A good and bad example of current science
Our astronomer begs to be allowed to explain what’s really interesting about KIC8462852.
The strange case of the dimming star
Articles Tagged with astronomy
In the eye’s mind
What you see depends on what you’re looking for
Our photographic consultant is fond of pointing out to us, with the help of books and magazines, the different styles of great photographers. Clearly part of the variation in the final image is in the subjects they choose: Ansel Adams is famous for mountains and landscapes of the Southwest, quite a different thing from a New York City street photographer catching an instant among people. “But,” he says, “put in exactly the same place, facing exactly the same subject, they’d still come up with different pictures. They just see differently.” Which is true, and much more widely applicable than he meant. Even the same person looking at the same scene can see something entirely different at a different time. A simple exercise can show this.
Mythology and cosmology
Our chief consultant writes:
Science is a part of our culture. It’s not just that the products of science are all around us, in our hands and in our lives; no less, the discoveries of scientists are covered in the mainstream news media (not always well) and the concepts widely known (not always accurately). It’s clear enough by comparing our world with that of other cultures, say in the particular case of astronomy. We have cosmology (the Big Bang and all that); the ancient Greeks, a series of stories about gods and Titans.
Studying humans, even as amateurs, one seeks out similarities across cultures, and so we see cosmology equated to cosmic mythology. This leads to assertions like, “Cosmology is only our way of explaining the universe to ourselves, exactly the same way other cultures use other explanations.” This is just true enough to be seriously misleading.
How can you tell, if you’re not an expert? (2)
How far can you trust a scientist?
Our chief consultant writes: It’s time to take up the question again of how a non-expert can evaluate an expert. In a previous post I introduced paradoxers, people from outside the field who claim to have made some highly important advance. Paradoxers are interesting in several ways and we’ll return to them later. Today we consider the case of some undoubted expert, a renowned or at least established scientist, describing something in his or her field. How much of it can you rely on to be true? How far can you actually trust a scientist?
This subversive-looking question occurred to our astronomer a while back. To try to answer it, he looked into the specific case of astronomy over the period 1833-1944, and wound up writing a well-regarded book with his conclusions. It’s 300 pages long, so I’m not going to try to include the whole thing in this post. His depressing conclusion is that even the best and most conscientious scientists may make statements as known fact, that turn out later to be wrong. His encouraging conclusion is that this is very rare, and for almost all scientists almost all the time, their presentations are reliable. In addition, there are a number of clues that help indicate the reliability, or otherwise, of what you’re being told.
Big numbers in science communication
Our astronomer writes: In his book Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint Exupéry tells the story of a group of Bedouin from the Sahara brought to metropolitan France. This was in the days of the French colonies in North Africa, and the intent was to impress them with the greatness of the civilization of Europe (or at least its power) so they would stop fighting against it. On their return, they said Paris, iron bridges, locomotives, everything was “very big.” They’d learned that Frenchmen seemed to be satisfied by the phrase and used it to buy some peace. In fact they did not comprehend what their guides had tried to show them.
I find that, in explaining astronomy to the public (including students in introductory classes) there is a temptation to play to the “ooh and ahh factor,” to try to impress one’s audience with big numbers to show how different it is from normal experience. (Sometimes there is the unspoken subtext: “Look at me, how good I am to be able to work with huge numbers!”) But if we are not very careful we may, in the end, only leave the vague impression that astronomy is “very big.”