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Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

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Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#41

Post by glenstein »

Diogenesian wrote: post #20
glenstein wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they're referring to scientists on Earth. Edit: Though I agree that alien scientists of Tri-Solaris probably lead more depressing lives than their counterparts on earth I don't know if this series is yet considered far enough in the past that we don't have to worry about spoiler warnings (I feel like the house rules about this apply differently to books than to movies), but I will just say that one of…

Hmm, fair enough - I checked Wikipedia. My mind completely erased the "sophon" bit or whatever it was called, it just got erased again. Not a fan of that particular fairy dust. I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.

That's actually a great example for what it is. If I were a scientist I probably wouldn't be reacting with "yay science" to every next failure that destroys civilization, even if notionally those are building up the body of data that could eventually lead to success.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#42

Post by colechristensen »

wuliwong wrote: post #27
colechristensen wrote: post #12

I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all. It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.

You dislike that people write for audiences other than yourself.

No.

If you're writing an article about a man going to the store to buy a sandwich, the man, the store, and the sandwich should all make appearances by the end of the first paragraph.

These people are writing informative articles like novels and it's incredibly irritating and a disservice if you're actually trying to inform anybody about anything. If you're writing an article about the g-2 anomaly, "g-2 anomaly" belongs in the title not 1/3 the way in.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#43

Post by somenameforme »

onraglanroad wrote: post #23
ceejayoz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall had to drink a beaker of Helicobacter pylori because no one would believe it caused ulcers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands. Scientists get hidebound just like the rest of us, at times.

Both examples from medicine rather than physics. Can you give an example from physics? Preferably from the last century or two?

I'm not sure about self harm or whatever, but Planck's Principle [1] was not stated without cause: 'Science progresses one funeral at a time.' And that was a quote from an outsized figure during the golden age of physics.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#44

Post by glenstein »

dguest wrote: post #26
black6 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were getting inconsistent results, not just weird ones. However I agree that suicide probably wouldn't be where they would end up.

I seem to remember something about the scientist being distraught because physics didn't make sense, not because she was having trouble getting clean data. That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken. As s…

>That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.

I think in the context of the book, the specific means of sabotage was something close to impossible to figure out, so I can see the despair of checking every conceivable explanation, coming up empty, and making an inference about reality itself. And it wasn't a kind of peripheral, controllable amount of noise, it was a complete global sabotage of all particle physics, on a scale that amounted to a global catastrophe rather than just another blip in the daily grind.

I think one thing that really hooked me on the book series in the beginning was being able to appreciate the kind of cosmic despair one scientist was sharing during the pool table conversation, because thinking big about meaning and order in the universe, and how important the universes' intelligibility is to our relationship with it, informed by data, is a synthesis of things that really matter to me as a reader - taking the intersection of science and meaning seriously.

I don't think that would be enough for plausibly explaining particular scientists offing themselves, but the psychology of someone to whom that kind of question matters that much, which is very much the heart and soul of what drives my interest in non-fiction reading, seems tragically underrepresented as a driving motivation in fiction which I think is terribly unfortunate. But sci-fi sometimes cares about it, and sometimes a lot.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#45

Post by traes »

sigbottle wrote: post #33
traes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very interesting story that's worth reading up on. "Natural philosophers" of the day refused to accept the idea of a particle too small to directly observe on purely philosophical grounds. They essentially bullied him out of the field for championing the idea of the atom, despite his math yielding numerous correct results. They fruitlessly pursued the idea of energetics instead. (One of the many instances of die ha…

I looked this up, and sure enough, Ernst Mach was the one who lead the charge (a self proclaimed positivist, which is a position that many scientists would gladly say they support). Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mean that some evil boogeyman named Hegel lead a worldwide charge against physics. (I doubt Hegel even understood physics, lol. But you get my point.) You mean that two physicists had a disagre…

Is it really wrong to blame this one on philosophy? The source of the disagreement was inherently philosophical, lead by a philosopher, backed up by other mainstream philosophers, and undeniably held back physics. I don't mean to imply that philosophy is fundamentally evil or useless even when applied to physics; most early physicists also considered themselves philosophers. I'm just pointing out a mildly interesting pattern that I have noticed while reading about the history of physics. I recall that Einstein credited many of his insights to the field of philosophy. He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs, which many consider a slight stain on his legacy.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#46

Post by kergonath »

storywatch wrote: post #18
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #2

That's the best part about science.

It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..

That’s life. Sometimes you see it coming and ride the wave, sometimes you’re late to the party.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#47

Post by vouaobrasil »

tansey wrote: post #24
storywatch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..

Academic here. It's actually great for us. You're usually the first to see the implications for your niche area and have a chance to get a hot paper out rather than a moderately impactful one.

I think it depends on who has the hot paper and who has the outdated results. I was in academia for quite some time and when sometime cool comes out that renders other results less important, there are always winners and losers beccause the only thing that matters in academia is impact and the latest and greatest - not the blind alleys along the way.

There isn't really an "us" in academia like there is in a private company, who all have a common goal: in academia the goal is to get there before another does and be on top.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#48

Post by ahoka »

storywatch wrote: post #18
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #2

That's the best part about science.

It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..

Einstein wanted to measure how fast Earth moves through ether as his research thesis.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#49

Post by ordu »

Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence.

In any case it gives me ideas how to check the hypothesis. If the Reality has a limited horizon for planning for new laws, scientists can trick it into inventing new laws that eventually (after some more research and even more laws observed) would start contradicting to each other, and at that point the Reality would snap into a different set of rules.

If it is true, then the plan is like this: we need to wipe all the scientific knowledge from this world and start again, and trick the the Reality into devising better laws of nature. Ah, wait, we have no evidence that the Reality can abandon laws that were introduced already. Pity, the plan is brilliant, but how to check if the Reality can abandon its laws? If laws are local... we can do something like Stephenson described in his Anathem: establish maths doing independent research and comparing their results once in 1000 years.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#50

Post by xprnio »

ordu wrote: post #49

Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence. In any case it…

I love how the closer we get to “the edge of the Reality”, the more it sounds like the ramblings of someone that got their hands on some of that GOOD stuff
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