Psybertron Asks

It’s all happening at once today. Prompted I guess by the first episode of Jim Al Khalili’s BBC4 series on Quantum Mechanics, the usual alternative theories are crawling out of the woodwork.

Not watched the episode yet, but judging by the Grauniad review we get the “Einstein was wrong” take and a bit of wave-particle duality so far – Feynman’s quantum physics in a nutshell “double-slit experiment”. Jim tweeted this morning receiving a link to Natalie Wolchover’s piece in Wired from back in June about the David Bohm interpretation of QM – basically an Einstein and Bohr were both wrong, take on things. Coincidentally mentioned by Rebecca Goldstein last month as her own preferred interpretation before she switched from physics to philosophy.

And talking of philosophy at the other end of the scale just yesterday we have Roberto Unger collaborating with Lee Smolin on anthropic mistakes in cosmological interpretations.

Two givens

Firstly, at the extremes of fundamental physics much is speculation, and the touch points with empirical reality few, indirect and incomplete. Yes, the maths work in given contexts and scales, but the explanatory understanding of reality – beyond doubtful metaphors – is a long way off.

And, secondly, physics needs philosophy to help sort out it’s relation to both reality and humanity.

Related – but more general (medical) science in this case: the recurring agenda of mine: when is speculative (or interested) science newsworthy? The tag of “science” allows so much hyped crap to be touted as worthwhile knowledge, when it’s really churn in the processes of science – speculative in both senses, doubtful, but worth a shot if it justifies the funds.

Interesting blog, collection of bloggers, and additional linked blogs, all on a topic dear to my heart. Hat tip to Rebecca Goldstein @platobooktour for the link to the specific post.

When apparently serious commentators simply dismiss ideas they don’t agree with (or understand) as “silly” you can be pretty sure they’re defending a position rather than advancing knowledge.

Interesting interview of Roberto Unger by Ian Sample in a Grauniad podcast. It concerns a book co-authored with Lee Smolin concerning some pretty drastic meta-law proposals to govern evolution of the universe, including the actual (evolving) laws within it. Much about inflation theories and anthropic hacks in the likes of multiverses simply not being science, but fanciful speculation to prop-up misguided theories. (Book published early 2015)

(Hat tip to Sabine Hossenfelder again on Facebook.)

Jono Alderson PodCast on Distilled – Turbocharging your WordPress Website.

(Hat tip to Sarah Taylor @saturngirl )

The Candy Crush saga. Apart from the pejorative headline “caught” rather than the value-free “noticed” – a fair cop.

In my experience of noticing people on London public transport entertaining themselves with their portable devices, I would say 3/5 of all passengers, of which 3/5 are doing nothing more than playing said game. I totally despair – why miss such fantastic (real) people-watching and mass-transit-operational-psychology-study opportunities, if no other real individual human conversation arises?

In a commons committee – I could understand it – the need to stimulate the brain above mind-numbing politically-correct procedure in between the occasional attention-needing episode.

Interesting piece by Michael Hanlon at Aeon Magazine. Holding post for later, but much to fit with my agenda here, despite a few points to which I’d take exception.

Hopefully I’ve made it sufficiently clear that the main reason I’m a fan of Jon Butterworth is because, as far as celeb scientists go, he’s as honest and grounded as they come. Loved this (*) quote from his Grauniad column a couple of weeks ago:

Physics is in an interesting position, now that the Higgs Boson has been discovered. The “Standard Model” doesn’t predict any more new particles, no matter how tiny, and it could be considered internally complete. However, it is very far from being a theory of everything, failing to account for such major experimental facts as gravity, the different amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe, and the 85% or so of stuff that seems to be “Dark Matter”. It also struggles with neutrinos.

It would be good to have some clues to a new theory which might account for those awkward facts.

Accounting for awkward facts is something scientists need to do. Interesting to see Sabine Hossenfelder commenting on “the Anthropic Principle as neither tautological nor useless“, despite being one of those controversial “theories” easier dismissed with smart-ass one liners than thoughtful consideration. The comment thread on her Facebook post gives a clue to the smart-ass dismissers. My agenda has only ever been to keep science, and those who claim scientific rationality, honest.

A rhetorician might say science is only about 1/6th right so far?

[Post Note (*) – I should say, I love it because it effectively publishes what I’ve been paraphrasing I’d heard Jon and his colleagues saying at this event, and confirmed personally with him afterwards.]

 

More grist to the CMBR mill. Story from ESA’s Planck project published in Nature.
(Hat tip to Sabine Hossenfelder on Facebook.
Also a positive aside from her on the James Watson furore, mentioned here.)

40 years after publication of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, an extended and updated version of the 1974 CBS Ideas radio interview of Robert Pirsig by Tim Wilson. (Hat tip to Mark Richardson on Facebook.)

Fascinating stuff to add to the timeline. The basement with the “roller-skate drawer”. The MoQ given its intended name for the first time. The emotional telling of the ECS treatment episode. [Here a post I made the day I visited the basement.]

[Probably explains high number of Pirsig-related hits on my pages in recent days.
And the continued high hit-rate today.]

‘I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that” is the title of both the latest book by @bengoldacre and his #londonthinks talk tonight @ConwayHall

Strangely that title is my conclusion from both of the last two Ethical Society and Humanist talks I saw last week – so much so that having drafted a piece on those two together,  I can now see me enlarging it to cover all three talks in one post.

[Post Note : Scrap that. Not as advertised.  Old TED Talk “Better Data” on Statins et al. Cheap laughs and no new content, but good points included:

• Psychology of statistics and down-side risk is real problem even for official practitioners and management of medical options – perverse decisions in terms of optimum outcomes.
• Big data approach is real option for public health, despite being largely marketing jargon in so many fields. Again perversely it is easy to justify one-off expensive clinical trials with lower value (even negative value) outcomes, than to do cheap easily-randomised long-term statistical analyses on “freely” available GP records – because of privacy rights risks perceived with the easy option. Wrong view of risks again.
• (It’s not about making “data” publicly available, but making available public data into proper “information” for decision-making. Since there are many ways to manipulate statistical data, we need to be able to trust who is turning data into information for us, ‘because psychologically it’s not intuitive for us, Joe public, to interpret data directly without a proper statistics & risk lens. I’m guessing Ben’s agenda is to sell the industry such a lens and trust is pretty much my earlier “authority” topic – ie who says?.)

 But not the talk advertised. Left before the Q&A. Oh, and I now see the new book is just a collection of Ben’s previous posts and articles, hence why no new content. Be really interested to know the context of the title quote.]