Your novel, novella, short story or epic poem has everything:
Shouldn’t you also get the universe right?
Our astronomer begs to be allowed to explain what’s really interesting about KIC8462852.
Our chief consultant writes:
Some weeks ago I mentioned paradoxers, those people from outside a certain science who come up with some amazing or important result that, sadly, is not accepted by those inside–mostly because it’s not true. I promised to describe the outstanding characteristics of this fascinating species; here are two.
Our chief consultant writes:
We’ve all had it happen: some unexpected, unusual occurrence, and someone asks: “What were the odds against that happening?” As an exclamation, an alternative to the pedestrian, “That’s unusual,” this is fine. Language should have flexibility and the freedom of metaphor. This becomes a problem, however, when the unusual event is taken to imply unknown laws of physics or perhaps sinister forces at work.
Actually working out probabilities in any but the simplest cases can be pretty tedious, and we’re not about to get into that here. But it’s easy to make basic mistakes in setting up this kind of question (respected scientists have done so); we present two rules to help keep you out of trouble, even if you’re not going to punch any numbers into your computer.
Our chief consultant writes:
We come to the hardest problem to set a layman: suppose there are two (or more) experts, that is, people who disagree strongly about some scientific or technical question, each of which has some claim to expertise. Call this “dueling PhDs.” You, as a layman, are called upon to decide between them. What do you do?
We assume that the matter is advanced or esoteric enough that there’s no question of you actually checking the math yourself. Also, that it’s not a matter of current research, where the answer really isn’t known. (That excludes, for instance, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose disagreeing about the Nature of Space and Time.)
You could try to evaluate the credentials of either side, working out whose PhD is stronger; or take of vote of scientists working on the matter; or, perhaps, decide on the basis of motivation, asking who is funded by whom. Slightly more useful is analyzing the rhetoric, on the assumption that someone with a poor scientific case is more likely to try to cover it with noise. All of these techniques leave us uneasy, and though we have some suggestions on how to use them we prefer a harder, more time-consuming method as a more reliable way of getting at something like the truth.
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.
Our chief consultant writes: an occupational hazard of working in a Physics or Astronomy Department, or at an Observatory, is the occasional receipt of an unsolicited paper from someone outside these sciences. One of these typically presents a new theory, more or less sweeping in its results, that corrects (perceived) errors now being made by scientists.
Physicists and astronomers generally spend little time on them. It is highly unlikely that someone with a minimal or mistaken grasp of the sciences (as these invariably display) will stumble upon something useful that many very capable scientists have missed. It also requires a lot of time and concentration to get through an often torturous piece of writing. (It is a good exercise for teachers, however, in distinguishing poor presentation from genuine error. Sometimes they’re passed on to graduate students to hone their thinking.) In the nineteenth century the authors of this kind of thing were squaring the circle and disproving Newton. Augustus de Morgan made a study of them, calling them “paradoxers” (using the word “paradox” in a different sense than we do today), and Five Colors S&T has adopted this term. (It’s worthwhile dipping into de Morgan’s A Budget of Paradoxes if you can find a copy. The writing is dense, but often entertaining.)