Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

There is a Terence McKenna quote from the early 80's where he says that basically everything we know about the (largescale) universe comes from radio telescope data, and all the bits from all the data ever recorded have roughly the same amount of energy as a piece of cigarette ash falling about two feet. And this is what our entire understanding of the cosmos is based on.

Not sure of the validity of the measure/comparison, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless. One does have to wonder though, if it's so obvious now why this phenomenon is happening then why didn't they predict it before seeing the data? Especially if we see the same thing in solar flares. It seems like it's generally a good idea to bet on the laziness of the universe, but beyond that anyone who pretends they know what's going on is probably full of shit.

edit: The Terence McKenna quote is from this talk about his life: http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=1509

The talk in general is about his formative intellectual influences, and about why he finds psychedelic drugs to be intellectually interesting. He has another talk that's more about his views of physics, epistemology, and cosmology here: http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=297

Perhaps my two all time favorite talks on any subject, albeit you need a high tolerance to ideas that are at times highly speculative. (And sometimes flat out wrong.)

your "if it's so obvious why didn't they predict it?" question is a result of the way that the article is written which, in turn, is a consequence of the dependency of nasa (and astronomy and space research in general) on public goodwill to motivate funding.

this isn't so exciting, and it isn't so shocking.

it's a standing joke in astronomy / astrophysics that magnetic fields are complicated and misunderstood. whenever something can't be explained it's attributed to tangled magnetic fields. so complexity in the magnetic field - this "foam" - would not be a great shock.

i have a phd in astronomy. one reason i left the field (apart from the small matter of being a pretty crappy astronomer) was that i felt it was a fraud. sure, it wastes much less money than the arms program and, yes, we do have non-stick pans now, but everything you see from the field is presented in a sexed-up, over-sold, exaggerated way to get more funding.

Wow. Astronomy has always been my dream job so this view is surprising to me. What areas do feel are most exaggerated? Is dark energy a bunch of crap for instance?

EDIT: My last sentences sounds snarky in retrospect...I meant do you feel that something like dark energy is played up.

well, my views are probably at one extreme of the spectrum.

dark matter and dark energy are both real problems. my beef isn't with the facts, but how they are presented. for example, i am very skeptical that understanding those will have any major practical consequences (the argument being that they are only significant on astronomical scales - if they were somehow available / useful / practical at human scales then they would be much easier to study). the "poetic" value of "understanding our universe" is something separate, of course.

most astronomers i know (and i know a lot - my partner is a prof at u chile; chile has a lot of telescopes) love what they do. the thing that they dislike most is the extreme pressure for jobs - there are many more grads and postdocs than there are permanent positions. if you're considering a career in astronomy i would weigh that much more than my (cranky) opinions on funding.

(also, you realise that going observing is not sexy? you're sat in a room somewhere, surrounded by computers, with no windows and a bunch of engineers, so tired that you've got mouth ulcers, eating crap food to stay awake as nothing much happens for hours on end. and the meaning of your data won't be clear until you've done a year more of processing and analysis... :o)

ps the most over-sold field currently is planets: very popular; very sexy ("human inhabitable" etc etc); largely pointless. the "dark" problems are at least physics, rather than stamp collecting.

Astronomy is just a dream of mine since childhood...I'm 38 now and set in my career path more or less. I agree with you that professional astronomy is probably not very sexy. My interest lies in the large scale stuff like quasars, galaxy formation, and the physics underlying neutron stars and black holes. For some reason exoplanets don't do it for me.

Thanks for the reply...it was very interesting.

"I'm 38 now and set in my career path more or less"

Fun exercise: Sit down. Think you just died. Like now. Just turn that around in your mind until it sinks in. Watch (hopefully) many of the rationalizations for your choices fall off. Repeat.

Sorry, that probably sounded defeatist or something. I meant that I am doing something now that I love, and working towards improving my life through this route. I have many dreams, more than a lifetime's worth :P

the thing that they dislike most is the extreme pressure for jobs - there are many more grads and postdocs than there are permanent positions

So its like every other position in academia then? Also like most private sector jobs in a recession/depression. Really having more opening then applicants is a rarity. Engineers, doctors, some other high demand professions, are all a minority in terms of total labor force in the economy.

you can have many applicants per job even with full employment.

my understanding is that astronomy is one of the more competitive areas within academia, but i don't have any figures.

Do you do any programming? I was curious what problems could be solved by someone who writes code and has a passion for astronomy. I used SDSS data and python to plot high redshift galaxies for a school project. I could clearly see the filaments that make up the large scale structure of the universe. It was a lot of fun and I would like to do similar stuff in the future as a hobby.

sure. you'd be surprised how little maths/physics most software engineers know. so there are lots of jobs out there where knowing that gives you an edge.

my first job after astronomy was working for a company that wrote software used in oil surveys. i worked on the mathematical model for a cable towed behind a boat. the maths was trivial, but only one other person in a company of 30ish could understand it (apparently).

these days i work for a "geophysics consultancy" (a handful of guys who will write pretty much anything you want, usually related to seismic data processing - most fun recent project was using a GPU). but i've also worked on more "normal" software development projects (j2ee once, for example).

to answer your question more directly - most observatories have software engineers on the staff.

There was a paper on arXiv a while ago that looked into this, and concluded that while there are enough postdocs to go around, only 25% of postdocs can count on a permanent position. And of course, as time goes on, the number of postdocs keep swelling as people pile up trying to get those jobs...

I'm close to getting out, I've enjoyed my time doing astrophysics but it would probably have been a career-enhancing decision to have done so a while ago...

good luck. if you're anything like me you might be pleasantly surprised at how much less competitive things are in the "real world". the flip side is that typically you do have less freedom.

The sad fact about freedom: In the "real world", you don't have freedom. In academia, you do, but the pressure is such that you never use it...

The situation of astronomers is not comparable to "every other position in academia."

Let's suppose that imbalance between "transitional" positions (grad students, postdocs, visiting researchers/lecturers) and "permanent" positions in Astronomy is the same as, say, Comparative Literature.

The difference is that the astronomers can typically, with just a little deflection, use their quantitative skills to find a different permanent job at reasonable pay. But it's much harder for a comp lit person to do so.

In other words, both astronomers and literature-lovers might have been deluded about job prospects. It's easier for the astronomers to recover, so their situation is not as dire.

Incidentally, did you manage to find a career in a field where things aren't oversold in the pursuit of popular enthusiasm? It seems a fundamental component of capitalism, if not human enterprise in general.

sorry, previous reply mis-understood your question.

this is the same point as the pressure for jobs, really. it's not that astronomy is the only place where things are oversold, or where there's a lot of competition for jobs - it's a question of degree.

in the case of astronomy it doesn't produce much at all of quantifiable physical value. it's not that different to poetry (you can make the same "life-affirming" arguments for both). in contrast, car mechanics, say, do something physically useful: they fix your car and you're willing to pay them for that.

so astronomers and poets are, largely, state funded (through science and arts grants, respectively).

you could, i guess, argue that a car mechanic who places an advert in the local paper is also relying on "over-selling". sure. but i hope you'll agree there's a difference in degree between the two cases: the mechanic is, say, 90% useful, 10% "ephemeral"; astronomy is 99% "ephemeral" [edit: made phrasing less abrasive].

in modern universities, most depts have a range of sources of funding. it's very unusual for astronomy depts to have links with industry because they don't produce anything that people want (there are engineering-related exceptions for optics and detectors). the way they get money is by being cool and hoping to appear attractive to rich donors (or the govt). hence the reliance on "advertising".

ps and to reply directly: yes; i now work on projects that help save people's lives.

I'd argue that astronomy does save lives! It does it through inspiring people to become more educated, and giving them a greater perspective on the nature of our world. Hopefully, that helps limit future conflict, warfare and environmental destruction.

This is probably not as direct as what you do now, though. I am glad you have found something that works better for you :)

Speaking as someone who has also wished at times to make a more immediate, tangible impact on the world around me, I'm glad you're liking your new job. That said, even "ephemeral" things have value. Individuals will buy poetry books, for instance!

You seem to be saying that, since one can't persuade the average person on the street to pay you to write a research paper[1], the research that gets done is "over-sold" through "advertising." In other words, the work is funded not on its own merits, but as a popularity contest. I'd argue, though, even within astrophysics alone, some research is more important than others: maybe it answers more fundamental questions, or could enable a unifying explanatory framework for a broader class of phenomena, or is actually of near-term importance to us on Earth (asteroid location, space weather).

Science is a human endeavor. Yes, there is often hype and trends as people advocate for funding for their next big thing--but there's a lot of that here on Hacker News, too.

Lately, I've been feeling more of this. I work in numerical simulations of galaxies, and I feel like people are just running simulations and writing papers without bothering to check things like sensitivity to the parametrized recipes for unresolved physics. What really irks me is that when you really do worry about these things, you just look like someone who can't produce compared to these people who are getting jobs without any repercussions from flip-flopping their results every couple of years. Because these simulations can be compared to reality only in very tangential ways, it's like there is no need to worry about being wrong...

Since you're here, how is this distinct from the 'foaminess' visible in a newtbasin [1], if at all?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_fractal also enormously fun to do with chains of actual magnets

"Fraud" is far too strong, to me. Many people are naturally interested in astronomy (when was the last time you saw a HN article about condensed matter physics, or epidemiology?), and popular articles like this provide a short-term return on their investment.

As to the sexing up/over-selling, competition for scarce resources is the very definition of an incentive. The grant funding system has plenty of flaws, but the fact that research is funded through competition a) increases its quality and b) doesn't remove the intrinsic value of its results.

Upvoted, if only for mentiong Terence McKenna.

That man was such a great thinker and ponderer (not to mention his huge vocabulary!)

Even though I don't agree with him on every idea, boy, do I wish there were more extremely out of the box thinkers like him around. :)

There's a reason that he was on shows like Art Bell's. Not quite the guy I'd be quoting in a discussion of science.

"Not quite the guy I'd be quoting in a discussion of science."

He didn't really believe in mainstream science though, and the fact that he's actually able to make a really intelligent and often convincing argument for his views is part of what makes him so interesting. He was definitely interested in a lot of fringe stuff as well, but he always has really good explanations for why we should take various things seriously.

Certainly he had a lot of faults, and was needlessly sloppy or overenthusiastic in many cases, but overall he's got to be one of the most intellectually interesting people of the last couple hundred years.

> one of the most intellectually interesting people of the last couple hundred years.

So, that would be since about 1800. In science and mathematics, that would put him in competition with Gauss, Einstein, Darwin, Maxwell, Turing. In philosophy: Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein. Not to mention harder-to-pigeonhole people like, say, Goethe. You think he belongs in the same list as those guys? Really?

It wouldn't make sense to compare him to those guys because he mostly didn't come up with big theories of his own. He was just very well read in all of the above and used their ideas combined with science to call bullshit on mainstream ideas, figure out which questions were the most important, and speculate about the nature of the universe and the human condition. (Much like a modern day Socrates.)

Depending on what you give him credit for I do ultimately think he may be able to hold his own with any of the above, not in terms of coming up with novel theories, but in terms of being able to see what's important and set the agenda for humanity for the next 500 years. But again like Socrates (perhaps Plato) he came up with a lot of bullshit too, so it's important not to throw critical thinking out the window.

Could you perhaps be more specific? I'm no McKenna expert, but so far as I can tell (1) calling bullshit on mainstream ideas, as such, is commonplace and does little to "set the agenda for humanity for the next 500 years" and (2) McKenna hasn't, in fact, provided any ideas we have any reason to think will stand us in better stead for the next 500 years than, say, the conventional wisdom would.

So would you care to give some examples of what McKenna's said that will "set the agenda of humanity for the next 500 years" and explain your reasons for thinking they'll do so?

(For the avoidance of doubt: (1) I am not claiming that the current conventional wisdom is in fact all we need for the next 500 years, just doubting whether what McKenna has to offer is any better; (2) I am not claiming that McKenna has had no good ideas or insights; perhaps he has, but so probably have any number of stoned undergraduates; what's useful is producing good ideas that can be identified as such and distinguished from the dross.)

"So would you care to give some examples of what McKenna's said that will 'set the agenda of humanity for the next 500 years' and explain your reasons for thinking they'll do so?"

So it's very difficult to do this because most of the ideas he espouses aren't really his. I think his main contribution was in combining a wide range of ideas into a compelling worldview.

- His ideas about the fragility of scientific knowledge, its dubious epistemology, e.g. the importance of the anomalous.

- His ideas about the unsustainability of consumer civilization

- His ideas about the epistemological implications of DMT and psilocybin, and drugs in general

- His ideas about using drugs to discover new ideas (IIRC in this talk: http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=328)

- His ideas about the singularity and teleology

- His idea about drugs have shaped human culture over the millennia, and possibly also human evolution.

- His focus on the big questions like who are we, why are we here, where are we going, etc.

- The way he was able to find elements of validity in paradigms that have long been outright discarded such as shamanism, alchemy, various spiritual traditions, etc.

It's unclear what impact McKenna will ultimately have because it's hard to predict how people will react to living in a world that's running out of material resources, a world with 100x as many academic studies as there are now, a world with unimaginable technology and suffering, etc. But based on how things seem to be going, it's really hard to see how science can remain indefinitely divorced from philosophy and the humanities, which is sort of the essence of his worldview.

It's difficult to see him ever getting credit for much because his ideas would definitely need to be cleaned up by others and reformulated before having a wider impact, and so it's unclear how he would be credited since most aren't really his ideas to begin with. But I still think a lot of the many of the things he espoused are going to be increasingly more important in the future than they are today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com