A friend just emailed me this:
One of the biggest criticisms of string theory is that its predictions can’t be tested experimentally–a requirement for any solid scientific idea.
That’s not true anymore.
At a AAAS session on Sunday, physicists said string theory is making important contributions to the study of two extreme forms of matter –one heated to trillions of degrees, the other chilled to near-absolute zero. In both cases the matter became a “perfect liquid” that ripples and flows freely, like water. String theorists analyzed the results by applying what they had learned from pondering how a black hole might behave in five dimensions. Then they went on to calculate just how free-flowing these liquids might be, predictions that the experimenters are using to guide the next stage of their work.
You may recall a lot of discussion being devoted to the supposed similarities between string theory and intelligent design. Not surprisingly, Gregg Easterbrook (in Slate, natch) was writing things like
The leading universities are dominated by hooded monks who speak in impenetrable mumbo-jumbo; insist on the existence of fantastic mystical forces, yet can produce no evidence of these forces; and enforce a rigid guild structure of beliefs in order to maintain their positions and status.
(For a take down of Easterbrook’s idiocy here, see this piece.)
Why would someone like Gregg Easterbrook weigh in on the merits of string theory, given his lack of scientific education? Because it presented a prime opportunity for high contrarianism: you would think that our top theoretical physicists are rational, but when you take a closer look, they’re just like right-wing Christians! And various forms of this kind of silliness dominated our public discourse for some time.
Matt Yglesias hypothesizes:
My strong sense is that contrarianness reached its apogee in the 1990s when a general sense took over that politics was basically silly and that punditry should be seen as basically akin to the college debate circuit wherein the idea is to construct the most clever possible argument rather than to actually hit on the truth. When this general spirit of the times merged with the elite press’ inexplicable loathing of Al Gore you started getting really bizarre arguments being made with a straight face. People would say that one good thing about George W. Bush was that he was dimwitted, which made him understand leadership. Or that a big problem with Gore was that he was interested in public policy.
This attitude brought us thousands of Americans killed in a terrorist attack, thousands more killed in a senseless war, and eventually the collapse of the world economy. But that in turn has at least to a small extent reminded people that it actually does matter what happens and who’s right.
I think that is exactly right. Don’t forget there was a time when people actually read the New Republic, when Mickey Kaus was influential (I agree with Atrios that Slate and TNR are the worst practitioners of facile contrarianism out there), and when Michael Kinsley was all over teevee.
In a perfect world, there would be no Mickey Kaus, no Gregg Easterbrook, no Meghan McArdle, no John Tierney, no Slate, no New Republic (I’m willing to live with the new, less smart-assed Kinsley). But I think it’s progress that they’ve been marginalized to some extent.
Update. Via the comments, a prominent critic of string theory asserts (and I think I agree) that the experiment does not really address “string theory’s failure as a unified theory”. Nevertheless, I think the experiment does show that string theory is fundamentally different from something like the theory of intelligent design or creationism.
WereBear
Woo hoo!
As a string theory fan, I feel vindicated.
As someone with a brain, I feel hopeful that brains will make a comeback.
BruceK
The world would be a better place if Easterbrook restricted his commentary to football.
(And if certain other commentators went on extended journey of exploration and suffered amusing irretrievable mischiefs, but that’s another matter.)
robertdsc
True, but don’t these people also serve as a deterrent against complacency? Fighting the good fight in debunking their points helps contribute to a sharper audience, no?
SnarkyShark
I don’t think they have been ‘marginalized’ so much as they Marginalized themselves.
Prancing about in fields of idiocy will do that to oneself.
They call it contrariness, I say stupid is what stupid writes.
And Eastbrook has been on a non-stop diet of teh stoopid.
At least do some basic research so you have some kind of clue, but apparently that is not how the game is played in the villagers world
DougJ
I don’t think so, no. Their “points” are smart-ass, bad-faith bs for the most part. To debunk their points is to be drawn into a useless rhetorical game. (And I don’t feel that way at all about good faith points that I disagree with.)
Doug M.
Putting aside the pundits, the string theory achievement seems to be much more modest than that blog entry would suggest:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/
Doug M.
Jim Pharo
Contrainism-ness is just another form of Jay Rosen’s “media savvy.” What’s important is to convince others that you have access to info that others do not have, or that your mind is so wonderful that you can predict the future.
More or less like 3d grade, except this stuff matters more.
DougJ
Your link is to a virulently anti-string theory blog (not to say it’s wrong, but consider the source).
(EDIT: To be completely clear, I think it is important that there be scientists like Woit who critique the shortcomings of theories they find less than satisfactory. It’s Easterbrookian simplifications of these that I find objectionable.)
Matt
@Doug M.: I was gonna say, it sounds only like they found some use for the mathematics of string theory, not that they had verified any part of the theory itself. Presumably the well-known problems of string theory remain, e.g. the energy necessary in an accelerator and the vacuum selection problem.
DBrown
Found some background information on the work and what type of matter they are talking about (quarks, not atoms -see https://www.llnl.gov/str/JanFeb08/soltz.html). Beware, not an easy read but no math.
So free quarks are being created and a fifth dimension is needed to perform the calculations (so, I see where string theory comes in) – getting strange … wait, not quark strange but strange, strange – a little quantum humor.
inkadu
Yep. Science has been so successful in explaining so much, that what’s left to explain is what in a space so tiny that it doesn’t even exist in a way we can understand.
That’s a sure sign of a failing mode of thought: it occasionally reaches a point where it can not explain something.
Sigh.
harlana pepper
This oh-so-clever contarianism has resulted in unspeakable cruelties against mankind. It actually makes one want to weep, to think about the influence all these smug assholes (I’d have to lump Bill Kristol in there) had on the public discourse about going to war and justifying the trampling of the less fortunate to even lower degrees of existence. It is a tragedy for this nation.
Thank you, DougJ, for addressing this issue once again and putting words to a phenomenon that is so morally bankrupt and self-serving, it’s about as easy for me to comprehend as string theory.
DBrown
@Doug M.: Read their point and it is not now (or maybe never was) correct. Fermi Lab has stated that obtaining this result did require the use of string theory – so a scientifically based source has, in fact, confirmed this result.
In any case, their major point is false and I am surprised they made such a stupid claim- using the concept of string theory (that quarks are made of string like objects) to determine a testable property of quarks in an experiment does in fact support the idea as fact and to say otherwise is like saying that testing the rate a ball falls to Earth is not a valid experiment of gravity (which is partly true but does offer strong support – science can not prove ANYTHING like math does. All theorys are and forever remain theorys BUT after enough experimental proof, we accept them as fact – at least as good as we can get.)
While these results hardly prove that string theory is valid it DOES prove that string theory makes a testable prediction and it was observed in a real experiment AND current QED does not predict this result. This is a powerful data point that supports string theory (and no, I don’t like string theory but unless someone comes up with a way for QED to get this result, the point that string theory cannot be tested has been laid to rest.
Fulcanelli
Seems like an awful lot of effort and money just to figure out how wingnuts like Malkin think. I say just shoot ’em. It’s cheaper.
steve davis
It’s called Sophism, and it’s actually a complete philosophical movement stemming back at least to Georgius. It’s one of the reasons Socrates got into trouble. He didn’t put up with Sophistic bullshit. And he didn’t allow dialectic to spin into rambling shifts of definition, or “both sides are probably partly right” garbage. Either something can be shown to be true or untrue, or it isn’t worth debating. If it can be shown to be true or untrue, then it is worth the time to be certain we know which category it is in. Sophistry got so bad in the law courts in England that it made its way into some lovely, crushing poetry by Pope, Dryden, et. al.
Dude in Jersey
Ummm, I don’t think that clever arguments and contrariness brought us the Iraq war. A desire to kill Arabs brought us the Iraq war. Sorry, Matt, you’re blowing smoke out your a$$ as usual.
El Cid
Note that “contrarianism” (the modern version) always leads to the conservative or hawkish perspective or solution.
That’s its purpose. It’s not about being facile or contrary. It’s about being or doing so in a particular direction — taking positions or solutions seemingly accepted within a mainstream or liberal paradigm and suggesting that, no, really, in reality, it’s the surprising conservative or hawkish view or approach which is correct.
For example, if you write a column beginning with commonly asserted assumptions about how a single payer health insurance system would be the most costly, and then you point out that it’s actually the greatest money saver, that’s not going to be considered a ‘contrarian’ view even though it departs from most of conventional thought.
Instead, that will be considered some sort of deranged liberal extremist view yet part and parcel of a robotic mindlessness, however correct it might be.
Contrarian is only when you argue that, hey, you know, we think it’s humanitarian to give people health care, but you know what the most humanitarian thing to do is? Just let people get sick and die.
DBrown
@inkadu: Your point is not really true. Just because we cannot explain something does not make science’ untrue or it has reached an end. Science is only an approach to understanding what is real and based (most the time) on math. This creates powerful and testable insights but is not and never will give absolute knowledge (a silly term that we all use because we have no real fucking idea what it really means.)
Slaney Black
READ THIS COMMENT CAREFULLY TO UNDERSTAND THE FULL HORROR OF IT
There is a “secret” personal angle here… It’s not just the media… Yglesias is describing the ethos of the entire freaking Harvard campus during the period. I know b/c I was there just a little before him. And I know for a fact every other Ivy except (maybe) Brown was exactly the same.
Sure, you read in Slate that “if liberals were serious about helping black people, they’d reintroduce slavery!” and sniggered that at least it was just one jerkoff publication. But I had that same goddamn conversation face to face with like 60% of my classmates.
They pumped us full of “game theory” and “microeconomics” and “evolutionary psychology” so that reactionary tomfoolery like that just became second nature.
And this will take decades to wash out of the system. Hell, we just got rid of the baby boomers’ nonsense in the presidency last year.
For example, if you write a column beginning with commonly asserted assumptions about how a single payer health insurance system would be the most costly, and then you point out that it’s actually the greatest money saver, that’s not going to be considered a ‘contrarian’ view even though it departs from most of conventional thought.
Do you remember a few years ago, Slate argued we should build shantytowns over the Katrina site? I kid you not.
inkadu
@Dude in Jersey: Contrarianism aided and abetted the Iraq war.
“Saddam Hussein gassed his own people with gas we gave him. He is unspeakably evil.”
“Saddam has been under the most stringent weapons control program in history. They have found nothing, therefore he must be hiding massive stockpiles of nerve gas.”
“We would very much like UN weapons inspections to continue, therefore we ask all UN weapons inspectors to leave the country immediately.”
I could go on.
JGabriel
Dude in Jersey:
Minor, but important, correction. While it’s true that Iraq is mostly Arabic, Afghanistan is largely a motley mix of tribes of mostly Iranic/Persian (i.e., Indo-European) descent, not Arabic.
And it really was contrariness, at least in part, that led us into Iraq, since there were plenty of people who warned that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction.
.
Slaney Black
They didn’t necessarily. Mostly non-ironic military-industrial jock-sniffing did. But like El Cid pointed out, contrarianism only works if you argue against liberal or humanitarian or just basic human decency principles. So…”Colin Powell may be widely respected, but in fact he is an empty suit who doesn’t know anything” is not a valid move in that game.
inkadu
@DBrown: I know. I was being snarky. Science is in an awkward rhetorical position with this string theory because it has pushed the frontiers of knowledge so damn far, it’s becoming really difficult to field test.
So science at the bleeding edge looks, to stupid people, a lot like religion.
Contrarianism — Thanks for putting a name to this. I used to really enjoy some conservative writers for “sticking it to the man,” with their outrageous arguments. I’m trying to remember one humorist in particular. I can’t remember his name, but he was a regular on NPR’s “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” One of his arguments was that movements could be judged by how sexy the chicks were. I thought that was hilariously true. Then I turned fifteen.
It also explained a lot to me about Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is more of a literary allergic reaction than a serious writer. He will take a contrary view and go all-out in a delightfully bombastic manner. If you agree with him, it can be a lot of fun. If you don’t, it is almost incoherent.
[Edit – PJ Orourke, “Parliament of Whores” etc.]
El Cid
CNN just runs an idiotically ludicrous commercial on ‘don’t let them push through a government run health care program’ which will ‘force government bureaucrats between you and your doctor’ (complete with hospital room with suffering female patient, kindly white jacketed doctor, and nerdy thick glasses bow-tie bureaucrat with clipboard reading “US GOVERNMENT” or something waving his finger back and forth “no”.
This was sponsored by “Conservatives for Patients’ Rights“.
Is CNN taking liberal ads for a public plan as well?
JGabriel
Fulcanelli:
We’re liberals. We prize physics over eliminationism, cost be damned!
.
inkadu
@El Cid: Unless CNN is giving steep discounts to pro-refom commercials, no.
Herb
The most important differences between string theorists and ID-ers are their tactics. String theorists don’t rejoice, claiming that the evidence conclusively supports the theory. They don’t blame their problems on scientists and the scientific method being somehow fundamentally biased against string theory. String theorists, though they write popular books and articles, aren’t engaged in a massive PR campaign to convince the public that they’re right, skirting the process of peer review. Finally, they have a firm grasp of physics, whereas ID-ers often do not understand biology (and lack a relevant degree).
harlana pepper
I don’t think contarianism would make much sense to a little Iraqi girl who was stalked by an American soldier, heard her family being shot to death and then was raped by same soldier before he blew her guts out. On the other hand, I doubt it makes much sense to the American soldier who had half his brain shot out and will live with TBI for the rest of his life. I really doubt his family would be too impressed, either. I watched this shit unfold over the last 8 years — how about “invading a country and slaughtering it’s people will result in DEMOCRACY & PONIES! Yayz”? I’d call that pretty damned contrary.
Matt
@DBrown: Reread this, for example
It doesn’t support what you are saying.
JGabriel
El Cid:
Interesting. I suspect there are far more people with real life experience in a hospital setting with just such a bureacrat, but with the clipboard reading “INSURANCE COMPANY”.
.
El Cid
Hitchens wanted to think he was copying Orwell, but he only wanted to copy that part of Orwell who was arguing against pacifists in WWII and against party-line Communist style thought. All the rest of Orwell, particularly the incredibly moving simple decent humanism and humanitarianism, Hitchens just ignores.
So Hitchens liked the Orwell who felt angry enough at certain sneering pacifists during WWII to argue that it was the soldiers dying who kept them safe to write their poems; he apparently doesn’t as much like the Orwell who points out that one of the greatest moral problems with war isn’t that people are sent to die in wars, but that people are sent to kill.
It isn’t the Orwell who wrote an essay about how awful it was even when people who deserved to feel vengefulness — say, an actually persecuted Jewish man — came face to face with the death on the battlefield even of those who would have killed them, German soldiers. Or the Orwell who wrote about the dreadful conditions in Germany after the war.
And that what may be even worse than killing people is the standardized, propagandistic lying about them to turn them into dehumanized enemies.
No, Hitchens for whatever reason decided to ditch his and Orwell’s basic humanism and humanitarianism while keeping nothing but their desire to kill those who are hateful and dangerous, leaving a miserable hollow mix of vengefulness, ignorance of the likely consequences of recommended actions, and incredible pomposity.
harlana pepper
@El Cid: May they burn in the flames of hell.
used to be disgusted
Yglesias (and El Cid and Slaney Black and DougJ) are really right about public discourse in the 90s. I remember how fun it was. Used to wait for the latest issue of TNR, and the latest nugget of counter-intuitive insight. But El Cid is right: the whole point of the game was to go against the prevailing assumptions of the audience — and since the audience was mostly composed of bookish people from what you might call a liberal background, in practice the game always turned out to be about the unintended consequences of good liberal intentions. I.e., it always pointed in the direction of the DLC if not the GOP.
I remember all those articles about how 9/11 killed irony. Everyone laughed in 2002, because of course you can’t kill irony. But in a sense it seems to me that the Bush administration did. People don’t have patience anymore to treat politics an intellectual game. When there are real consequences for people, it’s no longer fun to focus on the amusing contrarian exceptions to the rule; you have to focus on the basic facts. Even if they’re boring, obvious facts, like, “the GOP exists largely to serve the interests of corporations and the wealthier segments of the business class.”
God, the 90s. We thought we were disillusioned and insightful, when in reality we were sheltered and trusting.
media browski
inkadu, high school biology looks like religion to stupid people.
And how did Salon not get tagged for virulent page-hit courting contrarianism?
greennotGreen
I know next to nothing about string theory; what I know about physics I learned from watching late night PBS programs (aren’t there supposed to be 11 dimensions?) But the parallel I draw between the spiritual realm and theoretical physics is not between an easily falsifiable myth like creationism versus the hard-to-prove bleeding edge of science, but between the unknown and the barely perceived.
Serious, actual physicists using serious, actual (invented by humans) math have hypothesized “branes” undulating in something outside of our space, and universes come into being when the branes collide. (Hey, I said I learned it on TV.) So why is that science, but the belief that something exists outside of us – a consciousness, a being, a force that many people call God – why is that superstition? Why is that not also a hypothesis that we do not yet have the tools to test?
I work in biomedical research, and I think that often scientists get so caught up in observing and measuring that they forget that you can only observe and measure what you have tools for. Bacteria existed before microscopes, even bacteria that didn’t cause disease or rot so that one could observe their effects. At this point in our development as a species, the existence of God may be untestable, but not just a belief held over from a more primitive time. Humility, people. We don’t know everything.
Of course, we *do* know more than Gregg Easterbrook.
inkadu
@El Cid: Shorter El Cid: When Hitchens writes a first-person war journal called Homage to Baghdad, he can compare himself to Orwell. Until then, he should shut the fuck up.
I could write more, but it would only detract. I’m glad we agree.
DBrown
@greennotGreen: The answer is math – all the theory is taken from math so it is (in principle) testable. This is very different from CS because it is based on faith only. Both give very speculative ideas but one can be derived from basic math the other is created ad-hoc to fit a preconceived idea (not even based on the Bible) simply to attack a biology theory (not based on math but observation.)
@Matt: Please provide a http link since your ‘this’ link does not work and your orginal source does not say what you just quoted.
Thanks
JK
What a truly wonderful concept.
Doug,
Keep in mind that Easterbrook is also the author of this nonsense
inkadu
@greennotGreen:
I am sure there are many answers to this, but for me, the answer is in the history of the idea.
Why do we think there is a God? The evidence, for me, points to a misapplication of the way humans understand the world. There is no outside reason to consider the God hypothesis, we just have an internal idea of God as an artifact of our way of processing reality. If we didn’t already have an internal idea of God, there would be no reason to even consider it.
Why do we think string-theory is accurate? Because there’s some math behind it. But if there were no good reason to think strings exist, we wouldn’t consider it.
And once you define “God,” we can have a more serious discussion about whether it’s scientifically testable. The Old Testament God was certainly a testable hypothesis. The problem is as science advances, God has less room in which to manuever. However, while you may say there is no way to prove God’s existence because he is such a nebulous character, you will also say that you pray to him, worship him, and feel his presence in your life every day. If has such a neglible effect on the universe, how can you he have such an effect on so many people? So pick your definition of God and then we can begin to see if there’s a way to test his existence. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of tail chasing.
Kevin
@BruceK: Have you read one of his football articles? Contrarianism married to armchair quarterbacking does not make for good writing.
JK
@inkadu:
Great points. Thanks for your post to last night’s thread about the availability of You Are There.
flukebucket
Hey! I saw that program. The way I interpreted it was that the only way to make their arithmetic work was to add another dimension. Throw in another dimension and the arithmetic worked. It was fascinating.
Kinda like watching the search for Neutrinos
I love to watch shit like that. I never know what the fuck they are talking about or why they are talking about it but it sure beats watching Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow for a second time in one night.
Matt
@DBrown:
Sorry. this.
truculentandunreliable
Um, yeah. I don’t have a “strong sense” of this. I know it’s fucking true.
The problem is when wonks and dorks treat political arguments like forms of fun diversion, people actually start to believe them and those arguments have real world consequences. In fact, I’ve long believe that most of the arguments that Repubs vomit out are what we would call “squirrely” on the debate circuit.
It’s not that they’re good–it’s just that they’re so insane that you don’t really have evidence to refute them. And you’re not really sure how to refute them in any other way than by saying, “What the fuck is this fucking squirrely shit?” The unfortunate thing is that, in the modern political and false equivalency media atmosphere, it’s not enough to say, “Clearly, this argument is batshit,” especially if your opponent is putting forth that argument with persuasive confidence.
This is how they win the public debate ALLLL THE TIME. Fucking squirrely motherfuckers.
inkadu
@JK: Wow. Balloon Juice is awesome. When’s the last time someone tracked me down from yesterday’s thread on Washington Monthly?
On the downside, I’m still waiting for Asiangrrl to kick my ass when I’m least expecting.
El Cid
@inkadu
The problem is that Hitchens might do so, or have done so, and he would copy the form and the poses and yet lose all the basic motivations.
And you could map it out in advance. Hitchens’ POUM would be the Kurds, but this time they weren’t undermined by Stalin’s centralized forces mostly opposing a Spanish Revolution, so you’d get bragging triumphalism instead of serious questions and attempts to explain where this may go.
inkadu
@truculentandunreliable:
Those arguments are “not even wrong,” as we say here on the intertrons.
harlana pepper
@inkadu: Hey, watchout, cuz she has an official bj stalker who may kick yer ass as well. ;)
inkadu
@El Cid: I am not quite so cynical. If Hitchens spent a year in combat with the Kurds, he would have a very different view of them. He would be annoyed that they weren’t modern, that they didn’t respect his education, that they were internally fractured, sexist, etc. He would also come away with a very different perspective on Iraq and what war can accomplish there.
The kind of blithe indifference Hitchens writes with can only be maintained with a lot of physical and emotional distance.
When I finished Homage, I was really fascinated by the communist struggle in the twentieth century, and how it might relate to fascism, and what those trends might have for us in the future. I don’t have very high hopes for the United States surviving as a free Republic into the next century, but I’m not really too sure where to go for more reading material. Heck. First things first. I have to finish reading Argentine history from Yrigoyen to Peron. Then I can worry about the rest of the world.
inkadu
@harlana pepper:
I don’t think Asiangrrl would be impressed by such stereotypical and testosterone-driven macho behavior. Violence against the ‘other’ has been one of the primary tools of oppression throughout history, and I am sure she is working hard to build a better world. She’d probably kick his ass for even thinking about it.
JK
@inkadu:
I make it a habit to check out the previous night’s threads to see if I missed any interesting comments.
@flukebucket:
@greennotGreen:
Yes, and Sarah Palin is a clueless fucking moron in each one of them.
RP
At some point the media elite decided that being clever was more important than being intelligent or wise. Maureen Dowd and Greg Easterbrook are the high priests of this movement, but they have have a lot of followers. Krugman was often ridiculed in the early Bush years because he wouldn’t play along and was too “serious.” Of course, many of the clever contrarians were happy to get serious after 9/11, but for them the “War on Terror” and the invasion of Iraq were still just games — they had no real stake in the outcome.
Some historians could probably draw some interesting parallels to the intellectual mindset in the waning years of the Roman Empire and the French Monarchy.
DBrown
@Matt: Thanks – the link worked.
I read the article and much was well past my pay grade but I got much of the post’s point and I am concerned by his simplest approach in relating the event horizon of a black hole to the idea of generalizing the reduction of dimensions in string theory. The reasons I object are a little out there but the main issue is most black holes DO NOT hide all their past information within their event horizons (like spin or magnetic field information but in fact, do interact with the universe in a direct manner) as easy as he says. I had a running and (he conceded) correct argument on this point with Sir Roger Penrose. That concerns me that the current idea that string theory has merit on this issue is far weaker than I thought. Still QCD does not account for the mass of a neutrino (in fact, says it can not have mass) so lets be honest, the standard model has a fatal flaw.
Still, the issue that string theory predicts a stronger interaction between free quarks is in agreement with experimental evidence and QCD does not (for now) and that is experimental proof that string theory has some testable aspects … maybe.
JK
@RP:
Don’t forget to include the insufferable and always irritating Ana Marie Cox to your list. To this day, Cox expresses her admiration for John McCain.
Redshirt
String theory seems to make the most sense to me, at this point, until something better comes along. And it’s clear we need something better — we’ve moved on past Newtonian Physics, Relativistic physics, and it appears Quantum mechanics as well — its clear to me we are like the people in a dark room, attempting to describe an elephant we cannot see. We gets bits and pieces of info, but cannot yet conceive of the entire system – for example, scientists currently estimate some 95% of matter in the universe is “Dark Matter and Dark Energy”; funny thing is, no one knows what dark matter or energy is — they’re just words to describe things we cannot measure accurately.Yet.
This is no condemnation of science, of course, for that’s the very point: Constant challenging of assumptions, and throwing out anything found to no longer be accurate.
The other point which I find good to keep in mind is that we will never know the full truth – our reality is so vast (and so small), so beyond our actual physical minds, we’ll never know everything. But we will always have the journey to find out more.
RP
True, but I would categorize her as one of Dowd’s acolytes, not as a high priest.
DBrown
@Redshirt: Dark matter is mostly hot and cold neutrino’s and is not an issue any more except, maybe, the total amount may include stranger stuff but I really do not consider that a big issue since there is zero evidence (again, so far) that these other strange things exist or are really needed. Dark energy is just a name for an observation that may or may not be correct. If dark energy is not real then issue does in fact cause the previous issue of strange particles to needed in very large amounts and that spells trouble. Since the universe appears to be flat (by the microwave probes and this is strange – then infinite) then the mass to create such a situation is a big issue and dark energy nicely fits the bill … still, that means we are living at the one special time when these forces are in near perfect balance … yeah, right and most astrophysicist feel that same way.
JK
@RP:
Fair point. The writings of Cox and Dowd have been known to induce vomiting. On those occasions when I can manage to keep food down, I feel the need to take a long cold shower after reading Dowd, Cox, Easterbrook, and the rest of the contrarians.
For people with an interest in string theory and other science topics see http://mkaku.org, the website of physicist Michio Kaku.
The Grand Panjandrum
The proponents of intelligent design (or any other untestable hypothesis) use a ploy that works something like this. First I misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then I get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, I cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a “controversy” to teach.
The trick is content-free. I can use it on any topic. “Tim F’s work in home beer brewing supports my argument that the earth is flat,” I say, misrepresenting Tim F’s work. When Tim F responds with a denunciation of my misuse of his work, I ever so cleverly respond, saying something like: “See what a controversy we have here? Tim F and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate! We should teach the controversy in the classrooms.” And here is the delicious part: I can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to my own advantage, counting on most of you to miss the point in all the difficult details. (I do realize home beer brewing is an extreme example but it gets the point across about the ridiculous, and content-free nature of these “arguments.”
@greennotGreen:
Agreed. Any discussion of a supernatural being is irrelevant in my mind. If intelligent design, or for that matter the existence of a god, were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing about their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology or the existence of a god.
Remember cold fusion? The scientific community was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.
Get in line, intelligent designers, and believers! Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard data.
Redshirt
@Dbrown – I hear ya. I guess I was trying to highlight the difference between what a scientist says and believe, and what a layperson might hear; for example, someone may take away the lesson that scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, based on the description of dark energy – they could then go further and say “see, no one really knows; so why not trust in Jesus?”
That’s not correct of course, as science may not have all the answers, or even the correct ones, but they are, collectively, diligently working to refine the theories.
I just think it shows our true position in the universe — both physically, and intellectually – when our best theories leave some 75% of observable matter classified as an unknown substance named “Dark energy”.
It just tells me we still have a looooooooong way to go to more fully understand our reality. And if it turns out to be massively multi-dimensional (branes, for example), then we truly are living in a sea of mystery.
Barry
used to be disgusted:
” But El Cid is right: the whole point of the game was to go against the prevailing assumptions of the audience—and since the audience was mostly composed of bookish people from what you might call a liberal background, in practice the game always turned out to be about the unintended consequences of good liberal intentions. ”
RP:
“At some point the media elite decided that being clever was more important than being intelligent or wise. Maureen Dowd and Greg Easterbrook are the high priests of this movement, but they have have a lot of followers. ”
Replying to both – the major thing that I note about media contrarianism is that it’s not right-wing; it’s a mockery very pleasing and useful to power and money. For example, I don’t recall reading too many contrarian articles in the big media tearing down the Myth of the Hero-CEO.
RP: “Krugman was often ridiculed in the early Bush years because he wouldn’t play along and was too “serious.” Of course, many of the clever contrarians were happy to get serious after 9/11, but for them the “War on Terror” and the invasion of Iraq were still just games—they had no real stake in the outcome.”
I think that Krugman was bitterly opposed for not playing around. Seriousness was not something that the contrarians were really opposed to, as long as that seriousness was in the service of money and power.
Barry
Sorry – ‘playing along’.
One thing to keep in mind is that the pre-NYT Krugman was somebody whom the contrarians would have gotten along with; in his Slate articles and books, he takes great pleasure in trashing left-wing stuff. They didn’t realize that he wouldn’t play along.
In fact, he made a comment later that he regretted spending so much time on intra-liberal disputes, ‘while Sauron was gathering his forces’ (quote from memory).
harlana pepper
@JK: Hot water is better for purification purposes. I would suggest a loofah also, but that’s O’Reilly’s department and I don’t think hygiene was what he had in mind.
((shudder))
harlana pepper
Completely OT, but I find the new K-Y commercials most irritating and icky. No pun intended.
Also, hey asiangrrl, where are ya? You’ve got some ass-kickin to do on this thread. ;)
prdelapaz
@DBrown: Dark matter can’t be explained by hot and cold neutrinos. Neutrinos don’t have enough mass to be cold dark matter, and if you have too much hot dark matter it messes with the large scale structure of the universe. Most people think dark matter will be a weakly interacting heavy particle, or multiple particles.
Also, the problem with string theory is you’ve introduced basically infinite degrees of freedom, so you can explain most anything you want, but don’t really make concrete predictions. Except you need 11 dimensions, but those maybe so small we can never measure them. And I do mean never, the large hadron collider has about 10 orders of magnitude too small energy to get to string theory energies. Nobody’s seen an actual string yet, and most of our theories beyond the Standard Model can be put into some string theory.
Also, the universe is apparently accelerating instead of decelerating, and it’s my understanding that string theory doesn’t no how to cope in that case. I heard a string theorist say they don’t even know how to define an observable in that case. I may be wrong there, I work on field theories and testing them at colliders, not string theories.
MBunge
“for example, scientists currently estimate some 95% of matter in the universe is “Dark Matter and Dark Energy”; funny thing is, no one knows what dark matter or energy is—they’re just words to describe things we cannot measure accurately.”
No, they’re words for concepts that scientists have largely pulled out of their butts to explain why the universe doesn’t look the way the math says it should look. Science says the universe should look like X. It actually looks like X+7. Dark Matter and Dark Energy are pretty much just a variable inserted into the equation to account for the +7.
DM and DE might very well exist, but right now the best argument for that is that the alternative is waaaaay to daunting to contemplate.
Mike
harlana pepper
This thread is getting much too scientific for my pea-brain! You guys are so farkin smart, which is why I keep coming back here, I guess.
NutellaonToast
String Theory = ID? That’s a new meme on me.
I think a better counterpoint to that bit of stupid is to point out that ST isn’t widely accepted. It’s a theory that physicists are looking at, but most of them aren’t convinced precisely because there’s not a lot of direct evidence for it.
Morgan
@NutellaonToast: New to me, too, since they’re not remotely similar. String Theory is completely scientific. The only reason we can’t test it (much?) currently is technical limitations both in determining and solving the equations involved and in harnessing the energy required to create the particles that might validate it.
Anyone interested in learning more about the subject (and a summary of physics prior to ST) ought to check out The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. It’s dense, but about as accessible as possible for laymen given the subject.
JK
Speaking of Intelligent Design, how about a shout out to wingnut and Arizona state senator Sylvia Allen who recently said the following
DBrown
@MBunge: dark matter is well understood in that they know what it should be and like all theories about space, we depend on experiments here on Earth – in that, the theory is just that but to say they pulled it out of their butts is very poor thinking and totally wrong. As for dark energy, yeah, we don’t know but so what? The theorys we have explain so very much of the universe/world we see and have around use and are very accurate. More to the point, all the experimental data collected that creates and supports these theories would take a small army to read some years and you have a problem with all these facts? Like a computer – it only works because all the theory on quantum mechanics is right – try pulling a computer and monitor from out of your butt and after that attempt I think you will agree that science works and is the greatest accomplishment of the human mind.
truculentandunreliable
@JK: UGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I saw this the other day. Do you think she’d like that uranium as much if she knew that it was used by scientists to prove that the earth is, in fact, older than 6,000 years?
I swear, we should require an IQ test from anyone who runs for public office.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@inkadu:
Why not? Ultimately, either the Universe was created, or it wasn’t. (If there’s data pointing conclusively either way, I’m unaware of it, so it seems equally reasonable to hypothesize either way at this point.) If you speculate that it was created, it seems perfectly reasonable to produce a hypothesis that this creating thing/force/entity/whatever is God. How you define God may impact the reasonableness of your hypothesis, but I don’t see any reason why the hypothesis is unreasonable in and of itself.
@The Grand Panjandrum:
LOL, I thought the big advantage of being a believer in metaphysical phenomena and entities was that your beliefs could neither be proven nor disproven by “hard” (i.e., physically and empirically verifiable) data.
binzinerator
Or, a nice take-down of postmodernism in one sentence.
Mario Piperni
I divide political contrarians into three broad groups – the Believers, the Liars and the Stupid
The Believers are of the Sean Hannity variety. They are the faithful on steroids which causes a blurring of truth which allows them to make the most ridiculous statements and comparisons. You listen to these people and shake your head in disbelief and think, “c’mon, this guy’s gotta know he’s lying through his teeth.” They don’t. The kool-aid has worked its magic. Many of the TeaParty attendees fall into this category.
The Liars are a different breed and leading the pack is Rush Limbaugh. Liars are in full control of what they say and fully conscious of the bullshit they spout. Their job is twofold: 1.) Promote the party line. 2.) Promote themselves. And not necessarily in that order.
Let me note here that sitting smack down in the middle of Believers and Liars is Glenn Beck. Beck is smart enough to realize that much of what he says is trash and entertainment but dumb enough to get carried away in the madness and convince himself that it might be all true.
And then we come to The Stupid, epitomized best by George W. Bush. The Stupid are clueless. They are often incapable of lying because for something to be a lie, one needs to have known the truth. And as they say in Texas, in Tennessee too…err…look, when a bucket is empty, you can pretty much fill it up with just about anything. (If you’re missing the relevance of that last line, check out the video in this post.)
asiangrrlMN
I do not kick anyone’s ass because I am a pacifist. An angry, cynical, sarcastic pacifist, yes, but a pacifist nonetheless.
As for Gregg Easterbrook, I used to read his football stuff until that became too wretched. He is really not a very good writer. I tried to read what he wrote about string theory, and frankly, my mind is not equipped to decipher that high degree of mumbo jumbo. So, put this in the “I read ’em so you don’t have to” category. Easterbrook just proves that you can have brains and still be an idiot.
inkadu
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
There are about three things wrong with it. First, the idea that an entity created something was the first scientific theory man came up with. It applied man, lightning, and relationships with mothers-in-law. It has always been proved wrong, but people go on believing it.
So, if you want to speculate that things were created, what’s wrong with God being the creator? Well, for one thing it’s a very confusing statement to make. God is a slippery bastard, and even though the Christian god is different from the Hindu gods, they all agreed that g/God created the universe. So to say that “God” created the universe is to say that some being who has no fixed definition and in whom we have contradictory ideas (sometimes internally contradictory) was the creator of the Universe. So we have taken something we know almost nothing about — the origin of the Universe — and merged it with something we can’t agree on — a Creator God — and we think this has moved the ball forward somehow.
The other thing wrong with the God hypothesis is that even if you posit a creator entity, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with anything that we traditionally call a god. It could be a transdimensional turtle leaving universe droppings. It could be a race of hyperintelligent computer beings, it could be, as Douglas Adams posited, hypergalactic snot. Even in the creator hypothesis, “God,” as we understand it, should be only one of very many (infinite, really) possibilities. Yet our mind settles on God and feels satisfied; and that, as a began, is a sign of a cognitive failing we have evolved with.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@inkadu:
News to me that it’s been “proved” (sic) wrong. If you can prove what caused the Big Bang, you should be publishing those findings, not arguing about them with me on this semi-obscure blog.
It’s not about “moving the ball forward somehow,” it’s a hypothesis which is incapable of being tested. It can neither be proven nor disproven, smug assertions like yours to the contrary notwithstanding.
Wow. So, you’re saying the exact same thing I said- that “how you define God may impact the reasonableness of your hypothesis,” only you’re saying it as if it hadn’t already occurred to me. And who is this “we” you’re referring to as having settled on one version of God, one paragraph after you’ve pointed out that there are many different ideas of God out there?
If you don’t want to accept the very possibility that the Universe was created, on the basis of nothing but your prejudice at the very idea that something other than a nihilistic fart into oblivion created reality, then just say so. It’s not very scientific of you to dismissively toss aside every other conceivable possibility for how the Universe came into existence, but if you want to argue with organized religious theologies instead of accepting that the concept of some sort of creator/God is not inherently any more or less ridiculous than the idea of something coming from nothing, that’s fine.