Posted by ibobev 5 hours ago
The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be.
Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically)
But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum.
Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime.
I thank scientists, but I do not envy them.
In any case it gives me ideas how to check the hypothesis. If the Reality has a limited horizon for planning for new laws, scientists can trick it into inventing new laws that eventually (after some more research and even more laws observed) would start contradicting to each other, and at that point the Reality would snap into a different set of rules.
If it is true, then the plan is like this: we need to wipe all the scientific knowledge from this world and start again, and trick the the Reality into devising better laws of nature. Ah, wait, we have no evidence that the Reality can abandon laws that were introduced already. Pity, the plan is brilliant, but how to check if the Reality can abandon its laws? If laws are local... we can do something like Stephenson described in his Anathem: establish maths doing independent research and comparing their results once in 1000 years.
There are several books from Greg Egan with this idea in mind: Permutation City and Distress. The latter one is exactly about this idea.
There isn't really an "us" in academia like there is in a private company, who all have a common goal: in academia the goal is to get there before another does and be on top.
PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.
Edit: oops, see the reply below... and my grumpy response. I seriously forgot about that entire plot point.
Edit: Though I agree that alien scientists of Tri-Solaris probably lead more depressing lives than their counterparts on earth
I don't know if this series is yet considered far enough in the past that we don't have to worry about spoiler warnings (I feel like the house rules about this apply differently to books than to movies), but I will just say that one of the most fascinating and mind-bending considerations in the book is the idea that some civilizations progress linearly and some progress exponentially, and how mind bending it is to have to plan ahead for exponential advances.
I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.
But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet's trajectory for the next thousand years without too many problems. (It would be academic, anyway - if you can build that kind of technology, why do you even need planets?)
And I also hated the sophons.
Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't think any of them were sad about it.
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
This makes it perhaps not a particularly good example of the phenomena being discussed, as he was suicidal not because of what he had discovered, but because no one believed what he had discovered.
Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mean that some evil boogeyman named Hegel lead a worldwide charge against physics. (I doubt Hegel even understood physics, lol. But you get my point.)
You mean that two physicists had a disagreement, one held institutional power, and ostracized the other.
Fine, but then why attack philosophy? Things are philosophy until they're not. Dogma happens in every field.
I thought that was sexism rather than philosophers? This was the same era and place that mostly ignored Bertha Benz.
(Or did you mean after moving to the USA?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands.
Scientists get hidebound just like the rest of us, at times.
But also the book doesn't suggest that scientists going missing was just a function of humanity's customary response to scientific progress. In the book, it's a very intentional sabotage campaign.
The specifics (proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging scientific experiments by altering the outcomes into incoherent results, the adverse reaction being suicide) aren't important here, because that's obviously the realm of fiction -- we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results[1]. We just need to acknowledge that adverse reactions to unexpected results do happen, so plausibly in a fictional story if you have very unexpected results then your scientists could have very adverse reactions as well.
[1] That we know of.
Indeed that is highly implausible. I daresay that anyone stating otherwise fundamentally lacks an understanding of the sort of people that are attracted to and work in the sciences. Paradigm shifts are a form of progress and progress is the raison d'etre.
Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend. Also that the examples given so far, in addition to being highly unusual, follow from social phenomena downstream of the new results rather than being a direct personal reaction to them.
That said, as noted by others that isn't what's going on in the book being discussed. So the plausibility of that plot point needs to be judged on its own merit as an entirely separate sort of thing.
We saw two examples, definitely unfortunate for what they were but well short of a built in civilization level reaction to scientific progress writ large. I don't think there's a single by and large way that people react to scientific revolutions, negative or otherwise. Feels like it depends on a combination of how it impacts most powerful stakeholders, things about culture, and things about the zeitgeist of a particular moment.
>we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results
Right, the specifics of the science fiction don't matter here. And plausibility counts for something though it's a dramatically lower threshold. And the person above who is appealing to scientific revolutions writ large seem to be attempting a general level inference to human reaction to scientific revolutions, which is a huge inference to make on the back of a pair of one-off examples.
Possibility counts for something, but I would say it only goes as far as explaining contingencies of particular circumstances and doesn't explain trends, and what happens within the fiction of the book is a trend, and it's explained by a sabotage campaign rather than by an appeal to the stresses of day-to-day science.
Active malice seems more likely to succeed, doesn't it?
They can gaslight people in their own heads, after all.
Was rejected and mocked by the medical community for his idea, developed a drinking problem and eventually committed to an asylum by his colleagues after having a nervous breakdown. While in the asylum he was beaten by the guards and died from a wound infection ... yikes!!
(The parent post also already mentions Einstein on quantum physics.)
That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
As someone who has looked for inconsistencies with the Standard Model for a while now, and seen every measurement land bang-on the prediction, I can say that I would love any deviation that said our existing theories are broken.
And sure, crank up the detector noise and we'd be sad, but ask any grad student: having your apparatus suddenly spit out garbage data is just an average day. I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.
I think in the context of the book, the specific means of sabotage was something close to impossible to figure out, so I can see the despair of checking every conceivable explanation, coming up empty, and making an inference about reality itself. And it wasn't a kind of peripheral, controllable amount of noise, it was a complete global sabotage of all particle physics, on a scale that amounted to a global catastrophe rather than just another blip in the daily grind.
I think one thing that really hooked me on the book series in the beginning was being able to appreciate the kind of cosmic despair one scientist was sharing during the pool table conversation, because thinking big about meaning and order in the universe, and how important the universes' intelligibility is to our relationship with it, informed by data, is a synthesis of things that really matter to me as a reader - taking the intersection of science and meaning seriously.
I don't think that would be enough for plausibly explaining particular scientists offing themselves, but the psychology of someone to whom that kind of question matters that much, which is very much the heart and soul of what drives my interest in non-fiction reading, seems tragically underrepresented as a driving motivation in fiction which I think is terribly unfortunate. But sci-fi sometimes cares about it, and sometimes a lot.
I want to read a spinoff of the Three-Body Problem with this premise.
if objects you put on a table started falling through the floor it would be a bit stressful
lol
but Dr. Becky gets really excited about all the various "crisis in cosmology" because she knows new science/knowledge will emerge from solving those questions
and you remind me there's another season coming up in that series, can't wait
"Is he still in the grandmother’s house? We would like to speak to him."
The lipstick putting can be exposed by simply asking if you would not prefer a version of the scientific method that is never wrong.
Then don't claim it as a strength!
It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.
Science writing for a general audience is really challenging.
If you're writing an article about a man going to the store to buy a sandwich, the man, the store, and the sandwich should all make appearances by the end of the first paragraph.
These people are writing informative articles like novels and it's incredibly irritating and a disservice if you're actually trying to inform anybody about anything. If you're writing an article about the g-2 anomaly, "g-2 anomaly" belongs in the title not 1/3 the way in.