🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 08:39:00 GMT, "Androcles"
<Headmaster@Hogwarts.physics> wrote (in part):

><Eric Baird> wrote (in part) in message 
>news:gmvsq39nurfqldtouqnr7d2hsufcf4krgs@4ax.com...

>| On Tue, 5 Feb 2008 23:34:41 -0800 (PST), Pentcho Valev
>| <pvalev@yahoo.com> wrote (in part):
...
> >http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca/mediasite/viewer/?peid=5f32739a-624d-4ec8-9ecc-4d44d3d16fe9
>| >Lee Smolin: "Newton's theory predicts that light goes in straight
>| >lines and therefore if the star passes behind the sun, we can't see
>| >it. Einstein's theory predicts that light is bent...."
>| >
>| >Pentcho Valev
>| >pvalev@yahoo.com

>| Okay, agreed, Smolin got that badly wrong. <sigh>
>| Newton light-bending refs:
>| :   Principia, vol.1, Prop XCVI (etc.).
>| :   Opticks, "Queries"
...
>| So, because people believe that fact-checking is obviously so much
>| better in physics than in the other hard sciences, it's often a lot
>| worse.
...

>'we establish by definition that the "time" required by
>light to travel from A to B equals the "time" it requires
>to travel from B to A' because I SAY SO. -- Rabbi Albert Einstein
>
>Ok, Einstein got that gleefully wrong. <sigh>
>Did you mention that in your book?


Actually I did, it's alluded to in Chapter Five, 
"The Newtonian Catastrophe", on pages 58-59.

Newton appeared to be relying on "lightspeed" (rather than
light-velocity) arguments when he constructed his attempt at a unified
theory of optics and gravitation ... this turned out to be an awful
mistake ... some of the English physics community committed their
reputations to some of Newton's resulting predictions, which then
turned out to be wrong ... in an attempt to save face, some of the
community started claiming that Newton had never said such a thing,
and that Newtonian theory had never said that gravity affected light
... this was a second disaster, that may have held back progress in
some parts of gravitational theory by a century ... 

... and Einstein, apparently unaware of the earlier controversy, then
went and did something similar with special relativity. 


===
The chapter doesn't come out and say, "Einstein got this part wrong"
(it tries to treat SR a little more fairly than that), but it does
point out that in the previous case of a theory using round-trip
arguments, which seemed to be defended as strongly by its proponents
as SR is defended today by its fans ... this sort of approach had been
a disaster. 


===
Most "intelligent" communities tend to learn from their own previous
mistakes, and guard against making the worst of those mistakes a
second time, so repeat disasters tend not to happen. 

But in physics, we don't learn from our mistakes in the same way,
because we tend not to be told that these mistakes ever happened. 
We //do// get told all about bad predictions and rotten experiments
done by people whose theories never quite made it to the mainstream
(so that we can feel smug about those silly people who foolishly step
outside "taught" reality), but we aren't told about the catastrophic
cockups that originated within the mainstream itself. That stuff gets
eliminated from the educational histories, because it's not considered
helpful. It's easier to inspire students by telling them that if they
stick with the mainstream, they'll always be on the winning side, and
that the "unscientific" people are the dissidents.


I think that most physics people probably still think that SR is
fundamentally correct and can't possibly be wrong (incomplete, but not
//wrong//), and I think that a lot of that belief is based on trust in
peer review, trust in the accuracy of information provided by the
system, and trust that all relevant information will have been be
provided to them and that any misinformation will necessarily have
already been corrected. 

They figure that the chances of the system telling them that SR is
necessarily correct if it //isn't// correct are so small as to be not
worth considering. They trust the system to work well, because it
always has in the past ... or so they think.   
What they //don't// know are the case histories of instances where the
system has previously gone pathologically wrong, and without that
information, they won't know what warning signs they should be looking
out for that might indicate if the current belief system is
pathological. 

They don't have the information necessary to make that sort of
assessment ... and in fact, the absence of that information and those
case histories is itself one of the warning signs. 
They may //think// that the reason why the information doesn't seem to
exist is because we've never really had a serious "system crash" in
physics ... but if you look back at the contemporary C17th-C19th
English-language physics texts, you find that that's not the case.
Physics people may reckon that physics is unique in that nobody would
//ever// lie about verifiable data because everyone knows that you
wouldn't be able to get away with it ... but it seems that when C19th
physicists lied about the Newtonian history, they not only managed to
get away with it, the lie then continued as a self-perpetuating myth
for more than a century after the people it was meant to protect had
died, even though the contra-evidence was readily available in print,
sitting on the science library shelves. 

So, an apparently deliberate piece of misinformation that was fed into
the system in the C19th still seems to be being taught in the C21st,
even though it's been contradicted by the physical evidence for all
that time.  

In a peer-review-regulated system that genuinely treated the
correctness of data as sacrosanct, and which ranked scientific
accuracy as being more important than politics, this sort of thing
couldn't happen. So our system isn't as good as we think it is 
(or as good as we say it is).

(I tackled social herd behaviour in science in chapters 20 & 21,
"Limitations of Language and Procedure", and "The Perils of
Experimentation")

================================

PS, I actually think that Smolin is one of the Good Guys: He's
radical, free-thinking, and not afraid of speaking out and calling
things as he sees them, even if it upsets his immediate peer group. He
questions stuff. He's also personally interested in the subject of how
new theories interface with older ones, and wrote a book criticising
the "string theory" community for cheerleading. He's supposed to be
one of the more radical mainstream researchers working on quantum
gravity. 
So if it's not occurred to //him// to check whether the taught history
of Newtonian theory is actually true, then one has to wonder exactly
how bad a state we're in.  


=Erk= (Eric Baird)   www.relativitybook.com
: " It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't 
:   see the problem. "
:  - G. K. Chesterton