Arno A. Penzias, 90, Dies; Nobel Physicist Confirmed Big Bang Theory
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxMKuv0A6z4
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/labscam.html
Edit: just wanted to say the hum of the universe dulled a little bit with his passing
Would anyone who knew him personally agree that he claimed to have "confirmed the big bang theory", and that he would want to be remembered in that way?
Almost certainly not, at least not the scientists who knew him. The scientific method does not involve proving (or "confirming") theories; it only involves falsifiable theories and attempts to falsify them.
Your view is needlessly narrow. Coming up with new theories, collecting new data, verifying how theories fit that data is also part of the process even if it doesn't falsify them. To quote wikipedia it's on going process:
"The process in the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypothetical explanations), deriving predictions from the hypotheses as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions."
What is your source? Wikipedia disagrees with you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
TL;DR: If a theory isn’t falsifiable—if it doesn’t make any predictions which can be proved or disproved—then it’s more philosophy than science. By this standard, for example, string theory fails.
This is definitely not true. One obvious example is that important scientific work is done turning unfalsifiable theories into falsifiable ones. After gravitational waves were predicted by general relativity there was some argument about whether they were a real observable thing or just an artifact of the maths. Those guys were undoubtedly doing "real science" while discussing something that some of them thought was undetectable (and therefore unfalsifiable).
Another example is that a lot of science is exploratory without any particular theory you're trying to falsify.
Science is more interesting and broad than your dogma about what it should be.
The vast majority of the time, when a working scientists says "proved" they understand the epistemic limitations of the terminology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1769_transit_of_Venus_observed...
Strong support is obviously not the same as confirmation, so I think you're right that he might have disagreed with this word choice.
Since the pressure varies depending on solar flux and how much was in the tank we couldn't use a turbine (the shape of the turbine is tuned to a constant flow) so instead used multi-stage steam engines (the first new steam engine designed probably in 75 years. These were ordinary container-sized pressure vessels and the steam engines were built into a container too. Easy to repair; you could make your own parts, and last forever.
Cheap PV and batteries killed it.
Arno was full of good advice.
Positive Q sign = lying in bed unconscious with tongue drooping down one corner of mouth; means either dead or will be soon.
Source: Retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years in practice)
My proof: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5DdrMc8AAAAJ&hl=en
In general land is less expensive than the cost of trackers or concentrators (capital cost incl installation, plus op ex of maintenance & power) so you deal with your cosine loss by just installing more panels.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/terrajoule-unst...
The advantage of the mechanical system is that it would last indefinitely and could be repaired on site. People in India could make most of the spare parts themselves and do the maintenance themselves.
But the advantages of the semiconductor + battery systems were: 1 - no moving parts and 2 - massive economies of scale due to mass factory production of highly uniform parts that could be used in lots of applications. Makes sense that it won -- our approach was superior only in certain applications.
“Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn’t know what it was when they had found it, and hadn’t described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times”
- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
RIP Mr Penzias
The audiobook at .7 speed is my sleep aid.
I love little hacks like this.
One could argue that the microwave background radiation was discovered precisely by the nobel winning experimenters because they refused to explain away the "noise". They were persistent and kept trying to eliminate possible sources of this noise. Perhaps other similar horn antennae had the same noise but this noise was just explained away by the other experimentalist as being an artifact of the equipment ? One may never know.
Lastly, it has been my experience that luck seems to strike competent and fastidious researchers more often than average ones.
Penzias had put Bell Labs on notice that it would have to get more applied while still maintaining the research excellence. There wasn't much direction on how to do both. The philosophy regarding any problem was, "You're smart, figure it out." Additionally, he felt the future was in software so the physical and materials science orgs where I resided felt the pinch that much harder.
Nevertheless, my management pressed the case for physical sciences hard and at often substantial personal and professional cost. The postdocs were well shielded from all this. No matter what was playing out at the higher levels, the doors stayed open and just about everyone was up for a discussion of whatever was on our minds. Go in with a middlin' idea, come out with three better ones.
You'll have to provide more context for why you say that.
No. That isn't to say that there aren't issues with it. Notably that it explains many of the observable qualities of the universe today with high accuracy, with our current instruments.
Due to some inconsistencies with what is observed across great distance (and time) and the need to violate a number of principles (thermodynamics and speed of light) during the inflation, there are other theories[1]. It is recognized that the BB theory has serious problems that cannot be empirically tested.
Therefore, the theory holds as long as it continues to be useful in describing our local space.
[1] I prefer the idea of a localized small bang as opposed to a universal big bang
There's no basis for that assumption, other than it fits the model.
One does not 'confirm' the Big Bang theory. One finds evidence that does not disprove it. Or one finds evidence that does disprove it, then someone (possibly the same person or persons) elaborates a variant of that theory, or a whole sale replacement of it.
Note the prominence of the need for falsifiability in the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
https://www.google.com/search?q=karl+popper+falsification+qu...
So, yes, speaking of how a Nobel physicist "confirmed" the Big Bang [theory] is unscientific nonsense. What should one expect though? It's a headline in the New York Times, not Nature!
My above comment is at -3, which normally I'd not care about, but collective ignorance of what the scientific method is is a bit depressing.
We see similar titles every once in a while when someone does a new kind of test for relativity too.
Yes, journalists aren't scientists.
Because while a cosmic microwave background radiation is something that would be expected from a Big Bang, its actual reality is weird and contradicted previous expectations. It has to do with casual connectivity. "A" can only possibly influence "B" if A could reach B at the speed of light. But the relative homogeneity of our universe is suggestive that parts of the universe which should not be casually connected, are causally connected.
So this discovery quickly led to the invention of cosmic inflation [1] whereby the early expansion of the universe is said to have dramatically accelerated well beyond the speed of light, and then slowed down - in order to enable these regions of space to become causally connected. No possible means or mechanism have been suggested, so it remains nothing but a rather inelegant hack to try to make what we observe fit a preexisting hypothesis that it largely contradicted.
As experiments to try to provide supporting evidence for inflation have also turned up negative, it's also becoming one of those contemporary model driven hypotheses that requires ever more exotic physics to even make it possible, as each failed prediction gets assimilated into the model to make it keep fitting what we see. Just add more epicycles. [2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Motivati...
Yes, that's why the title doesn't say "Physicist proves Big Bang theory"
Really?
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018MNRAS.478..283V/abstra....
> Obviously, the idea of the universe oscillating within a given range of redshifts is a mere hypothesis full of open questions. The primary question is: which forces drive the oscillations. Without proposing any solution, we can just speculate that [gravitational collapse] might play a central role in this model [p 16, ibid]
"The Big Bang is the simplest explanation to the universe that we know, and it's probably wrong"
Why does anyone give a damn about Youtubers.
The BBT has a lot of issues in the details, but the overall picture - that around 14 billion years ago the universe was in a hot dense state and has been expanding ever since - is absolutely undisputed since Penzias' discovery. We can literally see the expansion, and we can even see the glimmer of that initial hot dense state. That's exactly the CMB discovered by the Penzias and Wilson.
There is lots of mysteries related to big bang, but steady-state model of cosmic evolution has been falsified. In early 1960s statistical evidence from radio astronomy ruled out the steady-state model.
Human language has syntax, semantics and pragmatics. HN comment section has disproportionate number terminology nitpickers and misunderstanders who somehow have problems with semantics and pragmatics. They represent a small minority of HN users. I suspect many of them are teens or young adults and improve over time.
Given my experience with crackpots from my time as a cosmology grad student, my money is more on retired old men, in particular engineers.
Either way, it's always voices from the sidelines who try to tell actual scientists how to do their job.
Later experiments might see some details in the measured result the theory didn't get right, but this doesn't invalidate the theory at the coarse level because at that precision the new measurements still agree with the old predictions: the theory is still confirmed in the sense that its predictions roughly match measurements.
Occasionally it happens that a new measurement of some detail comes up with a result that the existing theory cannot be easily modified to accommodate: only this represents a true challenge in the sense that if some competing theory easily explains the new result along with all the old ones that will then become the "correct" one.
Without this other competitor, a theory found to not accommodate the latest experimental results will be kept on indefinitely as the correct and confirmed one, but only used within clearly delimited context.