Really accurate when it comes to the dilemma of inspiring kids about science while not misrepresenting what the actual life is like. As an astrophysicist, I get asked all the time if I go to huge telescope and look through eyepieces, jotting down Eureka moments. People get really deflated when I tell them it is writing code and squinting at the same data hundreds of times to find signals and decide what is real.
The hype about AI in science is even worse. While random forests, convolutional neural networks, and generative adversarial networks can be really good at classifying signals and anomaly detection, it doesn't do the work of discovery and interpretation itself. It is much more an enabling tool than a transformative tool, at least in the physical sciences where I work.
I think what you're overlooking here is that many Americans under the age of 60 (I am tempted to write "most") get their ideas about quantum mechanics, quantum computers, aliens et al not from "Wikipedia, YouTube, podcasts, essays from magazines and newspapers, newsletters, MOOCs, even science-based video games" but from speculative fiction sources like movies, TV series, and yes—for Luddites—even science fiction books.
I think at this point we can abandon the age delineations, it's pretty much permeated everywhere. My nearly-70-year-old parents (who both have Master's degrees in physics!) are now sending us Youtube videos about fusion-powered car nonsense because "Mazda is using it!" (they're not)
With science one should start with the basics and slowly work your way up to the theories that strech that science. Multiply dimentions, string theory, the big bang theory, what's a black hole, dark matter is so different from basic biologocal sciences that never the two shall meet. One's more appropiate in the SF section of the library the other in non fiction. (IMO) Hope I get lots of comments on this. HNY bloggers...it's gonna be a string theory one hell of a year.
what’s so weird about quantum physics is you can do the double slit experiment in a high school classroom. and it demands explanation, and one of the viable interpretations is MWI! I find that very strange (as an MWI nonbeliever).
I agree with the dilemma of inspiring kids with unrealistic ideas about a career, and it made me think about which jobs are accurately depicted to kids? As a lawyer, I make every effort to explain to kids what their potential career paths look like and I'd wager that the unseen grind exists for everything from college professors to pro athletes.
I don't know any astronauts but I'm guessing that job sucks much of the time as well.
Happy New Year! Let's bring in 2025 with a bit of pedantry.
I wonder if you give string theory too much credit - the word "theoretically" in the phrase "theoretically falsifiable" is sweeping quite a lot of stuff under the rug. There is no one string theory, but a collection of theories, with a vast collection of parameters that can be tweaked to explain stuff that doesn't initially align with the theory. Even some string theorists accept the idea that string theory isn't really falsifiable, but just consider it not to a problem. See here the most prominent example, by Sean M. Carroll, who suggests that we do away with the falsifiability criterion entirely.
Incidentally, while I have my doubts about string theory, I do think that the argument against falsifiability as a prerequisite of science is at least somewhat compelling. The tl;dr of the argument is that either a theory is true, or it isn't, and that the truth value of a theory (i.e. a collection of statements about the physical universe) can be independent of our ability to verify them, theoretically or otherwise.
Of course, plenty (perhaps the majority) of scientists disagree with Carroll. See here for an amusing parody:
Carroll is right, obviously. An example I like to use to prove the point to my students:
A giant monolith is discovered on the moon. Unlike in 2001, it isn't featureless. It's covered with illustrations that suggest it is the last relic of an alien civilization, and that they've destroyed all other signs of their existence in a perverse religious ritual.
The hypothesis that the drawings on the monolith are an accurate story is not falsifiable. But it's clearly scientifically meaningful.
That is falsifiable. We will never have the information to know if it is true or false, but it is falsifiable because it's a question that can in theory be definitively answered with evidence if we possessed it.
A non-falsifiable theory is one like intelligent design through irreducible complexity or like simulation: there is no evidence that *could* falsify it. If you can even imagine the evidence, it still wouldn't falsify the theory.
That's my understanding, anyway; perhaps there's a broader use that includes things like "we currently have no way to gather evidence to deny this hypothesis." I haven't read the Carroll piece; I certainly agree that something unfalsifiable could be true (like we're all living in a simulation), but it's not a scientific idea in the first place. It is impervious to evidence of any kind you can imagine.
Ah oops sorry, I mixed it up. The hypothesis in question is not *verifiable*, it's the contrary hypothesis (the story about the aliens is false) that isn't falsifiable.
Another thing to keep in mind is that no hypothesis about probabilities is falsifiable, unless you unrealistically assume an infinitely long series of measurements.
I still think that falsifiability should be at the very least a guiding principle, if not an outright requirement. I think doing away with falsifiability entirely opens the door to all sorts of metaphysical speculation and is probably a bad thing.
If I were in charge of awarding research grants, and two different teams came asking for money to research two similarly plausible theories, I'd certainly prefer to allocate the funds to the team working on the falsifiable theory.
Years ago somebody told me that the language of physics isn't English, or Chinese, or Russian--it's math. And most of the population can't handle the math.
Do you believe in black holes? If the answer is yes the obvious next question is "Why?" For the lay public the math is simply incomprehensible and the reason that they trust that black holes are real boils down to "An expert told me so". That's the fundamental problem with all of the pop science videos preying on the public, and it's based on an even more fundamental problem with how society at large interacts with science.
That’s not just a math problem, though, that’s literally most of our knowledge about anything. We don’t have the wherewithal to go do the research for ourselves, so we trust institutions and research to do it for us. I believe the moon is a big rock not because I’ve been there, but because I’ve been told it by so many people. Epistemology is a funny thing.
(And heck, knowing about the Schwarzild solution to general relativity didn’t prove the existence of black holes; scientists needed to go find them before they believed in their existence themselves. )
You can build a telescope and look at the moon directly. That provides pretty good evidence that it's a big rock.
How do you do that with a black hole? Even interpreting the measurements requires a fair amount of math and expertise and that domain knowledge is just beyond the grasp of most laypeople.
Well, experts tell me that GPS wouldn't work without the theory of relativity.
I rely on experts and/or popular consensus for everything from "the world is round" to "there is a place called Croatia," and that's just the simple stuff. The Earth's iron core, the history of the world as contained in the fossil record, the names of the English kings, the occupations of my great grandparents, the existence and function of genes, the effect of lenses on light, and on and on.
I could confirm some of it, I'm sure, but I'm even relying on experts for *that* unless I try. I think it's likely that if I got a properly aligned telescope and watched a ship go over the horizon, the bottom of the hull would disappear before the top, but I'm only sure of that because of what experts have told me.
The point I am trying to make is that you can only verify so much with your common sense at our human scale, thats directly observable. The fact that we have to rely on others for so much of what we do and know in life is nothing new here. Adam Smith's famous pencil / pin factory for example.
It's a matter of degree. We routinely rely on experts for almost everything, even things we *could* theoretically confirm with direct observation.
It's a sliding scale - I could probably confirm the rate of acceleration as a result of falling under Earth's gravity within a margin of error in a few hours, and I could probably confirm relativity after months or years of study plus experimentation but I don't do either one because it's more effort than it's worth.
Have you looked at the moon with a sufficiently big telescope to know that it’s a rock? Because I haven’t. We are trusting our institutions that this is so. Which is fine! Fine until easy access to information shows us where institutions fail, but then replace them with gut intuition. (I am developing a whole rant on this.)
J Mann’s comment below is on point for this, so no need to respond directly.
OK, so if I’m following you correctly, the problem is not that black holes are really hard to understand without the math*. The problem is that people are going to make videos on the internet about everything, but because of the complexity of science people are way more likely to get the facts wrong. Does that sound right?
If so, “do you believe in black holes” is probably the wrong question to illustrate the problem, because that falls into the general problem of epistemology and institutions. But I would agree with the larger point and wouldn’t want to get sidetracked.
* I also happen to think that black holes are pretty easy to understand without math. “Think of something so heavy and dense that light can’t get out. It seems like that might be possible. If it were, it would be really small and really dark, but stuff falling into it would fall so fast that it would start to heat up and glow BEFORE it got into the black hole. So if we see with our telescopes an area that’s kicking out a ton of light, but the middle itself is completely dark and black and of a specific size, we can be pretty sure that’s a black hole. And we found one! Yay!!”
I was just going to write something about how arguing from analogy (or trying to teach from it) is bullshit. Plenty of people devise reasonable sounding frameworks to justify why the crystals they're selling cure cancer.
Part of the problem too when the topics are about the very big (black holes) or the very small (the quantum realm), none of that grafts onto our evolved "common sense"... Looking at it from an evo psych perspective, we have this Newtonian view of reality that works well for us at our scale. That breaks down at the very big/very small and it just doesn't make sense to think of it that way.
Richard Feynman used to tell his physics students something like "Don't worry if you don't really understand this stuff because nobody really understands this stuff".
The problem with the pop-science videos is that they're not created by experts except in rare cases.
See: the misleading Veritasium video about how electricity travels, followed by an "well accskkkkshually THIS is what I REALLY meant to say, and it's your fault for misinterpreting" video after being called out by dozens of actual experts.
Eh. It's not just that "You decide what to click on." You can also decide what to exclude from your feed by making liberal use of the the "Don't Recommend Channel" button.
I too like me a good science YouTube video, but I almost never see videos in my feed of the sort you complain about here, because whenever I do, I use said button. Channel never comes up again.
A few years ago, Buzzfeed decided to farm clicks with articles on the "Mandela Effect" that were pretty irresponsible. Then a bunch of people decided that since the Many Worlds theory had some science articles behind it, it was settled science and they must have been born in an alternate dimension and came to this one in their sleep one day. (I'm guessing switching places with their double originally from here. The amount of energy required to do so would likely be astronomical and something we would have detected if it occurred multiple times.) Therefore anyone telling them their memories of the Froot Loops box from their childhood were wrong were arguing with established science, instead of having to face the fact that their misunderstanding of South African history didn't make them special.
In this house, we believe...science is real (and boring)
I'm fairly committed to believing less than half of what I read, including about science, but I've also come around to the fact that what I believe mostly has no bearing on anything. Like, sure, I doubt that there are multiple universes, but also...no one cares whether I believe in multiple universes. The revelation that there are multiple universes would change my life in exactly zero ways. Nor will my lack of belief in multiple universes cause them to cease to exist, if they already do. For the most part, there's no reason for me, as a layperson, to have an opinion about almost any of this stuff. I'm mostly okay with shrugging, saying, "That'd be cool," and moving on with my life.
Agree. There are many theories that I can accept might be true, including religious ones, but I've decided that I'm all right with not knowing.
I do however enjoy science articles. I get them curated though the Economist, MIT Review, NYT ( usually valid though can be hyped) BBC, NPR (It's getting better) I don't have a subscription but Scientific American and Science News are good too. Real peer reviewed journals won't give you absolute truth, but it's better than click bait YouTube.
It might change your life because others with, say, very strongly held epistemological and eschatological beliefs, might have a more violent reaction to the new fact that disproves them, with social repercussions.
One of the common threads I find is that we are addicted to maximalist renderings of almost everything. You can't have a news story that says "not a big finding, but seems kinda interesting" or "we went down this dead end and our hypothesis was wrong".... It has to be "the most"... "the best"... or even better, "the worst" .... I am waiting for the weather headline, "ALERT! Biggest snowfall predicted.... since last Saturday"
Freddie- This is about the best summary from a non-scientist I've seen, and better than most from scientists. Thanks!
The most pernicious of the stories you mention is the idea that extra-terrestrial human exploration will do something positive for the situation of Earth or even open up infinite vistas for extending human consciousness. It's particularly popular with the billionaire boys.
Some of the others (faster than light....) are just plain wrong.
For anybody with a little math background interested in an inconclusive exploration of your first story (Many Worlds) I have a video from a Berkeley workshop that some might enjoy.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, the novel where he puts all his theories about why interstellar colonisation won't succeed, is very convincing. He gives it a happy-ish ending but you know the truth. (And as a British reader in 2019, when it suddenly becomes a vicious battle between Leave or Remain I wasn't ready for it...)
Here's an attempt at a sober statement about the Many-Worlds theory (I wrote 'The Emergent Multiverse', which is the standard academic-level text defending it).
1) Quantum mechanics demonstrably allows microscopic systems, including complex systems with many moving parts, to get into 'superposition' states for which the best non-mathematical description is that they are performing many different processes all at the same time (performing multiple computations, say).
2) It is fairly widely accepted that these superpositions can't just be understood as 'maybe one thing happens, maybe another does' - the different processes can 'interfere', providing evidence that they occur simultaneously.
3) There is nothing in the known laws of quantum physics that turns off these superpositions at the macroscopic level.
4) By far the clearest way to understand quantum mechanics is to assume that superpositions are universal, and look to (quite well understood and to some degree tested) dynamical explanations as to why we observe only one term in a macroscopic superposition - the term describing us - and don't observe the parallel versions of ourselves described by the mathematics.
5) It is perfectly reasonable to remain agnostic or skeptical about whether that means parallel universes really exist, either because of specific skepticism about aspects of the quantum story or more general skepticism about how far we can trust claims by scientific theories that are not directly and individually verified. But for all that, parallel universes are a fairly direct consequence of taking contemporary quantum theory literally, and attempting to remove them from that theory normally involves a commitment to substantially redoing physics in the absence of empirical evidence as to how.
That said, I certainly wouldn't call Many-Worlds 'settled science'. If I got to write the quantum physics textbooks, I'd certainly describe the theory in many-worlds terms where that is helpful, because I think not doing so leads to a lot of confusion, but I'd insert some philosophy-of-science caveats about the limitations of how far we can trust even our most successful theories in their not-directly-verifiable claims.
David- I agree so far as that goes, but as you know many of us find the usual explanations (or mere fiats) of the experienced probabilities to be bogus. That's why I find Mallah's Many Computations approach so interesting. It doesn't break the known dynamics but under non-inevitable but reasonably generic conditions the empirical probabilities emerge.
The basic argument is that superposition isn't multiple things at once or any other way we can understand it intuitively. It's something else outside our experience.
Yeah, I sit in the [unqualified to make the decision but better qualified than most, with my little baby physics bachelor’s] “many worlds seems like a perfectly possible interpretation of the math in eg superpositions” boat, but the link from “this gamma decay happens at a different time” to “in this universe Hitler died at 1st Ypres” simply makes no sense, and people always jump to _that_ parallel universe understanding. Which is to say, many-worlds but only in the most boring possible way. (Just the way I like it personally)
I love this essay, because you're talking so accurately, so far outside your domain. Thank you! As an old (recently retired) biologist, I add a few comments for non-practitioners:
• Yup, science is a grind.
• It's suffused by hype. Some of the hype comes from the scientist, who wants to gain recognition. Some from the university/lab director, who wants more $ and fame. Most from the media, who want eyeballs. Any time you read about a "dramatic new breakthrough," it probably isn't.
• Science is full of errors. The only thing distinguishing it from any other human endeavor is that there are procedures to correct errors that usually work, sooner or later.
• Scientific knowledge has greatly enhanced material human conditions. But most new basic scientific knowledge contributes nothing, and the new knowledge that does turn out to help typically doesn't do so for 50-100 years.
Don't know if you would confirm this regarding your third point, but I've also been told by friends who work as biologists and chemists that one of the big challenges working in science today has increasingly been peer review, i.e. it's a critical part of the scientific method but because there's little to no recognition or glory in reviewing another group's study, fewer and fewer researchers want to devote time and resources to it.
In other words, checking someone else's work is the least sexy part of science, despite the fact that it's what keeps the whole system running effectively.
It's a big problem, as you say. Not sure it's getting worse. One issue is the proliferation of journals... science steadily grows into a larger enterprise with more categories, but junk increases faster than good manuscripts and good journals. The field would likely be better served if the least prestigious 75% of journals vanished.
Besides the difficulties you identify is the inherent conflict of interest in peer review. Most reviewers really try to be objective, but some play sleazy games, and the "sleaze ratio" may actually be highest amongst the most prestigious journals and researchers.
That MWI remains a viable interpretation of quantum mechanics seems shocking and entertaining enough. All they’d have to do is add like 3 sentences of hedging language to the videos and articles and they’d be completely honest. “If MWI is true (it’s hotly debated)…”
That audiences can’t even handle that level of thinking is disturbing.
Really accurate when it comes to the dilemma of inspiring kids about science while not misrepresenting what the actual life is like. As an astrophysicist, I get asked all the time if I go to huge telescope and look through eyepieces, jotting down Eureka moments. People get really deflated when I tell them it is writing code and squinting at the same data hundreds of times to find signals and decide what is real.
The hype about AI in science is even worse. While random forests, convolutional neural networks, and generative adversarial networks can be really good at classifying signals and anomaly detection, it doesn't do the work of discovery and interpretation itself. It is much more an enabling tool than a transformative tool, at least in the physical sciences where I work.
I think what you're overlooking here is that many Americans under the age of 60 (I am tempted to write "most") get their ideas about quantum mechanics, quantum computers, aliens et al not from "Wikipedia, YouTube, podcasts, essays from magazines and newspapers, newsletters, MOOCs, even science-based video games" but from speculative fiction sources like movies, TV series, and yes—for Luddites—even science fiction books.
I think at this point we can abandon the age delineations, it's pretty much permeated everywhere. My nearly-70-year-old parents (who both have Master's degrees in physics!) are now sending us Youtube videos about fusion-powered car nonsense because "Mazda is using it!" (they're not)
With science one should start with the basics and slowly work your way up to the theories that strech that science. Multiply dimentions, string theory, the big bang theory, what's a black hole, dark matter is so different from basic biologocal sciences that never the two shall meet. One's more appropiate in the SF section of the library the other in non fiction. (IMO) Hope I get lots of comments on this. HNY bloggers...it's gonna be a string theory one hell of a year.
what’s so weird about quantum physics is you can do the double slit experiment in a high school classroom. and it demands explanation, and one of the viable interpretations is MWI! I find that very strange (as an MWI nonbeliever).
I agree with the dilemma of inspiring kids with unrealistic ideas about a career, and it made me think about which jobs are accurately depicted to kids? As a lawyer, I make every effort to explain to kids what their potential career paths look like and I'd wager that the unseen grind exists for everything from college professors to pro athletes.
I don't know any astronauts but I'm guessing that job sucks much of the time as well.
We should just start paying lab techs what AI engineers make and vice versa. The former has value!
Happy New Year! Let's bring in 2025 with a bit of pedantry.
I wonder if you give string theory too much credit - the word "theoretically" in the phrase "theoretically falsifiable" is sweeping quite a lot of stuff under the rug. There is no one string theory, but a collection of theories, with a vast collection of parameters that can be tweaked to explain stuff that doesn't initially align with the theory. Even some string theorists accept the idea that string theory isn't really falsifiable, but just consider it not to a problem. See here the most prominent example, by Sean M. Carroll, who suggests that we do away with the falsifiability criterion entirely.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25322
Incidentally, while I have my doubts about string theory, I do think that the argument against falsifiability as a prerequisite of science is at least somewhat compelling. The tl;dr of the argument is that either a theory is true, or it isn't, and that the truth value of a theory (i.e. a collection of statements about the physical universe) can be independent of our ability to verify them, theoretically or otherwise.
Of course, plenty (perhaps the majority) of scientists disagree with Carroll. See here for an amusing parody:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00108
Of course, I do in general agree with you about the hype being, well, hype. And I work in quantum information theory, so I should know.
Carroll is right, obviously. An example I like to use to prove the point to my students:
A giant monolith is discovered on the moon. Unlike in 2001, it isn't featureless. It's covered with illustrations that suggest it is the last relic of an alien civilization, and that they've destroyed all other signs of their existence in a perverse religious ritual.
The hypothesis that the drawings on the monolith are an accurate story is not falsifiable. But it's clearly scientifically meaningful.
That is falsifiable. We will never have the information to know if it is true or false, but it is falsifiable because it's a question that can in theory be definitively answered with evidence if we possessed it.
A non-falsifiable theory is one like intelligent design through irreducible complexity or like simulation: there is no evidence that *could* falsify it. If you can even imagine the evidence, it still wouldn't falsify the theory.
That's my understanding, anyway; perhaps there's a broader use that includes things like "we currently have no way to gather evidence to deny this hypothesis." I haven't read the Carroll piece; I certainly agree that something unfalsifiable could be true (like we're all living in a simulation), but it's not a scientific idea in the first place. It is impervious to evidence of any kind you can imagine.
Ah oops sorry, I mixed it up. The hypothesis in question is not *verifiable*, it's the contrary hypothesis (the story about the aliens is false) that isn't falsifiable.
Another thing to keep in mind is that no hypothesis about probabilities is falsifiable, unless you unrealistically assume an infinitely long series of measurements.
I think it's convincing.
I still think that falsifiability should be at the very least a guiding principle, if not an outright requirement. I think doing away with falsifiability entirely opens the door to all sorts of metaphysical speculation and is probably a bad thing.
If I were in charge of awarding research grants, and two different teams came asking for money to research two similarly plausible theories, I'd certainly prefer to allocate the funds to the team working on the falsifiable theory.
Years ago somebody told me that the language of physics isn't English, or Chinese, or Russian--it's math. And most of the population can't handle the math.
Do you believe in black holes? If the answer is yes the obvious next question is "Why?" For the lay public the math is simply incomprehensible and the reason that they trust that black holes are real boils down to "An expert told me so". That's the fundamental problem with all of the pop science videos preying on the public, and it's based on an even more fundamental problem with how society at large interacts with science.
That’s not just a math problem, though, that’s literally most of our knowledge about anything. We don’t have the wherewithal to go do the research for ourselves, so we trust institutions and research to do it for us. I believe the moon is a big rock not because I’ve been there, but because I’ve been told it by so many people. Epistemology is a funny thing.
(And heck, knowing about the Schwarzild solution to general relativity didn’t prove the existence of black holes; scientists needed to go find them before they believed in their existence themselves. )
You can build a telescope and look at the moon directly. That provides pretty good evidence that it's a big rock.
How do you do that with a black hole? Even interpreting the measurements requires a fair amount of math and expertise and that domain knowledge is just beyond the grasp of most laypeople.
Or even closer to home, tech like GPS. For it to be accurate, you have to take into account the theory of relativity.
Well, experts tell me that GPS wouldn't work without the theory of relativity.
I rely on experts and/or popular consensus for everything from "the world is round" to "there is a place called Croatia," and that's just the simple stuff. The Earth's iron core, the history of the world as contained in the fossil record, the names of the English kings, the occupations of my great grandparents, the existence and function of genes, the effect of lenses on light, and on and on.
I could confirm some of it, I'm sure, but I'm even relying on experts for *that* unless I try. I think it's likely that if I got a properly aligned telescope and watched a ship go over the horizon, the bottom of the hull would disappear before the top, but I'm only sure of that because of what experts have told me.
The point I am trying to make is that you can only verify so much with your common sense at our human scale, thats directly observable. The fact that we have to rely on others for so much of what we do and know in life is nothing new here. Adam Smith's famous pencil / pin factory for example.
Yeah, I think we agree.
It's a matter of degree. We routinely rely on experts for almost everything, even things we *could* theoretically confirm with direct observation.
It's a sliding scale - I could probably confirm the rate of acceleration as a result of falling under Earth's gravity within a margin of error in a few hours, and I could probably confirm relativity after months or years of study plus experimentation but I don't do either one because it's more effort than it's worth.
Have you looked at the moon with a sufficiently big telescope to know that it’s a rock? Because I haven’t. We are trusting our institutions that this is so. Which is fine! Fine until easy access to information shows us where institutions fail, but then replace them with gut intuition. (I am developing a whole rant on this.)
J Mann’s comment below is on point for this, so no need to respond directly.
The difference is that the average lay person can bring their own expertise to bear on a question like whether the federal reserve exists.
To some extent everyone is qualified to discuss whether it's legal to transport liquor across state lines.
Quantum mechanics? Engineering? Not even close.
OK, so if I’m following you correctly, the problem is not that black holes are really hard to understand without the math*. The problem is that people are going to make videos on the internet about everything, but because of the complexity of science people are way more likely to get the facts wrong. Does that sound right?
If so, “do you believe in black holes” is probably the wrong question to illustrate the problem, because that falls into the general problem of epistemology and institutions. But I would agree with the larger point and wouldn’t want to get sidetracked.
* I also happen to think that black holes are pretty easy to understand without math. “Think of something so heavy and dense that light can’t get out. It seems like that might be possible. If it were, it would be really small and really dark, but stuff falling into it would fall so fast that it would start to heat up and glow BEFORE it got into the black hole. So if we see with our telescopes an area that’s kicking out a ton of light, but the middle itself is completely dark and black and of a specific size, we can be pretty sure that’s a black hole. And we found one! Yay!!”
I was just going to write something about how arguing from analogy (or trying to teach from it) is bullshit. Plenty of people devise reasonable sounding frameworks to justify why the crystals they're selling cure cancer.
Part of the problem too when the topics are about the very big (black holes) or the very small (the quantum realm), none of that grafts onto our evolved "common sense"... Looking at it from an evo psych perspective, we have this Newtonian view of reality that works well for us at our scale. That breaks down at the very big/very small and it just doesn't make sense to think of it that way.
Richard Feynman used to tell his physics students something like "Don't worry if you don't really understand this stuff because nobody really understands this stuff".
The problem with the pop-science videos is that they're not created by experts except in rare cases.
See: the misleading Veritasium video about how electricity travels, followed by an "well accskkkkshually THIS is what I REALLY meant to say, and it's your fault for misinterpreting" video after being called out by dozens of actual experts.
NASA/JPL took a picture of a black hole last year.
("<snort>if you believe *NASA*</snort>" --internet chuds everywhere)
Oh brother.
Eh. It's not just that "You decide what to click on." You can also decide what to exclude from your feed by making liberal use of the the "Don't Recommend Channel" button.
I too like me a good science YouTube video, but I almost never see videos in my feed of the sort you complain about here, because whenever I do, I use said button. Channel never comes up again.
A few years ago, Buzzfeed decided to farm clicks with articles on the "Mandela Effect" that were pretty irresponsible. Then a bunch of people decided that since the Many Worlds theory had some science articles behind it, it was settled science and they must have been born in an alternate dimension and came to this one in their sleep one day. (I'm guessing switching places with their double originally from here. The amount of energy required to do so would likely be astronomical and something we would have detected if it occurred multiple times.) Therefore anyone telling them their memories of the Froot Loops box from their childhood were wrong were arguing with established science, instead of having to face the fact that their misunderstanding of South African history didn't make them special.
In this house, we believe...science is real (and boring)
I'm fairly committed to believing less than half of what I read, including about science, but I've also come around to the fact that what I believe mostly has no bearing on anything. Like, sure, I doubt that there are multiple universes, but also...no one cares whether I believe in multiple universes. The revelation that there are multiple universes would change my life in exactly zero ways. Nor will my lack of belief in multiple universes cause them to cease to exist, if they already do. For the most part, there's no reason for me, as a layperson, to have an opinion about almost any of this stuff. I'm mostly okay with shrugging, saying, "That'd be cool," and moving on with my life.
Agree. There are many theories that I can accept might be true, including religious ones, but I've decided that I'm all right with not knowing.
I do however enjoy science articles. I get them curated though the Economist, MIT Review, NYT ( usually valid though can be hyped) BBC, NPR (It's getting better) I don't have a subscription but Scientific American and Science News are good too. Real peer reviewed journals won't give you absolute truth, but it's better than click bait YouTube.
It might change your life because others with, say, very strongly held epistemological and eschatological beliefs, might have a more violent reaction to the new fact that disproves them, with social repercussions.
I mean, I guess, but there isn’t a whole lot I can do about that, either
Yea, I use this all the time. Regardless of "whatever XYZ REALLY IS" I'm still right here in the world as it's presented to me.
One of the common threads I find is that we are addicted to maximalist renderings of almost everything. You can't have a news story that says "not a big finding, but seems kinda interesting" or "we went down this dead end and our hypothesis was wrong".... It has to be "the most"... "the best"... or even better, "the worst" .... I am waiting for the weather headline, "ALERT! Biggest snowfall predicted.... since last Saturday"
yes
Freddie- This is about the best summary from a non-scientist I've seen, and better than most from scientists. Thanks!
The most pernicious of the stories you mention is the idea that extra-terrestrial human exploration will do something positive for the situation of Earth or even open up infinite vistas for extending human consciousness. It's particularly popular with the billionaire boys.
Some of the others (faster than light....) are just plain wrong.
For anybody with a little math background interested in an inconclusive exploration of your first story (Many Worlds) I have a video from a Berkeley workshop that some might enjoy.
https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/why-born-probabilities
Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, the novel where he puts all his theories about why interstellar colonisation won't succeed, is very convincing. He gives it a happy-ish ending but you know the truth. (And as a British reader in 2019, when it suddenly becomes a vicious battle between Leave or Remain I wasn't ready for it...)
That book was awesome
Here's an attempt at a sober statement about the Many-Worlds theory (I wrote 'The Emergent Multiverse', which is the standard academic-level text defending it).
1) Quantum mechanics demonstrably allows microscopic systems, including complex systems with many moving parts, to get into 'superposition' states for which the best non-mathematical description is that they are performing many different processes all at the same time (performing multiple computations, say).
2) It is fairly widely accepted that these superpositions can't just be understood as 'maybe one thing happens, maybe another does' - the different processes can 'interfere', providing evidence that they occur simultaneously.
3) There is nothing in the known laws of quantum physics that turns off these superpositions at the macroscopic level.
4) By far the clearest way to understand quantum mechanics is to assume that superpositions are universal, and look to (quite well understood and to some degree tested) dynamical explanations as to why we observe only one term in a macroscopic superposition - the term describing us - and don't observe the parallel versions of ourselves described by the mathematics.
5) It is perfectly reasonable to remain agnostic or skeptical about whether that means parallel universes really exist, either because of specific skepticism about aspects of the quantum story or more general skepticism about how far we can trust claims by scientific theories that are not directly and individually verified. But for all that, parallel universes are a fairly direct consequence of taking contemporary quantum theory literally, and attempting to remove them from that theory normally involves a commitment to substantially redoing physics in the absence of empirical evidence as to how.
That said, I certainly wouldn't call Many-Worlds 'settled science'. If I got to write the quantum physics textbooks, I'd certainly describe the theory in many-worlds terms where that is helpful, because I think not doing so leads to a lot of confusion, but I'd insert some philosophy-of-science caveats about the limitations of how far we can trust even our most successful theories in their not-directly-verifiable claims.
David- I agree so far as that goes, but as you know many of us find the usual explanations (or mere fiats) of the experienced probabilities to be bogus. That's why I find Mallah's Many Computations approach so interesting. It doesn't break the known dynamics but under non-inevitable but reasonably generic conditions the empirical probabilities emerge.
I'm not well-versed enough in physics to evaluate this, but it seemed like a pretty accessible way to explain superposition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkHFXZvRNns
The basic argument is that superposition isn't multiple things at once or any other way we can understand it intuitively. It's something else outside our experience.
Yeah, I sit in the [unqualified to make the decision but better qualified than most, with my little baby physics bachelor’s] “many worlds seems like a perfectly possible interpretation of the math in eg superpositions” boat, but the link from “this gamma decay happens at a different time” to “in this universe Hitler died at 1st Ypres” simply makes no sense, and people always jump to _that_ parallel universe understanding. Which is to say, many-worlds but only in the most boring possible way. (Just the way I like it personally)
If science is magic and only wizards can interpret it then it's a very short jump from "Space dragons eat light" to "This crystal cures cancer".
heck, some people want to cure cancer with Madagascar periwinkle!
As long as it's not administered as a suppository.
I love this essay, because you're talking so accurately, so far outside your domain. Thank you! As an old (recently retired) biologist, I add a few comments for non-practitioners:
• Yup, science is a grind.
• It's suffused by hype. Some of the hype comes from the scientist, who wants to gain recognition. Some from the university/lab director, who wants more $ and fame. Most from the media, who want eyeballs. Any time you read about a "dramatic new breakthrough," it probably isn't.
• Science is full of errors. The only thing distinguishing it from any other human endeavor is that there are procedures to correct errors that usually work, sooner or later.
• Scientific knowledge has greatly enhanced material human conditions. But most new basic scientific knowledge contributes nothing, and the new knowledge that does turn out to help typically doesn't do so for 50-100 years.
Don't know if you would confirm this regarding your third point, but I've also been told by friends who work as biologists and chemists that one of the big challenges working in science today has increasingly been peer review, i.e. it's a critical part of the scientific method but because there's little to no recognition or glory in reviewing another group's study, fewer and fewer researchers want to devote time and resources to it.
In other words, checking someone else's work is the least sexy part of science, despite the fact that it's what keeps the whole system running effectively.
It's a big problem, as you say. Not sure it's getting worse. One issue is the proliferation of journals... science steadily grows into a larger enterprise with more categories, but junk increases faster than good manuscripts and good journals. The field would likely be better served if the least prestigious 75% of journals vanished.
Besides the difficulties you identify is the inherent conflict of interest in peer review. Most reviewers really try to be objective, but some play sleazy games, and the "sleaze ratio" may actually be highest amongst the most prestigious journals and researchers.
That MWI remains a viable interpretation of quantum mechanics seems shocking and entertaining enough. All they’d have to do is add like 3 sentences of hedging language to the videos and articles and they’d be completely honest. “If MWI is true (it’s hotly debated)…”
That audiences can’t even handle that level of thinking is disturbing.