Apparently heretics are, on the aggregate, lazier than I suspected. I had the unusual pleasure of reading a blog post for completely independent reasons and coming across my own name — Ethan Zuckerman was reporting on a talk given by gerontologist Aubrey de Grey at the recent BIL Conference, in which he quotes my line from the Edge World Question Center that “Being a heretic is hard work.” (His other quote was from Gandhi.) It hadn’t occurred to me that such a sentiment was sufficiently unique to deserve being quoted, but as far as Google knows nobody else has pointed this out before. (While we’re at it, did nobody appreciate my previous Google joke?)
So I re-read my own World Question Center entry, and (to nobody’s surprise) I thought it was great. I’m my own most sympathetic audience. But in my post here about the WQC, I linked to the entry but didn’t reprint it in its entirely. Which I will hereby do now, because I’m a busy guy and you are busy blog readers who don’t always have the time to click on a link. Being a blogger is hard work.
———————————————
Growing up as a young proto-scientist, I was always strongly anti-establishmentarian, looking forward to overthrowing the System as our generation’s new Galileo. Now I spend a substantial fraction of my time explaining and defending the status quo to outsiders. It’s very depressing.
As an undergraduate astronomy major I was involved in a novel and exciting test of Einstein’s general relativity — measuring the precession of orbits, just like Mercury in the Solar System, but using massive eclipsing binary stars. What made it truly exciting was that the data disagreed with the theory! (Which they still do, by the way.) How thrilling is it to have the chance to overthrow Einstein himself? Of course there are more mundane explanations — the stars are tilted, or there is an invisible companion star perturbing their orbits, and these hypotheses were duly considered. But I wasn’t very patient with such boring possibilities — it was obvious to me that we had dealt a crushing blow to a cornerstone of modern physics, and the Establishment was just too hidebound to admit it.
Now I know better. Physicists who are experts in the field tend to be skeptical of experimental claims that contradict general relativity, not because they are hopelessly encumbered by tradition, but because Einstein’s theory has passed a startlingly diverse array of experimental tests. Indeed, it turns out to be almost impossible to change general relativity in a way that would be important for those binary stars, but which would not have already shown up in the Solar System. Experiments and theories don’t exist in isolation — they form a tightly connected web, in which changes to any one piece tend to reverberate through various others.
So now I find myself cast as a defender of scientific orthodoxy — from classics like relativity and natural selection, to modern wrinkles like dark matter and dark energy. In science, no orthodoxy is sacred, or above question — there should always be a healthy exploration of alternatives, and I have always enjoyed inventing new theories of gravity or cosmology, keeping in mind the variety of evidence in favor of the standard picture. But there is also an unhealthy brand of skepticism, proceeding from ignorance rather than expertise, which insists that any consensus must flow from a reluctance to face up to the truth, rather than an appreciation of the evidence. It’s that kind of skepticism that keeps showing up in my email. Unsolicited.
Heresy is more romantic than orthodoxy. Nobody roots for Goliath, as Wilt Chamberlain was fond of saying. But in science, ideas tend to grow into orthodoxy for good reasons. They fit the data better than the alternatives. Many casual heretics can’t be bothered with all the detailed theoretical arguments and experimental tests that support the models they hope to overthrow — they have a feeling about how the universe should work, and are convinced that history will eventually vindicate them, just as it did Galileo.
What they fail to appreciate is that, scientifically speaking, Galileo overthrew the system from within. He understood the reigning orthodoxy of his time better than anyone, so he was better able to see beyond it. Our present theories are not complete, and nobody believes they are the final word on how Nature works. But finding the precise way to make progress, to pinpoint the subtle shift of perspective that will illuminate a new way of looking at the world, will require an intimate familiarity with our current ideas, and a respectful appreciation of the evidence supporting them.
Being a heretic can be fun; but being a successful heretic is mostly hard work.
on the other hand:
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=%22stuff+the+Bush+administration+has+completely+screwed+up%22
OK, fair enough. But how the hell do I get all my heretical ideas to go away? I’m full of them! Emailing famous cosmologists might very well be my only hope for redemption!
For example, I had this thought that maybe Newton’s inverse square law is missing a variable, perhaps a variable linked to some key feature of our sun. Sure, it works fine in our solar system, predicting how any two (or more) bodies interact here, but perhaps those same two bodies in another star system would interact differently. And don’t go quoting me the movements of other stars and planets who masses we presumably “know” that confirm Newton – don’t those masses come from plugging their movements into the potentially flawed inverse square law in the first place?
What test can I, a layman, possibly perform to put this notion to rest? I can’t send a probe to Zeta Reticuli. I’m lost. I am morally compelled to lay my heresy at the feet of Sean. He does have a blog, after all.
Or try…
http://www.google.com/searchsourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF8&rls=GGLJ,GGLJ:200636,GGLJ:en&q=22stuff+the+Democratic+congress+has+done+to+slow+the+Bush+administration%27s+excesses%22
Of course, this would be better had I mastered how to make this appear as a link.
Oh, magic, it did appear as a link.
Hmm. Doesn’t the latest announcement of orbital anomolies, combined with the long standing Pioneer anomoloy, give real hope to GR heretics these days?
Which do you expect to occur first, the completion of current theories or something new? I would guess the latter.
Me thinketh you suffer from a slight case of heretic envy. 😉 But by all means, keep defending the Faith; without the Church and its High Priests, there is nothing by which to define or measure Heresy. You are playing a vital role. Honestly, you are. Dude, seriously.
Matt, what you can do is learn the relevant background physics. ‘t Hooft’s list is a good start.
RockHoward, anomalies are always interesting, but more interesting is to try to construct a theory that explains them while remaining consistent with the data that GR fits very well.
LordSphere, I am suffering from a case of heretic something, but “envy” is not it.
Oh, hallowed be thy name, oh mighty patriach (spit) of The Church of the Righteous, for we poor sinners know not what we do….
Interesting the quote was made by Aubrey de Grey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
(for those unfamiliar with him)
If he’s right we’ll all have plenty of time to figure everything out 🙂
e.
And I thought the best and brightest were going into structured finance these days!
We like to think that Einstein was a revolutionary in physics, and he was, but what he did was to illustrate something that was there all along. He showed that the motion of charged particles was such that the speed of light was constant. It was buried in a way in Maxwell’s equation. Einstein did not start out to be some radical heretic, but he just asked some basic questions.
We are not in the same position that Galileo was in. I listened to a radio play of Berthod Brecht’s play on the life of Galileo. It was amusing how hard it was for him to get the Church astronomers to just look in his telescope. Galileo really started at the ground floor. Sure there was a body of “pre-physics” based on Aristotle and Ptolemy, but these more constituted mathematics and philosophy which syllogistically positied ideas about the world with no empirical basis. It took Roger Bacon to start the idea of empiricism, and Galileo took it up with fervor. Galileo was in a sense the first true physicist.
Today we don’t want our bedrock theories to fail utterly, but more to fail “gracefully,” by exhibiting departures in domains of observation previously unexplored. After all while we are all mentally marinated in the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics we don’t throw our textbooks on classical mechanics in the rubbish.
In some ways in the sense of Newton’s “standing on shoulders of giants,” things go back a ways. Copernicus wrote the following:
For every apparent change in place occurs on account of the movement either of the thing seen or of the spectator, or on account of the necessarily unequal movement of both. For no movement is perceptible relatively to things moved equally in the same direction; I mean relatively to the thing seen and the spectator.
“Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres” sec 5 Nicolous Copernicus
There is a hint of relativity in this!
Lawrence B. Crowell
Hmmmmm,
Perhaps a reading of Lee Smolin’s book, “The Trouble With Physics” may be in order here?
Or perhaps Joao Maguejo’s “Faster Than the Speed of Light?”
Pingback: Heretics bring traffic at Freedom of Science
Wait, I thought “Matt” was kidding. Kidding… LIKE THE ORTHODOXY OF SCIENCE MUST BE KIDDING WHEN THEY EXPECT US TO IGNORE THE COINCIDENCE BETWEEN THE W BOSON MASS AND THE PERIOD OF PSR 1913+16.
Best crank admonition: “CONNECT THE DOTS”. It’s like, dude, I’m trying.
Sean:” So I re-read my own World Question Center entry, and I thought it was great.”
It is great. But in my view you miss a point (notice Lawrence B. Crowell comment). Heresy by definition is notion used outside the science. It has roots in religion, economic reasons, political (ideology) fitness, etc. Anything you want but empirical arguments. Therefore your personal track from ignorance to knowledge led you naturally to your present position.
“Standing on shoulders of giants” is the necessary condition and just the opposite of heresy. The relativity was introduced by N.Copernicus and amazingly in form more closed to general relativity! J.C.Maxwell stands on shoulders of M.Faraday who (amazingly) discover charge quantization and introduced fields with closed (!) field lines. Maxwell translated that on the language of math. A. Einstein made connection with the geometry and H.Minkowski translated that on the language of math. And so on. And I think it is more adequate to consider I.Newton, W.R. Hamilton, J.C. Maxwell, A.Einstein, E.Schrödinger, E.P.Wigner, C.N.Yang integrators who made the process continuous.
If you like, my “video” behind that is Egyptian Pyramid and not Tower of Babel.
Regards, Dany.
In hindsight, shouldn’t we have rooted for Goliath?
Lawrence; wasn’t Einstein’s most revolutionary work the electromagnetic effect, not relativity?
I mean, the wave nature of light had been conclusively proved by Young’s double-slit experiment a century before, and then Einstein produces this theory – that explains an experiment previously mysterious – that turns everything on its head again. Whereas, as you said, shades of relativity can be found in others’ work.
In a way I don’t regard string theory or LQG as really theories, but hypotheses. A theory to my mind is something which has some empirical backing, and neither of these theories have much to back them up. I further think that these are two differing views of a problem, like peering into a room through keyholes on different doors. Curiously the two physical hypotheses are complementary in a way. String theory fails to be constrained effectively, while LQG is in a way “too constrained.” LQG is a better treatment of gravitation than string theory, but conversly string theory is more effective at particle theory — the quantum field theory v. general relativity divide still manifests itself.
As such with this “divide” I don’t see LQG as falisfying string theory, but more that we have various propositions about a domain of physics we have almost no direct information about. Also don’t rule out twistor theory as having something to say about this! If we can manage to arrive at a working theory, one which has some basis of observational support, I suspect that all of these structures will enter into the picture.
Is there scientific heresy? In principle no, for any scientific hypotheses or line of research that is properly done is not heresy, even if at the end it is wrong, or if it is divergent from the norm and is found to be right. Is there scientific heresy in practice? Since scientists are people and behave in social hierarchies and the like, yes. There is a measure of social dynamics in trajectories which science takes, which gives disfavor to trends outside the standard path. This extends to the applied sciences as well, such as the strange almost obsessive trend with nuclear weaponry.
As things stand, any physicist working on frontier problems will support known physics, such as the standard model of electro-weak unification as at least an effective theory. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
Lawrence B. Crowell
The Almighty Bob on Mar 7th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Lawrence; wasn’t Einstein’s most revolutionary work the electromagnetic effect, not relativity?
——————-
1905 was Einstein’s Annus Mirabulus, where in addition to relativity he wrote on the photoelectric effect and how Brownian motion was due to atomic theory leading to Langevin physics. Einstein’s special relativity in a way amounts to the observation that the “curl” Maxwell equations, such as the Maxwell-Faraday equation
$latex
nablatimes H~=~J~+~frac{1}{c}frac{partial D}{partial t}
$
have the speed of light embedded in the theory, and that the Lorentz transformation is a consequence of how charged particles in motion interact with electromagnetic fields.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Simon: yeah, I was kidding. Thanks for noticing. But then I was genuinely disheartened to discover that I lacked the basic physics understanding to even falsify my own mock-crank “theory.” So off to ‘t Hooft I go!
Matt, apologies for not catching on. Blinded by too many true positives.
Sean, some months ago you kindly (and, perhaps slightly rashly) offered to review any paper that your blog readers might care to email you, or that was my impression.
Understandably, an axiomatic principle, doubtless drummed into post-grads in their first class “Dealing with the General Public”, is never never reply to kooks or amateurs.
But there’s a fairly continuous spectrum between obvious incoherent lunacy, ranging through misguided and hopeless naivety, via poorly presented but possibly a glimmer of a promising idea, all the way to an impeccably correct paper by a budding Galileo (although you’ve also assured us in the past that none of us is that ;-).
So given your offer, I’m curious to know what criteria you would use to draw the line between replying to an unsolicited email/paper or not as the case may be.
I must admit I sent my paper to a couple of distinguished (read “names I’d heard of”) scientists and never received a reply. I’d concede this was most likely due to their natural reaction “hmm, probably rubbish but I don’t have time to check”. (I’ve been in the same situation myself, believe it or not, as the unsolicited receipient of maths papers.)
But by chance I discovered another possible reason: Emailing a draft of the paper to myself as a backup, I was amazed when the email program baulked at sending it, on account of spam words! It turned out that the program had spotted the phrase “via gravity” and assumed this was a crafty attempt to disguise the word “viagra”. So quite possibly the emails had all ended up unread in spam folders!
However, if your offer still stands and you have ten minutes spare, I’d be pleased to mail you a copy (which I have refined since previously emailing it to anyone) and would value your opinion even if less than favourable – I’ve plenty of other irons in the fire. So rest assured I don’t have a bee in my bonnet about any one of them.
Cheers
P.S. You’ll find I’ve been careful this time only to use the phrase “through gravity”, as I don’t think there’s a pill called throughra.
Hi Sean,
Any chance I could get you to blogroll our new Cosmic Variance-esque physics group blog (with a slight twist, we are grad students + postdoc), http://imaginarypotential.wordpress.com/ ?
Thanks,
Dave
OK, I understand the reasons for suspecting that most orthodoxy by now is essentially correct. But how many of you are deliberately looking for things that don’t fit? Look at how recently the weird issue of “dark energy” came up, there could be more like that.