Wicked Problems

A recent post on the website 'Age of Awareness' provided this chart for qualifying problems as 'wicked problems':

Interesting take on solving difficult problems.

[20190110]

Dark Matter Candidates

Given the state of the state at this particular moment of our pre-dark matter/energy epoch this xkcd cartoon while humorous also pretty well encapsulates our present understanding as well as anything else presently under consideration! 

[20180821]

Physics is Simple and Over

Professor Eli Rabett has analyzed a lifetime of study and concluded, interestingly, physics is simple.

Here's his post verbatim:

Physics is Simple

Physics is the simplest science, a hard won truth that Eli has reached after many years in many fields. A bunny can do a lot of physics with pencil and paper, maybe even without those if enough homework has been passed in and marked.

This may seem, perhaps, a bit simplistic to some and mistaken to your average physicist, but consider, science is done through a mix of observation and computation. Physicists in the 17th century didn’t have to observe very much before they could start generating computational theories using pen and paper and testing them against observation. Physics is simple enough that one only need observe a few things before starting to build theories and compute results that could be compared to observations.

Other areas, not so simple. Lavoisier put it well, you cannot have a science without an agreed nomenclature because without you cannot talk about anything. 

“The impossibility of separating the nomenclature of a science from the science itself, is owing to this, that every branch of physical science must consist of three things; the series of facts which are the objects of the science, the ideas which represent these facts, and the words by which these ideas are expressed. Like three impressions of the same seal, the word ought to produce the idea, and the idea to be a picture of the fact. And, as ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science, without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it. However certain the facts of any science may be, and, however just the ideas we may have formed of these facts, we can only communicate false impressions to others, while we want words by which these may be properly expressed”

A useful working definition of science, a well liquored and tasty combination of observation, ideas and discussio. 

Just to pick the next simplest science chemistry, the nomenclature is voluminous, systematic though it might be, to occupy a huge database and committees of learned souls called together by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry to deal with new discoveries. Biology is worse. A lagomorph might argue that biology began with Linnaeus’ nomenclature for living organisms and for quite some time stayed there. And then we have geology and the rest of the alphabet soup of the geosciences each with their own dictionary that has to be mastered. 

Eli conceptualizes this as the cladistic dimension. The physics dictionary is pretty thin by comparison except where physics meets materials and the other sciences bring their descriptive overload in. 

Computationally a lot of physics can indeed be done with pen(cil) or paper depending on how many mistakes are to be made. You can do damn near no chemistry with pencil and paper beyond simple physics applications such as thermo or stat mech.

When Eli moved over to chemistry in the 1970s, theory was an object of derision and, as general chemistry today, required a series of rules, sequentially setting forth any number of simple models for chemical bonding and reaction following the historical development of the science. As each model was stacked on the next to extend them and handle myriad exceptions to each, students struggle. Why each of these simplifications works and their limits of applicability was not obvious, or at least not so until reaching the quantum basis of atomic and molecular structure. At that point, perhaps, when it became obvious how each of the historical models is an expression of quantum mechanics everyone, hopefully nods their heads and says "Oh yeah".

By the 1970s computational chemistry was a hungry beast posed to devour computer cycles. The formalism was prepared and a few brave souls had seen the future, working out relatively simple cases on several reams of paper, or with mainframe heat pumps filled with vacuum tubes.  

The driving force is interesting. About twenty years ago it became clear that observation could never be complete enough to describe all the chemistry that was wanted. One could never measure any chemical process for all of the conditions possible and even if one could and could do a statistical parameterization of the results it would be flying blind because there would be no understanding of the underlying chemistry. It would all be handwaving, perhaps statistically valid handwaving but handwaving none the less, and worse, it would not be clear under what conditions the handwaving would fail. 

Computational chemistry, validated against observational chemistry is today’s gold standard. 

Eli would posit that atmospheric science has passed through this same progression enabled by computational forcing, but more so. Not only can we not make all the observations that would be needed to fully describe the Earth’s atmosphere, but absent a time machine and a large ensemble of Earth, or at least Earth like planets, we could never do so. 

Thus Earth System Models, if you like Global Climate Models grown up. 

(Stay tuned for part two)

[20180623]

Special addendum: The End of Physics.

Science is maybe only three times as old as Eli (Eli is very old, has he mentioned that recently) maybe 5 if you count back to Newton.  About a month and a half ago, the Bunny pointed out that physics was the simplest science, the one where you could most easily combine and contrast observations with theoretical descriptions in useful models.  It is also the science where humans have gone the farthest.  That raises the interesting question as to whether we have reached the end of physics or if a lagomorph prefers, the end of physics that a bunny can understand or do or use for other ends.  Comes to the same thing

There is little doubt that progress on foundations of physics finds itself in a traffic jam of a multitude of unprovable theories.  String theory, the multiverse, and other attempts to break out have not been very successful, one could say not at all for more than a few decades.  Astronomy, confronted with the issues of dark matter or modified gravity may not be far behind.

Attempts to go beyond the current paradigms for gravity and quantum behavior have become increasingly fanciful.  Peter Woit, on his blog, Not Even Wrong, has chronicled the search.  Sabine Hossenfelder, on her blog Backreactionand book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray grapples with these issues.  Both are optimists in that they think that further progress is possible.  Eli maybe not so much.

John Horgan, in 2012, wrote about an interview he had with Thomas Kuhn.  There is much of what Kuhn says that Eli disagrees with but perhaps more on that later.  For example, Kuhn appears to miss much of the interplay between observations and theory and models.  He also appears to fall into the philosophers trap of what does a thermometer measure, however there is a disturbing for us thread in the interview.

Kuhn described normal science as the working out of puzzles within an accepted framework or paradigm.  IEHO, for some areas it is almost certain that humans have approached the point where no further changes are likely.  Paradigm shifts in those areas are jogs not car crashes, and most often the new is simply an extension of the old to more extreme, smaller, or larger conditions.  Extension rather than revolution is something that the follow on to physics sciences are now experiencing.

In that sense it is to be expected, that for example in chemistry, many new, exciting and useful puzzles will be solved in new ways but don't expect the hydrino revolution.  Ain't happening folks.

New foundational science can end.  It might have already done so in physics

Invention of the Telescope

There are at least three questions from the beginnings of modern science that even today remain unsettled and if one were to try an offer a comprehensive explanation one would fail. The three in question are: Did Galileo invent the telescope and use it to make the first astronomical observations? Did Newton invent the calculus to write the Principia? Did Galileo drop two objects from the Tower of Pisa? First, the telescope. Luckily we have a blog, Renaissance Mathematicus, by Thony C. a man who has dedicated his life to correcting misconceptions about early scientific and mathematical discoveries. What follow is his best and final, as far as possible, analysis of how the telescope entered civilization first as a novelty then becoming one of the first important scientific instruments. All credit goes to Thony and is presented here as an effort to widen the understanding of the origins of the telescope. And now:

Thony C.’s blog post:

“Getting Galileo wrong yet again

As a history of science blogger, whose reputation is built to a large extent on my playing Whac-A-Mole with crappy pieces of history of science, I should be eternally grateful for Galileo, the gift that keeps on giving. Actually Galileo is not the problem, it is the people who choose to write about him. What is most frustrating is that there is a vast amount of accessible literature written by historians of science that the offenders could consult to get their pieces about Galileo correct but they don’t seem to think that they need to do so. So who is the latest offender? Alan Lightman has published an essay in the online journal Nautilus with the title, When the Heavens Stopped Being Perfect: The advent of the telescope punctured our ideals about the nighttime sky. In fact it’s a part of his newly published book, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine.

Alan Lightman is according to his Wikipedia page an ex astrophysicist turned novelist, who has published an impressively long list of both fact and fiction books. He also has an almost as long list of honorary doctorates. One could expect that such an author would know how to consult historical sources, primary and or secondary, and thus get his facts right, apparently not!

In his essay Lightman wishes to pay tribute to Galileo’s first major publication the Sidereus Nuncius, which is in and of itself a good thing as it is to quote Lightman, “one of the most consequential volumes of science ever published.” So far so good.

In his introductory biographical sketch Lightman write:

Unable to discharge his financial responsibilities on his academic salary alone—he had to pay the dowries of his sisters in addition to supporting his three children by a mistress—he took in boarders and sold scientific instruments.

As head of the family following the death of his father, he did indeed have to pay the dowries for his sisters a financial burden that he could have lived without. However, Galileo was also a bon vivant, who almost certainly lived beyond his means, so his financial problems were certainly aggravated by his life style. Taking in the student sons of rich families as boarders was a common practice amongst Renaissance university professors, as it provided a nice extra income and good connections to the influential parents. This is something Galileo would probably have done with or without financial problems and not something he was forced to do. The same applies to his instrument making. Designing, making and selling mathematical instruments was again a very common practice amongst Renaissance professors of mathematics and medicine and something in which Galileo excelled, so once again voluntary and not a burden. We now arrive at the telescope:

In 1609, at the age of 45, he heard about a new magnifying device just invented in the Netherlands. Without ever seeing that marvel, he quickly designed and built a telescope himself, several times more powerful than the Dutch model. He seems to have been the first human being to point such a thing at the night sky. (The telescopes in Holland were called “spyglasses,” leading one to speculate on their uses.)

The story that Galileo built his first telescope purely by here say, without having seen one, a claim which he set in the world, has been largely debunked. He almost certainly saw one through the offices of Paolo Sarpi, who first drew his attention to the instrument. Also Galileo took surprisingly long between first hearing of the telescope and actually building one. Eileen Reeves thinks that before he actually saw one he thought it had something to do with mirrors rather than lenses and thus lost time on a wild goose chase. He was definitively not the first person to point one at the night sky, as I have written on a number of occasions. To quote myself:

Galileo was not the first person to turn a telescope to the skies. Already in the last week of September 1608 as Hans Lipperhey demonstrated his new invention to the assembled prominence in The Hague it was turned to the skies “and even the stars which normally are not visible for us, because of the scanty proportion and feeble sight of our eyes, can be seen with this instrument.” The quote is taken from Embassies of the King of Siam Sent to his Excellency Prince Maurits, Arrived in The Hague on 10 September 1608, the French newsletter that carried the news of the advent of the telescope throughout Europe. If instead he meant the first astronomer/astrologer/mathematician/natural philosopher or whatever then that honour goes to Thomas Harriot and not to Galileo. There is fairly strong but not conclusive evidence that Simon Marius also turned his telescope to the heavens before Galileo.

Galileo ground and polished his own lenses. His first instruments magnified objects a dozen or so times. He was eventually able to build telescopes that magnified a thousand times and made objects appear 30 times closer than they actually were.

Remember those instruments? Galileo employed a full time instrument maker, although he did work in the workshop himself. I mention this because his instrument maker, Marc’Antonio Mazzoleni rarely gets the credit he deserves. Galileo’s first instruments, such as the one he demonstrated to the Senate of Padua, magnified nine times. His later observational instruments varied between twenty and thirty times magnifications. The problem with Dutch or Galilean telescopes is the higher the magnification the smaller the field of view, anything above thirty is practically useless. A Galilean telescope, which magnified a thousand times is pure fantasy! That would really have been a sensation! Lightman, an astrophysicist remember, here falls into a trap that Galileo laid out for the careless reader. If a telescope magnifies the sides of a square thirty times then it magnifies the area of the square thirty times thirty, equals nine hundred or approximately one thousand!

Lightman now indulges in a bit of fairy tale telling:

Many people were skeptical, questioning the legitimacy of the device and thus the validity of its findings. Some regarded the strange tube as magical, not of this world, as if a cell phone were presented to someone in the year 1800. Galileo himself, although a scientist, did not understand exactly how the thing worked.

We should recall that belief in magic, sorcery, and witchcraft was widespread in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. In just those two centuries, 40,000 suspected witches, most of them women, were burned at the stake, hung from the gallows, or forced to put their heads on the chopping block. In 1597, King James VI of Scotland (who in 1603 became James I of England) complained about the “fearefull abounding at this time [and] in this Countrey, of these detestable slaves of the Divel, the Witches or enchaunters.” It was believed that sorcerers could cast spells by damaging a strand of hair or a fingernail of an intended victim. Was the Italian mathematician’s device a bit of sorcery?

I have read a vast amount of literature about the early use of the telescope both by Galileo and by all of the other early users. I have read all of the objections, the discussions, the rejections and the acceptances but not once have I ever come across a reference that people thought the telescope or the observations made with it were magic or sorcery. Lightman seems to have extracted this little piece of ridiculousness out of his…

Within a couple of months of the publication of Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo became famous throughout Europe—in part because the telescope had military and commercial value as well as scientific. (From “the highest bell towers of Venice,” Galileo wrote to a friend, you can “observe sea sails and vessels so far away that, coming under full sail to port, 2 hours and more were required before they could be seen without my spyglass.”) Word of the invention traveled by letter and mouth.

Maybe I’m not reading this paragraph correctly but as I read it Lightman is saying that the spread of news of the telescope was due to Galileo’s publication. This is rubbish, the news of the new invention spread like wildfire after the first demonstration in The Hague in September 1608. This was largely due to the Embassies of the King of Siam Sent to his Excellency Prince Maurits, Arrived in The Hague on 10 September 1608, the French newsletter that carried the news of the advent of the telescope throughout Europe. However it was also due to the fact that Maurits van Nassau sent telescopes as gifts to many of the crowned heads of Europe including the Pope. For example, the Jesuit astronomers of the Collegio Romano were already making telescopic astronomical observations well before Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius. It was this widespread knowledge of the telescope that first led Galileo, in far away Padua, to hear of the telescope.

In his book, Galileo exhibits his own pen-and-ink drawings of the moon seen through his telescope, showing dark and light areas, valleys and hills, craters, ridges, mountains. He even estimates the height of the lunar mountains by the length of their shadows.

The illustrations of the Moon are not pen-and ink drawings but washes, i.e. monochrome watercolour paintings.

All of which supported the proposal of Copernicus, 67 years earlier, that the sun, rather than the earth, is the center of the planetary system. These were quite a few new ideas to pack into such a little book. And with no apologies to Aristotle or the Church.

Altogether now in chorus, the telescopic discoveries published in the Sidereus Nuncius neither refute the Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy nor do they support the Copernican heliocentric astronomy. They merely shred the Aristotelian cosmology.

All of it supposedly constructed out of aether, Aristotle’s fifth element, unblemished and perfect in substance and form, what Milton described in Paradise Lost as the “ethereal quintessence of Heaven.” And all of it at one with the divine sensorium of God. What Galileo actually saw through his little tube were craters on the moon and dark acne on the sun.

Lightman doesn’t seem to be aware that the discovery of the sunspots cannot be found in the Sidereus Nuncius, they came later.

Galileo’s announcement of dark spots on the sun was an even greater challenge to the divine perfection of the heavens. We now know that “sunspots” are caused by temporary concentrations of magnetic energy in the outer layers of the sun. Being temporary, sunspots come and go. In 1611, Christoph Scheiner, a leading Jesuit mathematician in Swabia (southwest Germany), procured one of the new gadgets himself and confirmed Galileo’s sightings of moving dark spots in front of the sun. However, Scheiner began with the unquestioned Aristotelian premise that the sun was perfect and unblemished, and he went from there to proposing various precarious arguments as to why the phenomenon was caused by other planets or moons orbiting the sun rather than the sun itself.

Note, Galileo constructed his own telescope, whereas according to Lightman Christoph Scheiner merely “procured one of the new gadgets.” Actually Scheiner like Galileo constructed his own telescope and was in fact very good at it. Scheiner did not confirm Galileo’s sightings of moving dark spots in front of the sun. When Marcus Welser published Scheiner’s Three Letters on Sunspots, Galileo had not published anything on the subject and was caught, so to speak, with his pants down. This of course explains his violent reaction, somebody was poaching on his territory, he, and he alone, was the great telescopic discoverer of marvels in the heavens. Of course both Scheiner and Galileo were blissfully unaware that Thomas Harriot had made the discovery before either of them or that Johannes Fabricius had already published a booklet on the subject. Scheiner did indeed initial suggest that the sunspots were the shadows of satellites orbiting the sun. This actually spurred Galileo on to prove that they were really on the surface of the sun, something he had not done before being goaded by Scheiner. Scheiner accepted Galileo’s proof with grace and then went on to devote several years to intensive solar astronomy producing much new information.

When Galileo’s observations became known, churchmen reacted with skepticism. On March 19, 1611, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, head of the Collegio Romano, wrote to his fellow Jesuit mathematicians:

I know that your Reverences have heard about the new astronomical observations by an eminent mathematician … This I wish to know because I hear different opinions, and you Reverend Fathers, being skilled in the mathematical sciences, can easily tell me if these new discoveries are well founded, or if they are apparent and not real.

 Although the Church mathematicians argued about the details of Galileo’s findings, they unanimously agreed that the sightings were real. Nevertheless, Galileo’s telescopic findings and his support of the heliocentric model of Copernicus were considered an unpardonable attack on theological belief. For that offense, Galileo, a pious Roman Catholic who had once seriously considered the priesthood, was eventually tried by the Inquisition, forced to recant most of his astronomical claims, and spent the later years of his life under house arrest.

The astronomers of the Collegio Romano had begun their efforts to confirm Galileo’s discoveries, with Galileo’s active assistance, well before Bellarmine asked their opinion on the matter. Almost everybody was of course sceptical of Galileo’s quite extraordinary claims. They, after some effort, confirmed the findings and held a banquet in Galileo’s honour to celebrate the discoveries. Galileo’s telescopic findings played absolutely no role in his trouble with the Inquisition or his subsequent trial.

I want to focus now not on the displacement of earth as the center of the cosmos but on the newly conceived materiality of the heavens. Because it was that materiality, that humbling of the so-called heavenly bodies, that struck at the absolute nature of the stars.

Here Lightman goes off on a long excurse evoking Kepler’s Somnium and Giordano Bruno amongst other on the materiality of the stars. He writes:

Once Galileo and others had declared the stars to be mere material, their millennia were numbered— because all material things are subject to the law of the conservation of energy.

Lightman wants his readers to believe that there was a direct link between the discovery of sunspots and the acceptance that the sun is just another star and that all stars are material. This is historically simple not true, Galileo never declared the stars to be mere material and it took quite a long time for this chain of thought to establish itself in the world of astronomy.” From Thony C.’s blog "Renaissance Mathematicus," APRIL 4, 2018

[Link to the original blog post]

So, [Jim here] Galileo did not invent or discover the telescope, but he built improved telescopes and increased their magnification to 20X. He was not the first to use a telescope for astronomy, but he did make some key discoveries with it. He did bring the telescope to the attention of a wide audience of users. And he did make some iconic  first drawings of mountains on the Moon and made observations of Venus and Jupiter which he interpreted correctly in a Copernican framework.

[20180420]

Here's how it all started

If anybody is reading this decades after I post it, indeed if even the capability is still available to access an internet, then this, in a nut shell, is how it all started.

AS OF TODAY

FRIDAY, 20 JANUARY 2017 BLAKE STACEY

The United States of America is a failed experiment.

We went out in the way a bad joke would have predicted. We lost against our own racism and sexism, our endemic illnesses whose symptoms were intensified by corrupt law enforcement and institutionally rotten mass media. Undone at the final hour by a bizarre codicil in a slaveowners’ constitution. Undone, pushed over the edge—but the edge was too close all along. When it really mattered, we proved ourselves incompetent: not able to handle our civil responsibilities, indeed, in a sense, not ready for adulthood. In the name of national glory, we have voted ourselves a government of the worst. And now a generation will grow up ignorant, poor and sick, if they get the chance to grow up at all. Many of the things we will lose will be things we can never regain, from international respect to endangered species to the lives of our loved ones.

Many good people will keep up the good fight and stir up, as John Lewis says, the good trouble.

The abyss has opened before us.

Whether the future we make for ourselves will have anything to commend it now depends upon our ability to stare into that abyss and make it blink.

Reference link

[20170731]

In the Beginning...

What was going on at the beginning of time? The beginning of the universe? Can we even know what  that situation might have been? As physics finds reductionist answers to the questions of how the universe works, this is the last great unanswered question.

Sean Carroll has a presentation addressing this issue.

[170407]

Mathematica and automobile reliability

I'm an unabashed enthusiast of Mathematica. And here's an example of a down-to-earth use.

[20170113]