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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

#131

Post by jongjong »

teamonkey wrote: post #130
jongjong wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you can only solve a problem that you are aware of. My concern here is about the unknown unknowns. The task at hand is exceedingly complex and requires extreme precision, with many unknown variables... And the people solving the problems have conflicting interests as they are paid hourly. Even if there are bonuses, all the bonuses would be given on the basis of solving known problems. There is literally zer…

Bluntly, I think this just highlights why software engineering is not a serious engineering discipline. There are some exceptions, like safety-critical systems, but on the whole, software is not designed and developed with a rigor comparable to physical sciences.

Especially true now with AI coding. But I would push back on the idea that sciences or other engineering disciplines are not affected. Several of the people I met who were especially guilty of this in software sector had a PhD in mathematics and used to work in academic institutions.

I think intellectual integrity has been on the decline overall.

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

#132

Post by teamonkey »

cobbzilla wrote: post #126

This “data driven” science approach sure looks like empiricism from a distance. What am I missing?

I think it describes the methods needed to obtain and process a large amount of data in a field where getting a small amount of data is expensive and requires incredible hardware.

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

#133

Post by shevy-java »

If old results do not add up then I can see two immediate reasons:

- The new results are wrong. That's why there is a difference.

- The old results were wrong. In this case all involved scientists should be very much ashamed to have helpfully participated in worshipping wrongness and fakery.

A third option could be partial wrongness, but I group this into the second case. In the modern era I no longer buy into honesty of scientists at all times. Case in point: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258 - bacterium growing via arsenic. Totally fabricated, hence lateron "retracted" (originally published in 2010).

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

#136

Post by qsera »

jibal wrote: post #119
exmadscientist wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Celebrating the mistakes is, as you're saying, perhaps a bit too far. But mistakes will happen, it's just the nature of the world. That makes developing a robust error correction mentality something that genuinely is worth celebrating.

No one celebrates the mistakes ... what an absurd strawman (qsera's). Rather we celebrate the scientific method that finds and corrects mistakes, as you say.

Your "scientific method" can only correct the "mistakes" as long as economics allows it. A wrong belief held "scientifically" will go on and on if there is sufficient economic incentives to make it go on....And it is the "true believers" of science that provides such economic incentives..!

So much for celebration!

Sure this "Muon mystery" that no one cares about financially could be corrected without much effort. May be you should praise the gods of economics to make changes that are in the best interests of humanity possible..

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

#137

Post by stbede »

podocarp wrote: post #100
whatsThisBtn4 wrote: post #68

9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science. The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be. Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best…

The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun. There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. If I do a push up the Earth moves beneath me but no reasonable person says I'm pushing the Earth away. Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathemati…

> The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun.

Or you can put the satellite in the back of a truck and back the truck out of your garage and see the sun orbiting the earth. Yet it remains sane to put anywhere in the center depending on your context.

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

#138

Post by stbede »

whatsThisBtn4 wrote: post #68

9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science. The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be. Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best…

How do you feel about Aristotelian realism? Makes more sense to me than nominalism/conceptualism ever has.

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

#139

Post by i_no_can_eat »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #108
dieselgate wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.

The Higgs and black holes are quite different. We've basically observed Higgs according to how we've defined them, while we've only observed phenomena consistent with black holes as we hypothesize them. Singularities are the result of theories based on (ironically named) real numbers, it's entirely possible that what we call black holes are really dark stars formed from exotic matter that can only exist in hyper-extr…

The difference is that we have theorerically sound formation scenarious for black holes under very broad conditions, and we have absolutely no model for a formation scenario of such an exotic dark star.

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

#140

Post by stbede »

xelxebar wrote: post #127
podocarp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun. There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. If I do a push up the Earth moves beneath me but no reasonable person says I'm pushing the Earth away. Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathemati…

Geocentric coordinates are easily observable; just look at the sunrise and sunset. And if you zoom out even more and look at the galaxy, heliocentric coordinates become unreasonable.

And at the speed at which the solar system is orbiting the galaxy, I don't know that it would even look much like like the planets are orbiting the sun.
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