Although its easy to see the absurdity in a self-declared scientific genius, it is similar to an attitude taken by some scientists with a dim view of philosophy. Plato, Aristotle and Socrates may have been deep thinkers, but philosophers are idiot scientists. Except they aren’t.
Confluence of Evidence
Suppose you were an electrician. You’ve trained, apprenticed, passed all your certifications, and you’ve worked with electric wiring for years. You’ve wired houses and commercial buildings for years, and you feel pretty confident in your trade. One day you finish wiring a light switch, dust off your hands, and flip the switch to test it. But instead of seeing the light turn right on, you find that it flickers dimly. You’re pretty sure you wired things correctly, so what do you do?
Pale Blue Dot
The image above is a radio image of Voyager 1. It was taken from the Very Long Baseline Array, which is a collection of 10 radio telescopes scattered from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands. It captures the faint radio signal of the distant probe. That pale blue dot is the most distant object made by humans.
Spherical Cow
There’s an old joke in physics where a farmer wants to increase milk production, and asks his physicist neighbor for advice. She agrees to think about the problem, and after a week comes back declaring she’s found a brilliant solution. “The first step is to get some spherical cows that can breed in a vacuum.” The point of the joke is physicists often make wildly unphysical assumptions when creating physical models, such as assuming cows are spherical. While that might seem like a poor way to do science, it is actually a powerful tool.
Poor Einstein, Dummy Boy
I’ve been seeing a lot of Albert Einstein quotes recently. It struck me how the quotes are attributed to Einstein as if it gives them more power. Einstein was such a genius that his views on education or new-age philosophy must be genius as well. Of course that’s not how it works. Being very talented or knowledgable in one area doesn’t make one an authority in others. And as history shows, Einstein even got things wrong in his own field.
Home
The image above is a processed color image of Earth from Saturn. As Carl Sagan once wrote, “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” The view of Earth as a pale blue dot demonstrates the rarity of our world, and the fragility of our lives. It is easy to feel small and humbled by such a visage. But this image of our …
Big Blue Marble
If you’ve ever observed the stars in a clear dark sky, you likely remember it. Most people don’t live in areas where the sky is very dark, so it isn’t something they experience often. But when they do, it seems to have an impact on their lives. Often people will talk about their first experience of a sky filled with stars in almost hushed tones. It is a view that seems to invoke a sense of awe and wonder in all of us.
A Lack of Balance
Yesterday I wrote about the difficulty in understanding black holes. The heart of this difficulty lies in trying to understand how two radically different physical models (general relativity and quantum mechanics) might integrate into a single, unified model. Two major approaches to this problem are loop quantum gravity and string theory.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Black holes are interesting objects, because we know they exist but we don’t know what they are. That isn’t quite true. We know that they are formed from the gravitational collapse of matter, either as supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, or as stellar mass black holes from the collapse of a star. We know that they power quasars and radio galaxies, that they can form accretion disks of matter around their equators, and that they can produce powerful jets of matter when they are active. But buried within our understanding of black holes is a fundamental contradiction that we have yet to resolve.