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Re: [Phys-L] just for fun



On 01/02/2014 11:48 AM, Forinash III, Kyle wrote:
I wouldn't expect anyone to believe me until I had that empirical
data at hand.

Yes indeed.

On several occasions I've been involved in overthrowing
conventional wisdom in various small ways. It's a little bit
hard -- and /it should be a little bit hard/ -- but there's
nothing mysterious about it.

1) Collect a bunch of evidence. Make sure you're right. It
is OK to be an advocate for your idea -- if you don't advocate
it nobody else will -- but you also need to collect contrary
evidence and weigh it evenhandedly. Document the strengths
/and the limitations/ of your idea.

2) If it started out as a theoretical idea, do the experiment
... and vice versa.

I was tangentially involved in a case where the theory paper
was rejected, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that the
result was too good to be true. Somewhat later the paper
was resubmitted with an additional paragraph saying "We
tried the experiment and it actually works". Not only was
the paper accepted, it won a best-paper-of-the-year award.

The guy who whose invention it was got promoted from postdoc
to permanent.

3) The /correspondence principle/ counts for a lot. That is,
it really helps to have a theory that simultaneously accounts
for the conventional results in the appropriate limit *and*
accounts for the new results in some other limit.

Example: Conventional wisdom says the sun rises in the east.
However, once I saw the sun rise in the south, and the next
day it didn't rise at all. There is a perfectly good theory
of celestial mechanics that explains both results. It
explains why the conventional result is a good approximation
in most places ... not including northern Scandinavia.

4) The topic of getting the idea /accepted/ is immensely
complicated, far beyond what I have time to discuss right
now. Here is a brief down payment:

As the saying goes:

The future is already here —
it's just not very evenly distributed.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson

That is to say, typically some people will embrace the new
idea a lot sooner than others. For some of the work I've
done, only about ten people know about it, but that's OK,
because they are the right ten people.

Also, when the issue involves public policy, expect the
worst, because national politics is venal and corrupt, and
has been for a very long time. Case in point: Since Day
One the FDA has been forbidden by law from regulating
homeopathic "medicines". This is perfectly ridiculous from
a scientific and/or policy viewpoint, but nobody holds out
much hope of getting this law changed.

On the other hand, the previous paragraph is not a 100%
reliable rule. At the EPA, Joel Schwartz started working
on the lead-in-gasoline question in 1981. The proposal
for unleaded gasoline was issued in 1984, and the final
rule was issued in February 1985. That's pretty fast for
something with such sweeping ramifications.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/review/review_fall_05/rvwfall05_schwartz.html

On the third hand, during the 2012 primary campaign, the
major Republican presidential contenders were vying to see
who would most quickly abolish the entire EPA.

On 01/02/2014 04:14 PM, LaMontagne, Bob wrote:
Regardless of which side of the fence you are on with this topic, you
have to enjoy the irony of this.....

a) Sorry, I'm not seeing the irony. Due to abnormal warming,
an immense sheet of old, hard, thick ice broke up elsewhere
and was carried by an abnormal series of storms to the bay
where the ship is.

Just because there is less ice overall doesn't mean there is
less ice everywhere.

The idea of climate change being more dangerous than scientists
expected strikes me as scary but not particularly ironic.

b) Every winter Faux News runs a picture of Al Gore's book
posed atop a snowdrift. I say that because there is global
climate change doesn't mean there will be no more snow in the
winter. Indeed, overall warming puts /more/ moisture into
the air, resulting in quite a few places seeing more storms
and more precipitation. See item (a) above.

On 01/02/2014 01:02 PM, Richard Tarara wrote:
I think the 'talking heads' of the far right and far left have pushed
the rational discussions to the extremes which then makes it
difficult for the lay-person to really evaluate the scientific
consensus versus the political consensus versus the economic
consensus--or just knowing what those views actually are.

Hmmmm.

It would
really help if ALL of these could be brought back to the middle!

First of all, that's not going to happen. Secondly, it
wouldn't help much even if it did. Thirdly, it is a fallacy
of the highest order to assume that the middle is the right
answer. Such an assumption just gives the biggest advantage
to the boldest liar. As Churchill said, I will not stand
even-handed between the fire brigade and the fire.

Counting the number of ill-informed and/or dishonest talking
heads is not a good algorithm for discerning the truth. Talking
heads are for sale to the highest bidder. Anybody who has a
financial stake in the matter can buy as many talking heads as
he likes. Similarly, the presence or absence of attractive videos
on the topic is not a valid measure of scientific consensus.

Seriously: Class time would be better spent teaching the students
not to pay attention to sources that so obviously cannot be trusted.
There is plenty of primary and secondary /scientific/ literature
available for anybody to read. Here's one that I found amusing:
http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/

It has the advantage of reflecting the recent trends in the field,
namely /regional/ predictions on progressively finer and finer
scales. Look up your own region.