision of measurements).
It is also important to consider that a mathematical model is an approximation that must agree with observations within uncertainties. As such it is possible that multiple models may fit the observations. Part of the reason why we look for models that predict something new, such as Eddington observing the deflection of light as predicted by Einstein, is seek an understanding that accomplishes something more than fitting the data. The ability to come up with new theories that fit the data is also why we are hesitant to adopt new theories when there is a discrepancy. When it was discovered that the precession of Mercury did not fit the Newtonian model, there were efforts to seek out explanations that fit the Newtonian model (e.g. is there a body perturbing the orbit that hasn't been previously discovered). General relativity's ability to predict the discrepancy in the perturbation was wonderful, but the deflection of light by gravity (a previously unknown effect) is one of the bits of evidence that allowed us to say general relativity is true since we are now confident that the inability to find a body perturbing Mercury's orbit is because no such body exists.
It should be noted that none of this is meant to claim that a better theory will replace Einstein's, simply that any new theory cannot overturn what we already know from general relativity.
The physicist in me would replace "probably" with "hopefully" here. :)
Just added Show HN on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085041. The product is on https://www.stayinsession.com
Cheers!
And only in the last decade did we establish that another, only 12800 years ago, killed off most American megafauna, and much of nascent American cultural development.
It is somewhat likely we will learn that agriculture originated before it, with all the evidence now 100+ ft below sea level. Along with a lot else.
Could you provide a source for that? Everything I'm finding says this is anything but well-established.
A layer all over the Americas and out to Syria, Chile, and South Africa, right at 12800 years ago, the start of the Younger Dryas freeze that lasted 1200+ years. It is packed with soot from hemisphere-wide wildfires, melt glasses, hexagonal nanodiamonds, and elevated platinum.
Bones of American mammoths, mastodons, horses, camels, giant sloths, dire wolves, glyptodonts, and many others appear only up to the layer. Also, all Clovis culture artifacts end immediately below the layer.
Current hypothesis is a broken-up comet and multiple Tunguska-style airbursts scattered over a wide area.
(The only naysayers, last published in 2017, cite one study that sampled only one site, and not at the layer in question.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
but I retain some small probability that the jury is still out.
The opposition gave up publishing in 2017. There is a great Nova episode on Youtube where they sponsored a trip to Greenland to collect ice samples from that period, and had a camera in the room when the first SEM images came up. It's all-over nanodiamonds.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/megabeasts-sudden-death/
That was in, what, 2010? Makes me wonder what motivated everything published against, since.
I was astonished to learn that wheat was farmed in China for thousands of years before they took up rice.
Just consider the rather immense period of time between whenever the Americas were settled (currently looking like at least 30k years ago) and the emergence of agriculture.
But the New Guinea highlands do appear to have invented agriculture, in isolation, 7000 years ago.
We don't know when agriculture in the Amazon basin started, just that it was much, much longer ago than anyone had imagined. The entire Amazon was a manicured garden when the Spanish got there. Then smallpox wiped it off the map.
Unless you're arguing that they actually were not isolated, and there was already cultural exchange going on between other continent's populations and those in the Americas.
12,000 years ago there were very different kinds of technology at different places. We are certain that Australia and New Guinea (at the time, a continent joined by the now submerged Sahul region) was settled by boat across open sea. The entire Pacific rim, from New Guinea to Chile, could have been connected by boat traffic operated by a now-vanished seafaring culture, with any remaining evidence now deep under water. Thousands of years is enough time for a very great deal to happen, and then the artifacts rot.
Absent evidence, there is no certainty. Maybe ideas arose independently all around the same time period entirely by accident, and maybe they didn't. But generally it is unwise to insist that simultaneous parallel events are entirely independent when there is possibility of contact.
Hopefully his children or grandchildren don't experience another one of these.
yet most of the discoveries of the past, DNA, semiconductors, relativity have nothing to do with prior information being wrong,
just that prior knowledge was incomplete or insufficiently accurate.
The predictions that best satisfy my intuition's classifier (not exactly a scientific process) are the ones that suggest an expanding of our current knowledge through the discovery of some new, fundamental thing—like a new piece of quantum mechanics, a new systems-level understanding of neural activity, new life forms that evolve our models of life, etc.
New models imply falsification or rejection of prior models.
Semiconductors were more an emergent materials-properties discovery, though with analogues in earlier systems (diodes, vacuum tubes, physical gates and valves, etc.). Not so much a model as a discovered behaviour.
I am really interested to see where this goes. How much of this bacteria determines which diseases we get?
Idk what conventional opinion would be, but the mass part is a lot more important in my mind than the number of cells part. We're still be 97% 'us' by mass. As an off the top of my head example, Jupiter is mostly the big gas planet thing, not the 79 or so moons that orbit it.
There are drastic changes on the horizon, both positive and negative.
I suspect that progress on certain kinds of science, especially physics, will slow. The reason is that confirming things at finer and finer grains of detail experimentally gets multiple orders of magnitude more expensive over time.
For example, Newton managed to empirically test many of his ideas by himself, in a cottage, with minimal equipment. Later discoveries have required fully-staffed laboratories, later still and we needed to construct multi-billion dollar supercolliders and deep space missions to empirically test our ideas.
As a layman, I've read that it could take solar-system sized experiments to test theories like String Theory. Eventually, the cost becomes too great in absolute terms and "real" discovery slows. (Theory will continue to develop, but it will be based on shakier and shakier foundations over time. Eventually we'll need experimental confirmation or what we are doing is no longer "science").
From what I understand, quite a lot of pure math research has begun thanks to theoretical physics. Here is such a Quanta article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-quantum-theory-is-inspiri...
Hopefully our current anti-science, anti-intellectual phase is just that: a phase. But it's also possibly a harbinger of a longer dark age to come, at least for the US.
As always, people are on a spectrum. There will always be vocal anti-science minorities (flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, etc.) no matter how enlightened the civilization. But hopefully they largely stay that way - minorities.
Furthermore, there are people who are quick to trust new science and people that are slow to trust new science (think people that instantly embrace the latest study vs. people that are instantly skeptical of the latest study). Both sets of people may be completely pro-science and trust in the scientific method, but the disagreement arises on how fast the scientific method converges on truth, the perceived strength of the presented evidence, etc. Sometimes I think we are too quick to label people in the second set as "anti-science".
I argue that the more abstract science is, the easyer is for the laymen to disagree with it. Sometimes in _highly_ unproductive ways.
It is all speculation until we have real hard numbers. It's easy to argue in both directions.
People believed all kinds of conspiracies when I was a kid. And people still do. The only difference is that it's more visible now. In the pre-WWW days you'd only hear it if you were in the room with them. Now you can see it even if they said it days ago.
Carl Sagan wrote The Demon Haunted World in the 90's, and it is mostly about exactly this: Whereas science had made tremendous progress in his life, the attitudes and crazy beliefs people have had not shifted much. The whole book is a lament about this, and a certain amount of bitterness on this being the case despite him spending most of his life promoting science.
Probably the only real thing that has changed is the role and type of media people consume. In the 80's if a whole bunch of people believed something that was clearly wrong, and were geographically spread out, they didn't have an easy means to make that an issue for elections. You would need to form a lobby group which takes time and money. The newspapers usually did not entertain them.
Now you don't need newspapers and news channels to get your message out. You have Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc. The cost to organize and spread your message is much lower. So tiny fringe groups have the potential to be much more influential. The politicians can now exploit that.
There definitely are a group of hardcore anti-science people, but I think it's far less widespread than you credit. It may appear more widespread because there is a tendency by some to present public policy preferences as 'science'. Since public policy choices always involve specific intention (what is our desired outcome) and trade-offs (what policies are we precluding by choosing this one) they are not 'science', they are rational proposals based on scientific evidence, and in some cases they can be rationally disagreed with in terms of both intents and trade-offs.
It could be "I trust 'pure' science but I can't tell if this particular science has been tainted by politics or money or corporate interests so I'm not sure I trust it". So any given pro-science person might hold one or more "anti-science stances" for various reasons.
Related article: Combating antiscience: Are we preparing for the 2020s https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7141687/
1. Compile a huge dataset of observations relevant to your domain
2. Using the cross-entropy loss or some close variant, train a raw data statistical model of the observations
3. Make the model immensely complex (GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters); this can be done without overfitting because of the huge size of the dataset.
4. Once the raw data model is available, reuse it for various related tasks of practical interest. The immense sophistication of the raw data model will make the practical task much easier.
GPT-3 demonstrates clearly that this methodology works, and produces far more powerful results than other more mainstream approaches in NLP that depend on laborious human annotation. In my view it is nearly certain to produce comparably dramatic results in other domains (I'd be happy to bet on this if anyone is interested).
Here's a longer essay on this topic: http://danburfoot.net/research/RediscoveryInteriority.html
Another use case would be for pharmaceutical research, there are a number of companies already in the ML -> drug pipeline space but GPT has brought new insight to the table.
I still remember a cartoon one of my father's colleagues had posted on his office door: a UFO crashed in the desert, with a little green man crawling away under a blazing sun, crying out "ammonia! ammonia!"
Wait, I can't parse that sentence. Does it mean to say bacteria (`the first ones`) were only found in 1977 ?
It's not a well-written sentence.
Aha ! Thanks.
Quite frankly the rest of the article isn't easy to decipher either (but English isn't my first language).
The list of beliefs/theories that could change throws me off because some statements are about some topics that I thought most were in agreement (eg: the universe is expanding)
> Things will continue to change. Below I have put a few things that I think could change from now into the beginning of the next century.
> - The Universe is not expanding.
The cosmology list is more about fact waiting to happen that expansion of knowledge but I am just a layman.
Or something.
> ...the bacteria and the archaea. The latter (archaea) were completely unknown until the first ones (bacteria) were found in 1977.
"In 1977, Carl Woese, a microbiologist studying the genetic sequences of organisms, developed a new comparison method that involved splitting the RNA into fragments that could be sorted and compared with other fragments from other organisms."
In 2008, when Joe Biden debated Sarah Palin, they both supported civil unions over gay marriage because that was the centrist position at the time.
When the author was born, the USA was over 90% christian, and less than 5% of people had no religion. Today the country is closer to 70/20.
When the author was born, black people were still being lynched.
The BLM movement would argue that they effectively still are.
These deaths can hardly be called premeditated extrajudicial mob executions, with the sole exception of Ahmoud Arbery.