Sunday, June 9, 2013

How Much Do We Know?


I've finished the first round of editorial revisions to Catherine of Lyonesse, so I'm back to these haunts again after a somewhat excessive absence.

The question in the title has come up here before, though my Google fu falls short of finding all relevant links, but it at least appears in the comment thread to this post from a couple of years ago.

It was brought to mind by an email from a friend (actually, my brother-in-law, who reads cosmology and theology for pleasure), with the following quote, from theologian Karl Rahner:
"...what is called knowledge in everyday parlance, is only a small island in a vast sea that has not been traveled... Hence the existential question for the knower is this: Which does he love more, the small island of his so-called knowledge or the sea of infinite mystery?"
Vast untraveled seas should be near and dear to the hearts of most readers here. For, whatever formal arguments we make, isn't this the core motivation for interest in space travel?

So ... how much do we know? Obviously we know almost nothing about the details of the Universe. The Kepler mission has not yet found an Earth equivalent (in size, mass, and relative orbital distance from its primary). It has found several near-misses, and those are out of a very limited survey. Even with instantaneous anywhere-to-anywhere travel, however, an exhaustive search for earthlike worlds would be ... exhausting.

The more immediate question is how much we know in broad outline, or to put it another way, how much do we know at the level of basic physics. Do we know a lot? Or only a tiny part of what there is to be known, even on a general level?


As often happens here, there are cogent arguments to be made in both directions. As also often happens here, the arguments for each position are not simply contrary, but more nearly orthogonal to one another. The arguments differ on a meta level.

Thomas S. Kuhn, author of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has much to answer for when it comes to political and bizz-speak cliches: He launched the word paradigm on its course of infamy. But his core insight was that major developments in the sciences do not just extend our understanding: They transform it.

This insight suggests in turn that just as Einstein supplanted Newton, who supplanted Aristotle, so the next physics revolution should supplant Einstein. Familiar realms will still be well approximated by the older physics. (When your car runs out of gas, its behavior is Aristotelian, not Newtonian.) But entirely new realms will be opened.

The strongest contrary argument (that I am aware of) does not try to refute this point, but instead seeks to render it nugatory. Why should we expect 'the next physics revolution'? Until nearly Einstein's day, fundamental physics was essentially a hobby; since his day it has been an industry.

Once lots of smart people put enormous effort into something, chances are they will figure it out pretty well. The Age of Exploration relentlessly stripped the map of its Here be Dragons blank spaces. The Lost Civilization subgenre of Romance, contemporary with the dawn of SF, was its last gasp.

Parallel reason suggests that if a century of industrial-scale physics research has not superseded Einstein, perhaps the reason is that Einstein essentially got it right. Which is a something of a bummer for FTL (even if FTL is not absolutely precluded), and a bummer on a broader philosophical level as well.

On the third hand ... so far as I can tell, there is a good, robust reason to think that Einstein did not essentially get it right. Proviso that I am going way beyond my physics pay grade here, but I am given to understand that General Relativity and quantum theory are mutually contradictory. On a fundamental level, that is, they cannot both be right.

Indeed, more than that, they must both be wrong - because if either one were valid, we could either dispense with the other or else reconcile them.

God, as Einstein supposedly said, does not play dice with the Universe. To which one famous response is supposed to be, Not only does He play dice, but He throws them where we can't see them. (Another response, attributed to Neils Bohr, was "Stop telling God what to do.")

In short, our fundamental physics is a cobble. It is a magnificent cobble, but still a cobble, a world-view or Universe-view constructed out of contradictory and necessarily flawed theories.


I find this quite refreshing, because on some conceptual level it restores the blank space to our maps. Superseding the muddle of General Relativity and quantum theory may be exceedingly difficult - almost certainly is, since a lot of bright people have been trying to do so for three generations, so far without success. But our physics is still a muddle.

To be sure, this does not necessarily mean that any 'next physics revolution' is awaiting us, even in principle. Theists, at least, can fall back on what the Evil Website calls Bellisario's Maxim: Don't examine this too closely. Though I am not sure how comfortable orthodox believers in the Abrahamic faiths would be with a God who, like mortal SF writers, handwaves His way past contradictions in world building.

Anyway, that would make the Universe even more mysterious.

Discuss:




Whether or not the Universe is ultimately mysterious - or even whether or not we already have learned much about its basic workings, it is is certainly full of Cool Stuff. The image comes from Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD).

184 comments:

Anonymous said...

Proviso that I am going way beyond my physics pay grade here, but I am given to understand that General Relativity and quantum theory are mutually contradictory. On a fundamental level, that is, they cannot both be right.

That is correct. The mathematics are incompatible, yet they describe the same universe. The funny thing is that both theories are extremely accurate and seem to be correct. That shows us that we are close to the truth, but we will need a new theory that combines elements of both.

As science pushes the limits of quantum mechanics and General Relativity we will eventually find new physics. Once they have a hint, physicists will be able to work on a new theory.

If we're lucky, anti-gravity and FTL will be in there. Personally, I'm looking forward to our space opera galactic empire.

Ron

Thom S said...

I don't know anything about physics, but...

On my end, our understanding of how little we know is pretty massive - everything in biology now looks to be much, much harder to unravel than expected due to the levels of interaction involved (DNA codes RNA codes proteins, all of which talk to each other to some extent). It actually makes a fun game (if you're into shadenfreude) to read some of the older and newer literature and watch the levels of optimism go down.

That said, we're well on the way to getting the reductionist part of the whole exercise right: lots of gene pathways and interactions have now been elucidated. We just can't synthesize it yet.

A rough analog might be in the field of AI, where early hopes (how hard could it be to get a robot to navigate a cluttered room?) were dashed by the realization of just how much we take for granted (and thus discount) when it comes to cognition.

jollyreaper said...

Traxk

Eth said...

There is probably no need for God to apply the Bellisario's Maxim. Maybe we are simply assuming that the Universe really is coherent with itself. After all, it is not because the Universe seems to follow our basic axioms of logic, as far as we can see, that it really does.

I wouldn't bet on it but it would be really funny, in a Lovecraftian sort of way, if it wasn't the case. And it would open so many possibilities...

Tony said...

Its not precisely true that general relativity and quantum mechanics are mutually contradictory. They just aplly at different scales of observation and measurement. General relativity applies in the domain of very large scales in both distance and time. Quantum mechanics applies in the domain of very small scales. The hard part is reconciling those two manifestly correct theories in way consistent over all domains. It may be that we just won't ever be able to generate the experimental conditions to figure out which one of many candidate theories is correct.

But here's the kicker -- even if we do, it may not lead to desired applications, like anti-gravity or FTL. It may just lead to more complete knowledge.

Damien Sullivan said...

AIUI, the universes described by QM (or Quantum Field Theory) and GR are in fact contradictory. Contradictory axioms, as it were. Quantized everything vs. continuous spacetime. Also, time and information: http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-howwhy-are-quantum-mechanics-and-relativity-incompatible/

But both theories are highly accurate in their domains and those domains don't overlap in any experiment or observation we can pull off. Which makes me think of modern theoretical physicists as like ancient philosophers or medieval scholastics, trying to solve an empirical problem with a priori reasoning.

QFT works really well and I think most physicists would bet Ultimate Theory will still be quantized; OTOH, renormalization math is kind of a hack. A successful hack, but one that may imply we're missing something.

And then there's dark matter and "dark energy". QFT explains the behavior of 4% of the universe, GR explains the gravity of that plus another 21% or so, and then there's mystery.

Also why there's more matter than antimatter. And possible multiverse stuff. So, lots of mystery really, outside the firelight of the stuff we see a lot and understand well. Kind of like chemistry one day before finding radioactivity. "We're good at chemistry but can't explain why the Sun is still burning or why atoms work."

Thucydides said...

One other example of how we really don't "know" stuff lies in the Standard Model of particle physics.

Although this is probably the most successful model of physics ever developed, it is full of mysterious "constants" and generations of particles with no real reasons as to why they are there. Why should the fundimental particles that define matter and energy come in such a profusion of types, spins, charges and even "colours"?

So we have some pretty impressive tools to understand certain aspects of nature (Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and the Standard Model), but don't have a deeper understanding of how or why they happen to work, nor ways to pull them together in a unified model.

Perhaps there is no way to do so, and ultimatley all science is descriptive science like the current forms of economics and various social sciences (which can explain "what" happened but are of little use generating predictions of future events). Or maybe we are still just lookig at things the wrong way? (Whoever can figure out the "right way" of looking at things will supercede Einstein much the way he superceded Newton).

Anonymous said...

It took around 50,000 years for Humans to realize that we don't even know what 78% of the universe is made out of. I think we have a very long ways to go before we close in on "The Theory of Everything".

Ferrell

Cordwainer said...

What always surprises me are the simple things we don't know in science. "The Why the Sky Is Blue Questions" that are so mundane no one has bothered to research them. Or the weird and eclectic questions, like why some people sneeze when exposed to bright light. Also, those odd phenomena that pop up from time to time like how microwaves can make water "burn", or thermopower waves.

Another thing that tends to be a pet peeve of mine is how many mathematical "constants" (value of i, value of s in electrodynamics) are just accepted as constants without a known reason as to why they are a constant. Or why many theories have gained acceptance even though the math is "flawed" in may ways. Maxwell's math was full of mistakes and Einstein cribbed most of his original mistakes in his Relativity Theory from Maxwell. It was only after "real world" application tested his theories that he had to go back and make corrections. People are still adding to Relativity and Quantuum mechanics to this day. Of course mathematicians are only human to, and the universe is a big place but I find it strange how often engineers and scientists who should know better will accept a mathematical formula or constant they know is not entirely precise for the simple fact that it is "good enough" to get the job done. I mean we are living in an information age it is not that difficult to be precise, it's what we have computer assisted design for. But, how many CAD programs have truly precise mathematical formulae programmed into their software tools suite? I'm not an expert on such matters maybe Tony or Thucydides could elaborate on this.

Tony said...

Comparing modern science to medievalism or, worse archaism, is gratuitous hyperbole. We're very much in the business of filling in shadowy corners right now. Yes, even dark energy and dark matter are minor details compared to what we already know about matter and energy. To put it another way, we know the rules of procedure to ridiculous levels of precision, we just don't know what the reasons behind them are. Knowing the reaons will be illuminating, but it won't change the rules.

Anonymous said...

Yes, even dark energy and dark matter are minor details compared to what we already know about matter and energy.

What an arrogant statement. How do you know what we don't know? No one does.

Sure our knowledge of science and technology is the greatest in human history, but that doesn't mean we figured it all out.

Victorian scientists thought they knew everything, until experiments proved them wrong. From the wreckage of the aether came quantum mechanics and relativity.

Ron

Tony said...

Cord:

A few things...

1. The mathematical constants are derived, not observed. When you take calculus, they teach you why pi has the value it does, and e, etc.

Where we have to take things as read are many of the physical constants. We take their values from observation of the physical universe around us. A scientist or engineer can investigate the history of observation and analysis if he wants to, but that doesn't help him do his job. He just trusts the values given in the Rubber Book*.

*CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics -- called the "Rubber Book" because it was originally published by the Chemical Rubber Company. When I was going to school, every engineering, chemistry, or physics bookshelf had one.

2. Modern computers actually aren't mathematically precise in Base 10 without a lot of help and inefficiency. This has to do with fundamental limitations built into binary mathematics. It turns out, for example, that binary representations of fractions are imprecise for any fraction with a prime factor in the denominator. That means you can't precisely store such common numbers as .85 or .2. There are two ways around this in practical terms. You either accept some level of imprecision at very small scales (like in the 5th or 6th decimal place) or you represent numbers as scaled* integers, and insert the decimal point for readability purposes only. But that takes extra memory and procesing cycles, because a precise decimal number has to be saved not only as a very large integer, but you also have to store, in the same piece of data, the scale.**

*i.e. whole thousandths, 10 millionths, whatever.

**In the Apollo guidance software they dispensed with the scale value in precision decimals, for memory space reasons. But they did it at the cost of writing software with presumed scales for every value. That's incredibly hairy where life safety is concerned, because the programmer has to make quadruple sure of the scale of every number he feeds into a procedure, and the scale of every number he gets out.

3. Computers are mathematically imprecise, part deux. It also turns out that computers don't do continuous math, as in classical calculus. Things like area under the curve (that we can calculate precisely with calculus on the back of an envelope) computers just can't achieve by digital calculation.* There's a whole field of math -- called discrete math -- that deals with imperfectly simulating integrations and other methods to some acceptable degree of precision. The tradeoff, in general, is how much time you want to take to find an anwer vs how precise the answer has to be to have any utility.

*One can -- and many math packages do this -- preprogram many of the most common derivatives and integrals as algebraic functions. But what I'm talking about is calculating the resultant value of some arbitrary function, common or otherwise.

Tony said...

Ron:

"What an arrogant statement. How do you know what we don't know? No one does."

Let me put it this way, and I'm sure it will sound a lot less arrogant. Throughout history, scientific knowledge has implied practical application. Even fundamental astronomical knowledge has utility in celetial navigation. But, sinc the trun of the 20th Century, we've been accumulating a lot of knowledge that has no practical application. Knowing how a black whole does what it does has no practical application in any foreseeable human lifetime. Neither will knowing stuff about galactic or large scale structure. At the other end of the scale, being able to mathematically theorize about Planck scale events -- or to even realize that they may exist -- has no practical application that I know of. Even the speculative ones -- like isolating a wormhole and promoting it a useable size for communication -- would require so much energy that it's not likely to ever be practical, even on an experimental basis.

The long and the short of it is that knowing what dark matter and energy are is not likely to have any practical application whatsoever. IOW, it may be accurate data, but that doesn't make it useful information.

Thom S said...

I'm kind of with Tony on this one, at least in as far as knowing that there are things we do not know does not invalidate what we do.

Any new theory must explain/give results for predictions made by its predecessor, so things like relativity and quantum physics aren't just going to vanish in a puff of smoke even if some new theory comes along.

As to usefulness, part of the 'problem' of current physics (as explained by Lee Smolin) is the fact that a lot of new theories simply cannot be tested using the technologies we currently possess. Theory, it turns out, follows data.

And without a means of testing these phenomena, how could we ever hope to harness them for something useful?

Also, captcha is feeling Cthulu-esque today: "Yourtyll appears"

Locki said...

I once struggled through a Brief History of Time and watched a BBC Horizon's TV show on black holes .... my head still hurts at the memory of it. I'm mostly writing this to get on the email followup so if one of the physics hotshots (Tony, Byron et al) want to correct me post haste there'll be no hard feelings.

But if memory serves me correctly Black Holes is the one notorious area where the laws of physics as we know them break down and prove to be useless.

Its a singularity so the physics are Einsteinian.

But because the scale is very, very small you need Quantum Mechanics.

When you use both theories equations to resolve what happens at the Black Hole you arrive at an equation that fills up several blackboards but the denominator is a great big honkin' "zero".

eg mathamatical nonsense. It drives the physicists bananas.

I follow physics about as closely as possible for someone with maths that doesn't go past 1st year uni level. eg I like it explained in words. Even so my gut feeling is Tony is correct. There's quite a bit we don't know but there are very, very few (to quote the great Rumsfield) unknown unknowns.

Physics is good enough to mostly have known unknowns.

Which means anti-grav and FTL look like non-starters IMO.

Eth said...

It seems that the Universe doesn't like singularities, though. So many physicists apparently wouldn't be surprised if there was somehow no singularity in a black hole.
For example, it's possible that things don't actually enter the black hole : as they slow down as they approach the event horizon, they slow down (or the Universe accelerates, depending on the observer) so much that, assuming that they would somehow survive tidal forces, an Universe's lifetime of radiations in the face and nasty stuff like that, they would actually ride the event horizon as it shrinks while the black hole evaporates. Note that this is just an example, not an actual solution to the singularity problem.

Tony:
" To put it another way, we know the rules of procedure to ridiculous levels of precision, we just don't know what the reasons behind them are. Knowing the reaons will be illuminating, but it won't change the rules."

Knowing the (primal) reasons is actually not Science's job. Science, by definition, works with axioms. We are choosing those axioms so things correspond to what we see (and we changed some over time), but it can simply not answer things like "why is there something?" or other "existential" questions.
And it works both ways, knowing those primal causes would indeed not change the rules.
That said, it can still go further up in the causes of what we see, then the causes of those causes and so forth. It's simply that there can not be an end to it.

Brett said...

To third what's been said before, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics do "work", in the sense that Newtonian Mechanics continue to work at the macro scale in terms of explaining much of the universe. The areas we don't understand, where they either overlap or get integrated into some even greater theory that explains everything, seem to be further and further away into more "extreme" conditions - as in the kind of conditions that rely on hugely expensive or even impossible machines to even get direct empirical proof.

It does us no good if the only way we can ever prove a theory is by somehow building a particle accelerator the size of the solar system.

@Thom S
On my end, our understanding of how little we know is pretty massive - everything in biology now looks to be much, much harder to unravel than expected due to the levels of interaction involved (DNA codes RNA codes proteins, all of which talk to each other to some extent). It actually makes a fun game (if you're into shadenfreude) to read some of the older and newer literature and watch the levels of optimism go down.

Too true. I just recently re-read Jurassic Park. Can you imagine that type of optimism about genetic engineering now? I can't. It's a struggle just to create plants with improved characteristics using genetic engineering, never mind full designer animals like dinosaurs.

As to usefulness, part of the 'problem' of current physics (as explained by Lee Smolin) is the fact that a lot of new theories simply cannot be tested using the technologies we currently possess. Theory, it turns out, follows data.

He's talking about string theory, right? It's the epitome of mathematically elegant theories with no predictions that we can empirically test with any kinds of machinery we know of.

Anonymous said...

Well, nothing that has been said so far has done anything to make me reconsidermy earlier statement. We simply don't know how many 'whys' or 'hows' are left to discover; some of us believe that the end of knowledge is close at hand, while others of us feel that we have a very long way to go before we even get close to that ultimate limit on information. I personally think that this question won't be answered in any of our lifetimes.

Ferrell

Cordwainer said...

I tend to agree with Eth their are a number of competing as well as complementary theories in physics which would suggest that black holes/singularities don't exist. Of course itwould require us the technology to sense Hawking radiation to prove definitively whether what we see as singularities are just really super-massive neutron stars. Even so we can expect that time-space might be curved around such a monstrosity so the effects on time and space would be similar in many ways.

Cordwainer said...

Also their at least seems to be some fractal theory along with certain cold-spot anomalies of 360 degree space imaging that suggests that the Universe is not entirely coherent, it just appears to be from very far away or for the most part in practical terms. What has really not been dealt with conclusively is whether the mathematical constants regarding certain forces in the early Universe were the same as they are now, such as the electroweak force. While the data looks less and less in favor of a variable constant over time, I have yet to see definitive proof for or against.

Cordwainer said...

Another thing that needs a lot of work is quantuum mechanics itself. I believe as has been stated before you would have to build huge colliders or highly sensitive sensors to determine certain things regarding brane theory or M-theory, the reactions of the Higgs boson which is only now been detected(although not with certainty) and quantum tunneling phenomena.

Anonymous said...

He's talking about string theory, right? It's the epitome of mathematically elegant theories with no predictions that we can empirically test with any kinds of machinery we know of.

The professors I learned physics from would tell you that string theory is a philosophy and not science. Since there is still no way to test it I agree.

The higher dimensional math is an elegant extrapolation of current science. However, science is built up by experiment. You don't start at the top and try to figure out which case applies to the real universe.

You don't necessarily need particle accelerators the size of the solar system to test theories. The universe does it for you. Astronomy is very important to particle physics and testing relativity by observing the most energetic events in space. For example, soon a network of radio telescopes will be able to resolve the black hole at the center of our galaxy. It will be able to see the accretion disc. Only a few pixels, but enough for astrophysicists to see if it matches the predictions of general relativity.

Ron

Mukk said...

We're definitely at least one theory from being right. If you want to take the idea that physics is mined out, you cannot say that there is nothing left to know. You would have to adopt the idea that there is nothing left we can know. The information is unavailable to us or we just aren't smart enough and will never be. I don't buy that. Just recently we've finally been able to get our particle colliders strong enough that we can examine certain theories. Our rate of progress is frustrating, but it has not yet stopped.

We still face a great unknown. From a writing perspective it does place an interesting set of constraints on how one would approach the next big breakthrough. Chaos Theory required computers before it came about. Without computers people couldn't 'see' the models to figure out what was going on. Accurately catching the feel of this would involve showing how incremental advantages lead across one to the next until they come together into something big. Relativity traces its lineage back into improvements in optics that let people measure the speed of light, finding that it was constant.

Of course writing science fiction about future science discoveries isn't really the point. We handwave that stuff away and hope people don't examine it too closely. And nothing would date a work more quickly than making up scientific advances that are proven wrong when the next real ones roll out. The closest you get to science fiction of that sort tend to be futurists, although "20 Minutes into the Future" is a TV Tropes setting.

jollyreaper said...

I'm about with you on that one, Ferrell. I think there's a lot of room out there for further discovery, we won't get through the bulk of it in several lifetimes, and there's room for surprises. But I think the surprises will also thwart what we think we want or need.

The comparison I fall back on is ask a bronze age king what he would ask for as the ultimate weapon, explaining what is possible with material sciences alone, he'll ask for a razor blade, maybe figure out how to ask for a compound bow. Firearms wouldn't even be within his idiom. Doubtless he would learn their utility if we showed him but without prompting him...

The most interesting things about retro-futurism over the past centuries are seeing what the best minds got right and what they got wrong.

Jack said...

My neighbour's dog also gives a convincing impression of understanding how the important stuff in the universe works: meals, walks, car rides, baths, cats, passing cars, mail men, screen doors, etc. How can we be confidant humans are smart enough to have a clue?

Jim Baerg said...

Since others mentioned the issue of reconciling quantum mechanics & general relativity, and also the difficulty of having singularities in GR, I thought I would point you to this:
http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw100.html

Thom S said...

Jollyreaper,

I don't know about that - greek fire was well known in ancient times and I can totally see some king asking the royal alchemist to come up with an improved version. One thing leads to another and suddenly that improved projector that the royal engineer was working on is rendered moot by the fuel projecting itself - and anything else in the tube.

As in the analogy: you may not get entirely what you expect, but this doesn't mean that you are completely ignorant of the possibilities.

jollyreaper said...

@Thom

Doubtless, some will be forward-thinking but I think that the shortsightedness of rulers can be taken as frequent.

On one hand, Napoleon's seems foolish. "You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? Excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense." But when did he say that? I think it was another 50 or 60 years before powered warships became common. No matter what the future potential for steaming warships, sail was probably superior for the plausible mid-future.

Come to think of it, this was all covered in the article with the round warship, right?

Damien Sullivan said...

"greek fire was well known in ancient times"

Greek fire proper is dated to around 670 CE, though the use of fire in warfare is much older, and the historian Thucydides apparently mentions tubed flamethrowers in 424 BC.

Thucydides said...

Observation and accurate measurement drove science for centuries (being able to accurately time falling objects laid Aristotle to rest, and being able to accurately measure the changing orbit of Mercury provided one of the clues that Newton wasn't the last word in physics).

We do seem to have reached practical limits in this regard; there are very few unknowns being revealed by measurement or observation of phenomena, at least in the ordinary way of thinking about these things.

If you want a prediction, the next area where measurement and observation can create new insights lies in variations of complexity and chaos theory; measuring and observing the interaction between things rather than the things themselves.

Tony said...

This seems to be appropos time for telling a little anecdote about modern science that illustrates the reason for my opinion about the future of science.

I have a close personal associate who has been working on his PhD in particle physics for 15 years now. What's the problem you ask? Well...the objective was to refine the precision of the "knee" in cosmic ray spectrum. So they collected data and did their analysis. At the level of precision the project was looking at, the data was essentially random, no matter what statistical tools they assaulted it with.

Okay, one might say, it's fifteen years later, get a grant and rerun the experiment with better instruments. But you can't get money for a new run of this experiment, because the cosmic ray detector just haven't improved that much. The first run collected the bet data set available with any technology.

See, science has, for several decades now, in many fields -- particularly physics -- been concerned with refining knowledge, not discovering it. And we're quickly running into a lot of walls that we can't bust through by improving technology or methodology.

Anonymous said...

I've always been taught that basic research is used to gather data that is later studied for patterns, combined with other data to point to other avenues of research, and to provide clues to expand our knowledge of areas we already have some undestanding of. Ultamately, that research leads to advances and even entirely new fields of knowledge. It's like exporing a cave; you never know if the next turn will lead to a contiuation of the journey, a dead-end, an unexpected treasure, or new paths to explore. Even after thousands of generations, we have just begun this exploration of the universe's store of information. I know that some of you will reject this view of what we do and don't know, and where we stand as to where we are in our journey of discovery of the 'secrets of the universe', but I'll stick with my view of us humans being still fairly close to the begining of this journey, rather than close to the end.

Ferrell

Cordwainer said...

Well I tend to agree with you Tony on some things and on others not so much, which is about usual with our relationship on this blog. While I agree we are running into a brick wall when it comes to the technology to further investigate our universe in a number of areas in other areas we are expanding our knowledge everyday. Also we are getting better at cross-disciplinary exchanges between different scientific disciplines which helps to support and inform our data sets even better. As to the impreciseness of computers I realize not everyone gets time on a supercomputer or that binary is not the best way to express ratios and some fractions. That being said numerous programming workarounds have been developed and some people still use slide rules as back ups. Also once a computer is programmed that programming is constant unless tampered with, so once your expert team of mathematicians determines something to certain level of precision it should remain that way. Problem is that you often have engineering and science teams who will use an inaccurate method of measurement or initial "back of the envelope" calculations and then compound that error by using numerous different computational formats to make a more precise approximation, which in turn means space probes crashing into the Moon or Mars or a geosychronous satellite ending up pointed the wrong way.

As to whether it really matters all that much if we understand the why as long as we know the how, and whether knowing more of the why really changes or improves our ability to utilize the physical phenomena of how I'm kind of on the fence.
I agree that such improved understanding normally only results in minor incremental improvements that doesn't mean that such improvements might not carry on to greater improvements. Two possible results could come of an improved understanding of the Universe. One many incremental improvements when added together over time can create phenomenal changes. Take developments in physics that resulted in the development of electronics and nuclear technology, for instance. Also, as stated before an improved understanding could bring about a sea change in technological advances like the changes between Newtonian to Maxwellian to Einsteinian physics that resulted in numerous advances in many different fields. One area study like stochastic dynamics theory could have a profound effect on science and engineering if even a shred of that theories findings prove to be verifiable or workable into other theories.

Anonymous said...

Tony: And we're quickly running into a lot of walls that we can't bust through by improving technology or methodology.

Ferrell: I know that some of you will reject this view of what we do and don't know, and where we stand as to where we are in our journey of discovery of the 'secrets of the universe', but I'll stick with my view of us humans being still fairly close to the begining of this journey, rather than close to the end.

In a way I think both of you are correct. There is still a lot to learn about the secrets of the universe, but in the past 400 years we have already picked all the low hanging fruit.

Ron

Cordwainer said...

There is also the point to be made for better calibration and fine tuning of experiments in the realm of plasma dynamics and near-planck scale studies. These could result in numerous improvements in dual-layer plasmas, pulse detonation, gigantomagnetism,pseudo-monopole like events, proteomics, adhesives, spin electronics, molecular biology, nano-technology etc.

One should also mention there are still unplumbed depths to history and the social sciences that could enlighten us today.

Geoffrey S H said...

"One should also mention there are still unplumbed depths to history and the social sciences that could enlighten us today."

17th century media, transnational activities in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Parliamentary support for Archbishop's religious reforms....
And that's the small amount of stuff I myself am looking at. The amount of stuff in history to be newly examined or re-examined is phenomenal.

Noclevername said...

Tony said: "The long and the short of it is that knowing what dark matter and energy are is not likely to have any practical application whatsoever."

The truth is we can't know in advance what discoveries will lead to useful applications and what won't.

Did the makers of the cardboard box predict that the Wright Brothers would someday base their aircraft steering method on seeing a blueprint box deform? Did the Samoans who invented the compression firelighter realize that they'd inspire a German to create the internal combustion piston?

It may be that something we've already observed or will observe will someday lead to a revolution in our understanding of how things work, and/or enable us to do things we coundn't before.

Grognak said...

Regarding Napoleon and Fulton... it's hard to say if "The Emperor"(TM) was right, but all considered I tend to agree with his decision.

Very soon after 1815 several navies started building steam warships (actually I think the first US Navy steam warship entered service in 1815), but as far as I know the first naval combat involving steam powered ships happened as late as 1861, 45 years later. That has to mean something.

I would say from 1815 to 1860 most admirals, etc, believed steam power was the future, but they could clearly see their experimental but increasingly useful steam warships still weren't ready for the spotlight (perhaps a bit like fusion power or electric cars!)

Besides, during the Napoleonic Wars ships were still 100% highly flammable canvas, ropes and wood. Starting any fire was strictly forbidden aboard (that was the reason chewing tobacco was popular) but even so each year several war ships were lost to accidental fires. And probably it is no coincidence steam replaced sails almost at the same rhythm steel replaced wood.

jollyreaper said...

Also worth a repaste of the Arthur C. Clarke story, "Superiority."

http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html

"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."
George S. Patton

Rephrased, "a proven weapons system today is better than a wonder-weapon that will render it obsolete next year." Assuming the fight is today. Invest heavily in pre-dreadnoughts for the war you know is coming in the next decade and get slaughtered when the war actually happens in twenty years.

Alas, reminds me of playing Civ. Damn barbarian submarines sinking my triremes.

Rick said...

Welcome to some new commenters!


As usual, there is not a whole lot original for me to add. But a few points made that strike me as noteworthy:

* Even if a new physics revolution supersedes GR plus quantum mechanics, there is no guarantee that it will enable Cool Stuff such as FTL. On the other hand, for story purposes, nothing rules this out ...

* The low-hanging fruit has indeed (probably) been picked. With the proviso that a new physics could (possibly) provide new capabilities.

Newton, I think, would have been untroubled by a nuclear reactor - he could understand how the steam engine part works, and would have had no reason to be surprised that enormous amounts of heat could be released from a lump of uranium.

OTOH, late 19th century physicists/chemists knew enough about the energy available from chemical reactions that they'd have been surprised as hell that the lump of uranium could release roughly a million times the heat available from a burning a similar amount of hydrogen and oxygen.

(I seem to recall that there was a real issue at that time, when the geological time scale vastly exceeded any mechanism that could keep the sun shining for that long.)

* Most fundamentally, are there 'unknown unknowns', and are they useful ones? We don't know!

Brett said...

The need for coal re-fueling was probably a limiter on steam ships, at first. It's no accident that full-on ocean-going steamships were preceded by "steam clippers" that used both sails and steam engines to move under way.

Cordwainer said...

As to the unknown "unknowns" I would bring up the fact that a better plan that is well executed is of greater import than a good plan violently executed. Patton's statement is old school Clausewitzian doctrine. Something which still has use today in the idea that if you are outthought you must be prepared not to be outfought. That being said modern militaries see the political, force multiplying and staying power of modern information technologies, command and control, logistics and indigenous or civilian engagement as part of an integrated strategy. Modern militaries are moving to a more Sun Tzu or Oriental school of strategy due to changes in politics, technology and the increasing use of assymetric and unconventional warfare. The best battle is the battle you never have to fight.

As I have said before small incremental improvements in our understanding of both ourselves and the universe(including it's physical laws) could reap surprising benefits. The hanging fruit may be lower than we think.

Byron said...

I'm going to side with Tony here. At the moment, engineering and science have largely separated, with the possible exception of the biosciences. We have the theoretical tools to describe things like fusion reactors, and even calculate how they would work, but we can't actually build them and get power out. Very little of what I'm studying in aerospace engineering has originated in the basic sciences after about 1950 or 1960. The improvements are either from materials or from the use of computers, not from new principles. Actually, most mechanical fields have been independent of physics since about 1900.
In many ways, this separation begat the field of science fiction as opposed to pure fantasy. We can somewhat predict where the future might go, as engineering moves forward to catch up with science.
WRT the theory of everything changing things, I find that doubtful. Getting onto the scales where it can be found to be distinct from the current theories is incredibly difficult, and that means that any use of it is also difficult. I'm not ruling out surprises, but I'd bet against them.

Byron said...

Bookmarking.

jollyreaper said...

Well, an immediate plan that resolves an immediate problem while creating a much larger long term problem isn't a very good plan.

But that's the kicker, isn't it? At the time, you can't tell if it's a bad idea that looks good or a good idea you can only see the bad in. That's the stuff of good drama.

That's actually a pretty good lesson for everything. Military guys can tend to look at the situation as an academic problem and not consider the larger context. The Schlieffen Plan. This is how you invade France properly! Great. But why are we invading France? That is a question for the politicians and philosophers. Ah, wrong.

Anyway, history tends to praise and condemn based on the outcome, not the avialable facts. The general who makes a terribly risky gamble and wins is a genius, the admiral who husbands his resources and preserves a fleet in being but misses presumed opportunities is criticized. Prudence and cowardice can appear the same to one gifted with the knowledge of hindsight.

Cordwainer said...

While I agree the principles of physical laws has created a gap between what we ca engineer and what scientists can dream up, that doesn't mean small seemingly insignificant changes could have surprising outcomes. For instance if some one figures out how to produce, shape, and manufacture cheap carbon-carbon structural materials and then develops methods for their use at the nano-scale then one could see some vast improvements in engineering that would allow one to make things very similar to what we see in hard SF these days. Similarly a better understanding of human cognition and the brain's design could lead to revolutionary developments in AI. Sorry if it bugs you jollyreaper but I tend to be a glass is half full sort of guy. After all a lot of great science and engineering has come out of someone not believing what the naysayers said and building their experiment or invention anyways.

Cordwainer said...

And, yes their our a lot of hurdles and what if's to creating new structural materials and finding new ways to apply them, but whoever said progress was always rapid. After all scientific progress has only experienced rapid spurts of progress in the last 500 years or so, before that progress was ploddingly slow. So will we have that pulp science fiction setting we all long for? Yes, but it will probably won't be in our lifetimes or even our grandkid's lifetimes.

Thucydides said...

Cord, you might be surprised to discover that Clausewitz is actually considered a very "modern" thinker; integrating the civil, political and military dimensions in his discussion of warfare.

Many soldiers from the past (British colonial troops, Americans fighting the Moro rebellion or the "Banana Wars") also knew and applied this first hand. It seems we are the ones who have attempted to simplify our understanding of warfare by neglecting to fully see and integrate the civil and political dimensions of warfare into our thinking.

Geoffrey S H said...

Before scientist,s, there were "natural philosophers". We hhad scientific study, but it was mixed up with other disciplines like alchemy and philosophy and theology. Might it be possible that there is another discipline waiting to be discovered, but currently a part of science due to us not knowing it exists (or not deliberately classifying it separately)? Perhaps what we see as stagnation in various periods of our history is due to us picking all the low hanging fruit in a discipline and not being able to move on to the next.

Put more simply, is there possibly something "more" than science lurking out that we can't see yet?

Noclevername said...

Geoffrey, strictly speaking, science is a method of analyzing data for accuracy.

Don't confuse science, as an activity, with the body of knowledge acquired by science, which changes and updates constantly ss new data is acquired. So any new discoveries that are made will be able to provide data that we can apply science to.

Anonymous said...

I've been giving a lot of thought to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Both have been verified over and over again. But remember that, until Michelson and Morley, Newton had been verified over and over again too.

Nobody has been able to put together self consistent equations describing where general relativity and quantum mechanics intersect (which I'm exploiting for all its worth in my space game). Fact of the matter is we simply don't know. The final solution when it comes could be something very pedestrian with no cool FTL stuff. . . or it could blow things wide open. Stay tuned.



We don't know, we don't even know how much we know. We won't know how much we don't know until we know more.

Tony said...

The message some of us are trying to get across here is that science will or won't find more to the universe than we already know. But that knowledge will be so expensive in terms of time, energy, and human effort that it will only represent data to be analyzed, not information to be applied. We are long past the days of applying jut a little more electrical power off the grid, or learning how to burn hydrocarbons hotter and hotter, and more efficiently. We're in the realm of major industrial effort just to demonstrate the existence of a single type of particle. This is the ultimate end to the chain of scientific evolutions.* We've gone from parlor room science, to backyard science, to university science, to industrial coalition science. What next are we going to do? Moral-equivalent-of-total-war science? I don't think so -- nobody would pay for it.

(*Kuhn and his revolutions can go take a hike, for all the reality that they possess. The3 scientific attainment of knowledge has always been about refining knowledge into more and more detail. There's never be a revolution in science. There's never been a time when scientists could have decided not to take the road of learning unreliable knowledge in the face of an ability to learn reliable knowledge. There have been holdouts and slowpokes on every turn of the wheel, but the wheel does turn, inexorably, because the gain in reputation (and financial power) that come with conclusively demonstrating new physical principles is just too much of an attraction. There is a quality of imperatives in science that eliminates the possibility of contingency.)

Also -- and this is very important -- what a lot of people refer to as "science" is really just engineering. The most obvious example is "rocket science". But this principle applies to a lot of things. Genetic "science" is just as closed down to fundamental discoveries as chemistry has been, ever since the guys with the first rudimentary particle accelerators demonstrated that chemistry is really just a gross manifestation of particle physics and electromagnetics. The "science" of genetics is really just engineering R&D for genetic engineering applications. Pretty much the same goe for biological science. At the fundamental level, it's just well-established physics. Descriptive biology is just a cataloguing effort. Analytical biology is just what it says on the label -- analysis, not discovery of fundamental principles.

Anonymous said...

Tony: The message some of us are trying to get across here is that science will or won't find more to the universe than we already know. But that knowledge will be so expensive in terms of time, energy, and human effort that it will only represent data to be analyzed, not information to be applied.

While you are correct about most current technologies probably not benefiting from the frontiers of science, you are forgetting about the possibility of breakthroughs.

Electron tunneling, a quantum mechanics phenomenon, lead to the invention of the transistor. Transistors revolutionized electronics. As you know, the computer you use works because of electron tunneling.

If high temperature super conductors are possible, that would revolution power transmission and have a great impact on society. That is being worked on by scientists who do not have to use multibillion dollar particle accelerators. Affordable science that could payoff big.

As I mentioned earlier, astronomy can be used to observe high energy events in the universe at levels impossible for us to recreate on Earth. Maybe those observations will result in new theories that have breakthrough applications.

The rest of us understand the message you are trying to get across. We just don't agree with your conjecture.

Ron

Tony said...

Ron:

"While you are correct about most current technologies probably not benefiting from the frontiers of science, you are forgetting about the possibility of breakthroughs."

I'm not forgetting them. I'm discounting ther plausibility. Quantum mechanics, up to the invention of the transistor, was developed with cyclotron and betatron data. That was at the level of whai described as "university science' -- universities or, at most, coalitions of universities could fund the experimental science. But university science can no longer approach the levels of energy required to investigate new fundamental realms.

Let's take, for example, the latest target of fundamental research in particle physics, the Higgs boson. The Higgs mechanism was first suggested almost 50 years ago. The theoretical physical properties of the resultant Higgs boson were quantified over 40 years ago. We've just barely detected one -- maybe -- in the last several months, at literally industrial levels of energy, in a collection of machines so complex that experiments are as much endeavors in system integration as they are experiments in science. Any data discovered is only applicable at those same industrial levels of power, focused into microscopic region of space. IOW, the simple power density at wich effects can be observed militates against new fundamental knowledge having commonplace application.

Noclevername said...

Science is expanding in ALL directions, looking at ALL parts of the universe, not just the high-energy realms. Just because we have large-scale science does not mean that small-scale discovery has gone away, it just doesn't get as much press as the big toys.

We can learn plenty from observations that do not require mega machines.

Tony said...

Noclevername:

"Science is expanding in ALL directions, looking at ALL parts of the universe, not just the high-energy realms. Just because we have large-scale science does not mean that small-scale discovery has gone away, it just doesn't get as much press as the big toys.

We can learn plenty from observations that do not require mega machines."


You're confusing descriptive and predictive science. Research at the fundamental levels these days is all tied up in confirming theoretical predictions already made -- many of them decades ago. Physicists are no longer discovering phenomena that require new theories about the fundamental nature of things, which in turn have to be tested.

All of this "new" stuff that's being discovered are really just gross manifestations and combinations of gross manifestations. We catalogue it and move on. That's descriptive, not predictive, science. Maybe at some point in the future somebody will come along and analyze these new discoveries. Maybe he won't. But when he does, it won't lead to something fundamental that we've never noticed before.

And here we need to make the distinction between "fundamental" and "gross manifestation". Fundamental is a basic principle of nature, like relativity or quantum mechanics. Gross manifestation is some system, simple or complex, made up out of fundamental building blocks. Our solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, even the entire universe are all gross manifestations. So are weather patterns here on Earth or Saturn, or genetic biology. We may not know or understand all of the gross manifestations yet -- and we will never know or understand literally all of them -- but they're all written in a language of fundamentals that we've already deciphered. Gross manifestations aren't at all likely to teach us anything new about fundamentals, because the fundamentals we already understand well enough to build GPS (which requires relativity theory for accuracy) and transistors (which require a quantum reality to work at all) are already so much more detailed and understood on such large and small scales. A universe of gross manifestations is just an endless set of recombinations of building blocks we're already sure about to demonstrably and remarkably precise degrees.

Anonymous said...

Tony: A universe of gross manifestations is just an endless set of recombinations of building blocks we're already sure about to demonstrably and remarkably precise degrees.

I don't know where you get all this, but you are wrong.

You totally ignored my example of high temperature superconductors. No one knows how superconductors work beyond liquid helium temperatures, but we do have some that operate at liquid nitrogen temperatures. We don't have a working theory based on first principles or fundamental principles or whatever you want to call them.

Now once we finally have a Theory of Everything, maybe we can work our way back to calculate 'gross manifestations' as you call them, but we are not there yet.

Sure quantum theory is the most precise theory ever and general relativity has never failed a test, but we don't even have a clue what gravity is. The gravitational constant is only know to 3 or 4 significant figures. We do not have the fundamentals down pat.

Now I'll grant you that unfortunately we maybe on a technological plateau. However, that does not mean we have figured it all out and there is nothing left to discovery that could lead to new technology.

Please go read some books on the subject. This know it all curmudgeon act is getting old.

Ron

Locki said...

Whenever, I start looking deeply into an area like fundamental physics I find the most interesting questions that arise are philosophical rather than scientific.

The BBC Horizon program is a great, relatively high level show for people who don’t necessarily have a doctorate on physics under their belt. At the end of one of their series on the nature of the universe the question posed by several of the Ivy league professors was “Why is it the uninverse can only be described in terms of math?” Why should the universe follow consistent, replicable mathametical principles?

Whenever, you read about explanations of fundamental physics I can’t help but think you are missing about 80% of the story when someone has to break it down into (small) words for you and describe mathametical phenomena by way of analogy.

This always leads me down the path of what is sapience? If our sapience arises as a natural part of those consistent, predictable fundamental mathametical principles why can our intellects sit aside like an impartial observer, totally separate to the universe, and make theories (and historically the vast majority were wrong) about why the universe operates the way it does.

We aready know our observations themselves have an impact on the universe (quantum mechanics). Sometimes I wonder if our intellectual musings don’t also have an effect on the state of the universe. Its that old if a tree falls and no one hears it Zen question.

This is a very difficult idea for me to verbalise. I guess the best analogy would be if I could design a perfect computer simulation of the world in every way and then put fully sapient AIs to inhabit that world. If I were to slightly tweak the laws of physics in that simulation (say I make the speed of light ½ speed or make Pi = 4.153) would my AI’s ever notice the underlying physics of their simulated world is different to what they are experiencing.

Its that age old philosophical question of whether our minds are separate to the universe or arises naturally as part of that universe's natural laws.

Tony said...

Ron:

I've read many books on physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. Superconductivity, superfluidity, and whole bunch of other "super" things are at the level of gross manifestation. They're at most atomic, but in general they're simply molecular. When you're talking about the worlds of nuclear phsyics and chemistry, in the context of quantum mechanics, you're into very gross levels of manifestation indeed.

We may learn more about molecular and nuclear physics. I'm certain we will, in fact. But that won't equate to the kind of fundamental level of discovery that could deliver (or, more likely, rule out) antigravity, FTL, and all of those other magitechnic things we SF fans would love to have for real.

That's what I'm trying to get through here -- People think that unexplained gross manifestations will lead to new fundamental knowledge. Not likely. They're at a level of phsyics that just doesn't reach into the fields and forces magitech seekers wish to access. To get to those levels requires industrial levels of effort and energy to even barely scratch the surface. Lab bench experiments in superconductivity won't get you there.

And I'd really wish you'd learn the difference between gratuitously "knowing it all" and applying critical thinking with integrity, even at the cost of one's own dreams. See, that's another thing you're missing here. I'm not happy that the physical sciences are in the shape they're in. I wish we could go back to the days of Newtonian epistemology, where the laws of the universe were yet to be discovered, and it took only the effort of interested individuals or relatively small institutions to probe substantiall deeper and further. But those days are gone. Nobody is going to build a hyperdrive in his garage, or barn, or even corporate R&D lab. Unfortunately, that's not because people don't want to. John Campbell, for example, a editor who insisted on scientific and technical accuracy in his authors, tried as hard as he could to believe in the Dean Drive and psi, simply because he wanted them in his world. But they weren't physically real mechanisms, at any level of scientific understanding. I want antigravity and FTL more than you may possible comprehend. I want to see extrasolar systems in my lifetime. But with all of that want, I'm not going to lie to myself or to anybody else that it's possible. If I can help it, I'm going to try to persuade others not to lie to themselves about it. If you don't like that, it's a you problem, not a me problem.

Tony said...

Locki:

We aready know our observations themselves have an impact on the universe (quantum mechanics).

Not observations, as in sentient viewing and measurement. Interactions, as in any particle interacting with any other. Some interactions within the universe are observed by sentients. The overwhelming majority are not. But they still happen, and they still behave according to quantum mechanical laws.

This in fact is one of those problems of trying to boil down mathematics into commonplace analogies. The popularizer inserts a human observer to help explain what he's talking about, and the naive (in the purely technical sense) reader thinks that the observier is a necessary part of the system. Humans aren't necessary for the universe to work. It in fact worked fine for 13.7 billion years without us. And quantum mechanics didn't just start happening because we came along.

Anonymous said...

Tony: And I'd really wish you'd learn the difference between gratuitously "knowing it all" and applying critical thinking with integrity, even at the cost of one's own dreams.

When are you going to learn that your opinions are not fact? You may dress them up with marketing style catch phrases like "critical thinking with integrity" and such, but they are still just your opinions.

Please stop the crusade to "try to persuade others not to lie to themselves about it." It's tiring. Just present your opinions backed up by facts and people who want to listen will listen. People who don't want to listen never will.

Humans aren't necessary for the universe to work. It in fact worked fine for 13.7 billion years without us. And quantum mechanics didn't just start happening because we came along.

There you go. A straight forward statement backed up by logical observation. That's more like it.

Ron

Locki said...

I probably just don't have the writing skill to communicate my thoughts.

My post wasn't to do with the nature of the universe. It was to do with the nature of the mind we are using to explore that universe.

In succinct terms. What is it about our intellect that allows us to formulate logical, self consistent theories explaining the nature of the universe that, in fact, have nothing to do with the "true laws of the universe."

Why does the mind seem to be separate from the laws it is observing, cataloging and explaining.

Noclevername said...

I've read many books on physics, astrophysics, and cosmology.

Wow, you've read books. That means you must know best, right? Are you a physicist? Are you caught up on all the latest peer-reviewed papers on the physical sciences? Can you write the equations that describe the latest models of the universe?

Popular press knowledge is not expertise. It does not give the proper foundations and background to really understand what is being done in science and where it will go from here.

I freely admit, I don't know what's going to happen next, let alone in the PMF. You need to honestly look at yourself and do the same.

Thucydides said...

Ron

Wikipedia lays out the current theory of high temperature superconductivity, and it is a manifestation of already known physics. The mechanism to create Cooper pairs in a high temperature lattice is different from that of a low temperature one (as might be expected), but no fundamental new laws of physics have been discovered or invoked here.

Yes progress is slow (HTS was discovered in the 1980's, after all), but then again, some discoveries take a long time to find practical applications. In fundamental discoveries, consider the lag between the understanding of the quantum nature of light and the introduction of the CD player. In material science, aerogels were first developed in the 1930's. My particular favorite is steam and atmospheric engines were described in the first century AD (you can read about it in "The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria". The staff at the Library of Alexandria are quite helpful...)

Tony said...

Ron:

"Just present your opinions backed up by facts and people who want to listen will listen."

What do you think I've been doing? The progression from parlor physics to the physics-industrial complex is a fact. The energy density needed to probe the physical world, beyond that which we know and can experimentally confirm, is a fact. The logical implications, while not being a fact in and of themselves, are not open to all that much debate or doubt.

"People who don't want to listen never will."

Eggs-zactly. It seems that you -- and some others -- don't want to listen.

Tony said...

Noclevername:

"Wow, you've read books. That means you must know best, right? Are you a physicist? Are you caught up on all the latest peer-reviewed papers on the physical sciences? Can you write the equations that describe the latest models of the universe?"

It's not impenetrable arcana that we're talking about here. It's a straightforward question of comparing resources with results. It is, if you will, a logistics problem, in both major senses of the word. In the common sense, when it takes industrial amounts of effort and energy to perform even the most basic experiments at the smallest scales, it's simply not likely that the output data is going to be of practical use for anything. In the technical sense, the learning curve of fundamental knowledge is not the quadratic (J-shape) that many futurists would like you to believe, extending ever upward into the future, at ever increaing rates. It's a logistic (S-shape), flattening out at the top. Our inability to probe further without exponentially increasing amounts of energy per cubic micrometer of experiment space suggests we're entering, if not already in, the flat part at the top of the curve.

See, I'm not talking about the internals of any given discipline. I'm talking about the physical and economic cost of each extra unit of data. That cost is going up at an ever increasing rate, while the relevance of the captured data to commonplace application on the gross, human scale is decreaing precipitously. It doesn't take special knowledge to see that. Just open eyes.

jollyreaper said...

"
This always leads me down the path of what is sapience? If our sapience arises as a natural part of those consistent, predictable fundamental mathametical principles why can our intellects sit aside like an impartial observer, totally separate to the universe, and make theories (and historically the vast majority were wrong) about why the universe operates the way it does.
"
This idea has been explored in the game Mage: The Ascension from White Wolf Publishing.

The basic premise of Mage: The Ascension is that everyone has the capacity, at some level, to shape reality. This capacity, personified as a mysterious alter-ego called the Avatar, is dormant in most people, who are known as sleepers, whereas Magi (and/or their Avatars) are said to be Awakened. Because they're awakened, Magi can consciously effect changes to reality via willpower, beliefs, and specific magical techniques.
The beliefs and techniques of Magi vary enormously, and the ability to alter reality can only exist in the context of a coherent system of belief and technique, called a paradigm. A paradigm organizes a Mage's understanding of reality, how the universe works, and what things mean. It also provides the Mage with an understanding of how to change reality, through specific magical techniques. For example, an alchemical paradigm might describe the act of wood burning as the wood "releasing its essence of elemental Fire," while modern science would describe fire as "combustion resulting from a complex chemical reaction." Paradigms tend to be idiosyncratic to the individual Mage, but the vast majority belong to broad categories of paradigm, e.g., Shamanism, Medieval Sorcery, religious miracle working, and superscience.
In the Mage setting, everyday reality is governed by commonsense rules derived from the collective beliefs of sleepers. This is called the consensus. Most Magi' paradigms differ substantially from the consensus. When a mage performs an act of magic that does not seriously violate this commonsense version of reality, in game terms this is called coincidental magic. Magic that deviates wildly from consensus is called vulgar magic. When it is performed ineptly, or is vulgar, and especially if it is vulgar and witnessed by sleepers, magic can cause Paradox, a phenomenon in which reality tries to resolve contradictions between the consensus and the Mage's efforts. Paradox is difficult to predict and almost always bad for the mage. The most common consequences of paradox include physical damage directly to the Mage's body, and paradox flaws, magic-like effects which can for example turn the mage's hair green, make him mute, make him incapable of leaving a certain location, and so on. In more extreme cases paradox can cause Quiet (madness that may leak into reality), Paradox Spirits (nebulous, often powerful beings which purposefully set about resolving the contradiction, usually by directly punishing the mage), or even the removal of the Mage to a paradox realm, a pocket dimension from which it may be difficult to escape.


See the link for more brain-bendy background. In this setting, science is the imposition of a hostile belief system not unlike forcible conversion to a religion. But, because it warps reality, people don't even remember the before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mage:_The_Ascension

jollyreaper said...

From wiki:

In science, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observation will make on a phenomenon being observed. This is often the result of instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner. A commonplace example is checking the pressure in an automobile tire; this is difficult to do without letting out some of the air, thus changing the pressure. This effect can be observed in many domains of physics.
The observer effect on a physical process can often be reduced to insignificance by using better instruments or observation techniques. However in quantum mechanics, which deals with very small objects, it is not possible to observe a system without changing the system, so the observer must be considered part of the system being observed.
Historically, the observer effect has been confused with the uncertainty principle.


Of course, it gets cooler when you think that the observation effect has to do with comprehension by a sentient mind. A good plot mechanic even if it's bad quantum mechanics.

The need for a conscious mind inside the superscience machinery allows us to keep a human observer in the story and in a way that might seem less silly than that FTL drive that needed virgin psychics to operate.

jollyreaper said...

"In succinct terms. What is it about our intellect that allows us to formulate logical, self consistent theories explaining the nature of the universe that, in fact, have nothing to do with the "true laws of the universe.""

It's true enough for certain levels of operation. If I tell you hanging your laundry up outside in the breeze lets the dew faeries collect the moisture and clumped in a ball inside means they can't get to it, you can test my theory and see it appears to be true. I could also tell you water soils like milk and meat and that is why the wet sheet in the corner begins to stink.

Furthermore, I could ferment wine and brew beer with wild, airborne yeasts and have no proper comprehension of the process, invent fanciful notions of inebriation faeries that visit my jars and fill the contents with delight.

The faeries are all very small. A mote of dust is like a great boulder to them. And if you question the existence of these faeries you will be shunned.

A theory can seem to fit the facts, seem correct enough but not be the truth.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/02/08/a_talk_with_mario_livio/?page=full

MARIO LIVIO IS an astrophysicist, a man whose work and worldview are inextricably intertwined with mathematics. Like most scientists, he depends on math and an underlying faith in its incredible power to explain the universe. But over the years, he has been nagged by a bewildering thought. Scientific progress, in everything from economics to neurobiology to physics, depends on math's ability. But what is math? Why should its abstract concepts be so uncannily good at explaining reality?

The question may seem irrelevant. As long as math works, why not just go with it? But Livio felt himself pulled into a deep question that reaches to the very foundation of science - and of reality itself. The language of the universe appears to be mathematics: Formulas describe how our planet revolves around the sun, how a boat floats, how light glints off the water. But is mathematics a human tool, or is reality, in some fundamental way, mathematics?

Or, put another way: "Is God a Mathematician?" This is the title of Livio's new book, in which he joins a long line of modern thinkers who have questioned "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics," in the words of Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner.

jollyreaper said...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences

Wigner begins his paper with the belief, common to all those familiar with mathematics, that mathematical concepts have applicability far beyond the context in which they were originally developed. Based on his experience, he says "it is important to point out that the mathematical formulation of the physicist’s often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena." He then invokes the fundamental law of gravitation as an example. Originally used to model freely falling bodies on the surface of the earth, this law was extended on the basis of what Wigner terms "very scanty observations" to describe the motion of the planets, where it "has proved accurate beyond all reasonable expectations."
Another oft-cited example is Maxwell's equations, derived to model the elementary electrical and magnetic phenomena known as of the mid 19th century. These equations also describe radio waves, discovered by David Edward Hughes in 1879, around the time of James Clerk Maxwell's death. Wigner sums up his argument by saying that "the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it." He concludes his paper with the same question with which he began:
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.

Locki said...

Thanks Jollyreaper. Thats pretty much exactly along the lines I was thinking.

Unfortunately, it just goes to show there are no original ideas left for budding SF writers :( Oh well. The White Wolf boys seem to have done a far better job than I ever could of crystalising some of those mind-body ideas.

Still it makes you wonder. The universe seems to follow predictable, consistent mathematical principles. But human choice seems to lie completely outside that. I could choose, with my single bullet, to shoot either that duck in the air or the Fawn on the ground. Now the gun, the bullet and the damage to my target animal is all predictable. But the choice itself is not. If I choose to shoot the bird or spare the fawn the universe then goes down very separate paths.

If you want something a bit larger to chew on Harry Truman could have chosen to nuke Hiroshima or nuke Tokyo eith obviously vastly different outcomes on our world. Our "free will" (assuming we have free will) allows us to affect the universe in ways not predictable by math.

Like Jollyreapers example of the Mage RPG you wonder if human choice is trully separate to the laws of the universe.

Maybe there's a way for our choices and intellect to affect the universe more directly at a more fundamental level. So we could collectively will FTL into being. Which would be pretty much like magi-tech FTL - but hey! Einstein's not helping us one bit :)

jollyreaper said...

Loki, I am not sure where your difficulty with the human choice is. That it appears random? That it is hard to predict?

If we accept modern scientific thinking, the seat of human consciousness remains in the physical world, arising from biological functions of the brain, no external soul. We are all inside our skulls.

A deer that runs out in front of my car could break left or right and could live or die. It's random but understandable. I could flip a coin. I can't tell you which side will be up even though I can tell you the odds.

While I don't believe in will affecting physical reality along the lines of magic, it does work on human minds in a way that feels like magic. Human beliefs are powerful things. Even though we can describe this in terms of psychology, it still beggars understanding. I look at cult movements and how tight the mental control is, how perfectly the leader can subvert the will and individuality of his followers. A shaman has no ability to work magic to make rain fall from an unwilling sky but he only has to convince the people he can. And what happens when there is still no rain? That he retains his position without being torn limb from limb, that is a true miracle!

Anonymous said...

Tony: Eggs-zactly. It seems that you -- and some others -- don't want to listen.

I have mentioned in previous posts about how astronomy is used to observe high energy events in the universe and how that applies to particle physics. Gigantic particle accelerators are not the only game in town. Of course, progress will be slow, but there will still be progress.

Even with examples, you totally ignore anything that does not fit your world view. My objection to your comments is that you believe you are 100% correct when you are about 90% correct.

You dismiss fields of science other than physics because you think everything can be derived from our current understanding of quantum theory and general relativity. That is incorrect at this time. Once a unified theory of thing exists, if we even figure that out, then it might be possible.

As you say, "Just open eyes."

Ron

Thucydides said...

"You dismiss fields of science other than physics because you think everything can be derived from our current understanding..."

Well, yes: http://xkcd.com/435/

Anonymous said...

When I was young and I often read pulp science fiction, a favourite technique of authors was that nearly every component of a futuristic technology would be grounded in real-world engineering, except for some as-yet undiscovered material with bizarre properties that would allow, for example, FTL or anti-gravity, when put inside the right black box designed by some mathematical genius.

Even back then I had trouble swallowing this. I’d ask myself, but don’t we already have the periodic table which predicts basically all the elements and their properties? Hell, even the standard model that predicts all the subatomic particles and their properties. It broke my suspension of disbelief that we could discover some element that not only produced impossible effects that were not predicted by these mature models but that such element would be naturally occurring and stable (just rare on earth).

Also, such unobtanium often casually violated well-understood theories like relativity and quantum mechanics. This is just not going to happen for the set of circumstances where they reign supreme, which will be most circumstances and levels of energy within the universe.

In a science fictional setting, I fear that the only half-way plausible setting where you’re going to be able to get around relativity is where you ‘break’ the system, ie the universe, in some way. If possible, it’s going to take beyond-industrial levels of energy and engineering. Things like constructing super-dense rings of matter taken from deconstructed solar systems and particle accelerators with lengths measured in AU and so forth (I’m not proposing a plausible method of FTL travel, merely speculating about the scale of mega-engineering project that might suspend the disbelief of a reader enough to accept that it could be doable, in your fictional setting).

Locki said...


Jollyreaper said ….
Loki, I am not sure where your difficulty with the human choice is. That it appears random? That it is hard to predict?

If we accept modern scientific thinking, the seat of human consciousness remains in the physical world, arising from biological functions of the brain, no external soul. We are all inside our skulls.


Don’t worry I haven’t gone full luddite on you. I haven’t suddenly become an “intelligent design nutter” on you all.

Rather than engaging in yet another endless round with the usual suspects of of ”Bah Humbug! we’ve done it all” vs “Tech progress and Singularity 4EVAH!” it seemed to me the more interesting question for this blog title “How much do we know” is the philosophical question of “how do we know what we errr know.” I’ve always found the AI discussions more interesting.

Why does our consciousness arise out of a complex series of chemical reactions and allows us to “choose” how the universe around us progresses.

This is a real stretch so stay with me.

For our fundamental physics to progress we are making new observations in 2 fields. We are looking inwards with our giant particle accellerators. And we are also looking outwards for phenomena in deep space (particularly black holes, hawking radiation, gravity waves et al). Our observations of deep space are being made with the assumption that no intelligence is choosing to modify its behaviour.

Now lets pretend there are actually Type III intelligences (Carl Sagan’s Aliens in contact) or even greater intelligences out there in the universe (eg Baxter’s Xelee series – why is he considered hard SF anyway??) able to choose which way the universe evolves. For example Carl Sagan’s aliens were actively working to increase the density of the universe to prevent the great rip.

If universe altering intelligences like this are possible then our understanding of the universe and its eventual fate will not be complete until we understand how consciousness arises from that universe.

Note: Does anyone else think Tony behaves like a lover who has been spurned. He’s knowledgable, reasonable and writes well. I enjoy reading his posts but its all just tinged with a hint of bitterness. I bet he was drawing rocket ships and ray gunz as a kid but once he realised none of those beloved “amazing tales” would ever occur in his or his childrens’ lifetime he has let life’s experience crush his hope and imagination.

Anonymous said...

Locki, your last comment: Although I wouldn't have put it in those exact terms, I'd be the last to disagree with you.
Well, fundimental knowledge seems to be all "Why" questions; like why does the universe work the way it does? Everything else would be "How" questions, like how does space expand or contract? for two examples. We don't know the answer to either one and I'm pretty sure that just trying to discover those answers will uncover many other answers, most of which we can't know in advance of what we might find on the way to understanding the really big questions.

Ferrell

Locki said...

The internet is a notoriously blunt instrument and I hope I didn't come across the wrong way. My apologies if I inadvertantly offended you Tony. This place would only be 1/2 as interesting if you stopped posting.

But I think what attracts many people to a blog named Rocketpunk is the hope that many generations down the track a group of very clever people, who are all gathered in the right place at the right time in history will make an unexpected series of breakthroughs that once again light up kids (and even middle aged fathers) imaginations.

And really for all of our pooh-poohing of todays' achievements I think if a Heisenberg or a Bohr or even Einstein himself could briefly peer at the society we have built outselves in 2013 they could go away with a sense of deep satisfaction. There may be a conspicious abscence of interplanetry atomic rocket ships (TM) or fusion powered flying cars but we have progressed enough in unexpected directions to pique the imagination and sense of wonder of any of the great scientists or sci-fi authors who created the atomic age.

Since we still can't reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity there is cause for optimism. Similarly, the nature of consciousness is a complete black box to us. There's plenty of gaps science has yet to fill.

There is always cause to be cautiously optimistic the achievements of our future descendents could similarly dazzle and amaze us in unexpected fashions.

The only magitech item I wish for more than FTL or Torchships or Anti-gravity is the ability to briefly peer into the distant future of humanity itself. I’m optimistic they will have created something more dazzling and fantastical than anything I could have imagined ….. even FTL

Tony said...

Ron:

I don't know why you seem to think that I'm not aware of the scope of our observations, both astronomical and sub-nanoscale. But I am just as intrigued by your misunderstanding of what they mean. We've dealt with the cost-benefit issues of further investigation at very small, very high energy scales. But let's talk a bit about astronomical observations.

Back in the Seventies, when I first became interested in astronomy, nobody knew what quasars were. They were very bright and very far away. But that was all we knew. As the power and resolution of our observational instruments got better and better, we realized that quasars were highly active galactic cores, sending out huge amounts of energy in the form of jets of matter and energy. Now here's the important point -- we didn't learn anything about particle physics from this (or anything else we observe in the universe, for that matter). We applied what we already knew about radiation, gravity, and relativity even, to theorize about the supermassive black holes that must be at the center of this phenomenon.

See, it's exactly opposite from your contention. We don't learn about fundamental physics from looking at light coming in from around the universe. We use our knowledge of fundamental physics to explain to ourselves what we see.

The same goes for things like gravitational waves, which we are still trying to conclusively demonstrated. Their existence is inferred from general relativity, not from any astronomical discovery. They were first suggested by Einstien almost 100 years ago.

Tony said...

Locki:

I can see your point about my attitude. I often wonder about it myself, with no prompting from anybody else. But I also ponder why people feel this need to discredit my character on the way to attempting to discredit some pretty well-established facts and some pretty obvious and logical conclusions. But of course anybody who's self-aware knows why, deep down in his heart...

In any case, I find it somewhat curious that people are surprised by math's ability to describe processes in the universe. Remember, we first developed math in the process of learning how to count and measure things in the physical world. And our sophistication in mathematical thought has closely paralleled our sophistication in understanding that world. Geometry was first developed for architecture and surveying. Newton developed calculus to help him work out the laws of motion. And while math has gon off in multiple abstract direction in recent centuries, those directions are ultimately related to real-world phenomena. When a mathemetician talks about abstract, multi-dimensional "spaces", for example, he's really telling you that his paradigm is rooted in the 3D physical world. When a computer programmer uses a relational database system, which is deeply dependent upon some pretty abstract set theory, he's still using it to categorize and store information about the real world.

So, it seems rather odd to me that anybody would question why math applies so well to understanding physical reality. It seems to me that we discover math in order to relate ourselves to that reality, not that we developed math apart, and that it somehow has a curiously inexplicable relationship to the physical world.

Locki said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Tony: See, it's exactly opposite from your contention. We don't learn about fundamental physics from looking at light coming in from around the universe. We use our knowledge of fundamental physics to explain to ourselves what we see.

Ah, now I see the issue. You are missing the most important part of gathering data. If your observations match your theory that's great, you have a good theory. If your observations don't match your theory, you have to modify the theory. That is how science works. It is the proper application of the scientific method.

From the Oxford Dictionary, Science - the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

The point is you use observation and experiment to gather data and then compare it to theory. If it doesn't fit you change the theory, not the data.

Einstein spoiled us with general relativity. A theory so good that it has passed every test so far. I can see how people can be confused by this.

Other theories are not as sound. Especially string theory since it does not lend itself to testing, making it more philosophy than science.

The same goes for things like gravitational waves, which we are still trying to conclusively demonstrated. Their existence is inferred from general relativity, not from any astronomical discovery. They were first suggested by Einstien almost 100 years ago.

Gravitational waves were indirectly confirmed by the observation of Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar. Hulse and Taylor got the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for that discovery.

The decay rate of the neutron stars' orbit precisely matches general relativity. That is another example of how good Einstein was.

Now imagine if the decay rate did not match general relativity. Then the theory would need a little correction. That is how science works. That's why we experiment.

As I pointed out earlier, soon astronomers will be able to resolve the accretion disc around the black hole at the center of our galaxy. If the observations match general relativity, that's another one for Einstein. If not, it will be a very big discovery and physicists will have their work cut out for them.

Our theories are good, but they are not perfect. That is why scientist keep observing and experimenting.

So, it seems rather odd to me that anybody would question why math applies so well to understanding physical reality. It seems to me that we discover math in order to relate ourselves to that reality, not that we developed math apart, and that it somehow has a curiously inexplicable relationship to the physical world.

That is a good point. It is amazing to me how everything can be described by mathematics and that we are able to understand it. Is math a useful tool or is it a fundamental property of the universe?

Ron

The Intelligencer said...

‘edit: I know the universe is not deterministic.’

The universe is deterministic. So are the processes of consciousness. Chaotic systems are just as deterministic as any other kind. The problem is probably that no system can fully understand itself.

I agree with Tony; we’re going to run into capacity constraints, and hard. Consider the amount of irreversible damage we’re doing to the earth squeezing what energy and industry we can out of it now; it’s unsustainable. There will likely come a point in the future where the resources we can lay our hands on become too scarce to plumb the depths of high energy physics any further.

Some people, even on this blog, put amazing faith in the ability of intellect to leapfrog over these hard physical constraints; as if the brain was not part of the physical universe.

The brain is, and the problem is worse than that. Our consciousness is not a pure or abstract phenomenon. It’s an emergent property of our mammalian brains which evolved on the African savannah maybe half a million years ago, which at the time endowed our ancestors some small measure of fitness in the tasks of finding food, fleeing from predators and out-breeding competitors. It is ill-suited to designing and operating particle accelerators and even less so for understanding the results. It comes with built in flaws, like survivorship and confirmation biases. Yes, our brains are probably a capacity constraint as well.

Locki said...

The Intelligencer said...

Some people, even on this blog, put amazing faith in the ability of intellect to leapfrog over these hard physical constraints; as if the brain was not part of the physical universe.

The brain is, and the problem is worse than that. Our consciousness is not a pure or abstract phenomenon. It’s an emergent property of our mammalian brains which evolved on the African savannah maybe half a million years ago, which at the time endowed our ancestors some small measure of fitness in the tasks of finding food, fleeing from predators and out-breeding competitors. It is ill-suited to designing and operating particle accelerators and even less so for understanding the results. It comes with built in flaws, like survivorship and confirmation biases. Yes, our brains are probably a capacity constraint as well.


-----------

All true but it seems to me you’ve missed the remarkable thing about becoming self aware. Sure we have built in flaws like “survivorship” and “confirmation biases” but we are able to step back and analyse these “flaws” and overcome them if we choose to.
Afterall I overcame my inbuilt tendency to feast everyday on the unlimited food available and forgo that short term reward so I don’t become as big as a house. Likewise I overcame my inbuilt tendency to procreate as many times as possible in my teen years because I knew neither I nor more suffering parents could afford it.
I’m as subject to confirmation bias as the next person (someone, anyone please like my post!) but if I sit down hard and think about my statistics I can perceive the truth of the observations behind a medical paper as well as the next person.
Or for more melodramatic sci-fi purposes many people are capable of sacrificing their life for an abstract concept. Being self aware, that ability to step outside ourselves and recognise our own flaws in our reasoning process, is still little understood.

-----------

Re Tony:

I finally thought of a more elegant and less confrontational way of communicating what I was trying to say earlier.

Experience has a knack of teaching us a certain humility about what is possible. We often achieve far less than what we imagined.

But that humility should cut both ways. Experience should also teach you it is occasionally possible to achieve far more than what you had believed possible.

I personally got it badly wrong once. I personally told an elite athlete she did not have it. In my experience she was far too short and lacked the flexibility to compete on the world stage. She ended up winning a Bronze medal at the Commonwealth Games.

It is important to be humble about both what is possible and what is not possible.

Thom S said...

If we're talking about our brains, I think a distinction should be made between overcoming our instincts (which can be done to a certain extent - the mind is a plastic organ) and overcoming the physical limitations imposed by its structure. There is a limited (if large) amount of processing, storage and so on that can fit in there after all. All too often, the recognition of our abilities as self-aware entities shades into a pseudo-magical belief that the brain is some kind of miracle machine rather than an incredibly powerful but very flawed product of evolution.

As for my two cents on the future of scientific discovery (to be taken with a grain of salt, of course) - My gut feeling is that scientific discovery will tend to follow the path of least resistance. If physics becomes stagnant then the folks who would have gone into it will turn to something else instead. Perhaps we will see a great broadening of understanding when it comes to the emergent stuff - a sort of grand unification of chemistry, material science, biology and so on. Maybe the second millennium will be the great age of scientific synthesis?

As I said before, molecular and synthetic biology is still in its infancy as a discipline. We are, in fact, just now getting into the stage where engineering of such simple organisms as bacteria is becoming routine*. If we are indeed living in the anthropocene then the great work of science for the next few centuries may be to use our understanding of biology, ecology etc. to begin the task of managing our planet rather than simply living on it.

Tony - I know it must get a bit wearisome to be the person singled out on this blog for psychoanalysis, so I just wanted to say that it's good to see you joining the discussion again. If you ever feel like being puckishly trollish, I'd suggest taking a page from 'Genius: the transgression' and outing yourself as an Atomist. I'll declare as a Progenitor or something - fair's fair after all.

* As opposed to tinkering with them, which we've been able to do for a while.

Locki said...

Hmmmmm,

I just read back over my last few posts.

That did sound incredibly, overbearingly pompous didn't it?

You can blame the fact I went in to bat for Tony 3-4 times the last 6 months and was trying to keep it all balanced.

I think I'll just slink off and stick to atomic powered ray guns for awhile.

My apologies everyone for straying off topic so badly.

Tony said...

Locki:

You're not straying, at least as far as I'm concerned. If you haven't caught on, I tend to treat anything that comes up as grist for the mill. I'm not a Renaissance Man by any means, but I'm interested in a broad selection of subjects. So, if I had my druthers, I's like you to keep it up.

As to why the universe should be mathematical, my response would be, why shouldn't it be? The universe is space, which has dimension, and contains countable, measurable things. What we call "math" is just formalism and abstraction applied to the physical properties of the universe and its contents. Like I said, the interpretational difficulty comes from imaginaing mathematics as a creation, rather than a discovery.

WRT proper humility, point taken. But I've been trying to make it very clear tham my opinion emerges from facts that anyone can verify, and follows logically from them. There's nothing personal in it.

Tony said...

Ron:

Whether or not astronomical observations confirm any given theory, they still have to be interpreted in accordance with known physics. Even the discovery of an apparent dark matter, and more recently an apparent dark energy, are interpreted in terms of the Standard Model. The reason we don't know what dark energy is is ridiculously simple -- our physics can't explain it. And there's no experimental way to detect what it could be, because unlike particla physics over the last 120 years, we have no way to kick our experimental capabilities up to the level that we could find new stuff out.

Similarly with dark matter, its effects are directly observable, but our means of figuring it out is to go to the Standard Model, think what theoretically possible particle could be dark matter, then test for it. IOW, we don't say to ourselves, "Must be something new..." We say to ourselves, "Must be something we've already theorized and need to demonstrate..."

BTW, did you read what Susskind said to Scientific American recently, for a special edition on "Extreme Physics"? The problem with our experimental techniques is that there comes a point where we put so much energy into such a small space that we create black holes. At that point, the collection of information stops, for what should be obvious reasons.

Anonymous said...

Tony: IOW, we don't say to ourselves, "Must be something new..." We say to ourselves, "Must be something we've already theorized and need to demonstrate..."

Haven't you ever heard of physicists looking for "new physics" so they can go beyond our current theories?

Never mind, I'm tired of trying to point that out to you.

Ron

Tony said...

Ron:

"Haven't you ever heard of physicists looking for 'new physics' so they can go beyond our current theories?"

Sure, plenty of crackpots are always trying to sell you something "new" and "revolutionary" about physics. In the world of professional physics, new physics means physics that extends current knowledge, not something that invalidates it in ways that leads to FTL and antigravity.

To me, it seems your only purpose is to rationalize away reality so that you can have magitech. Which is fine for you, if that's what you want to do. But don't take swipes at other people simply because they're not playing the game by your own personal set of rules.

Anonymous said...

Tony:

"Must be something we've already theorized and need to demonstrate..."

In the world of professional physics, new physics means physics that extends current knowledge, not something that invalidates it in ways that leads to FTL and antigravity.


Over many posts you have said our theories are complete and now you say new physics extends our current knowledge. Finally, after all this time your recognize that we need to extend our knowledge. That is what I have been trying to get you to recognize.

I am not arguing about new theories to cast our current theories aside. That would be ridiculous. I know what new science means. I have been arguing about your narrow minded view of the world.

Tony, you have some very practical views on technology that are a welcome addition to Rick's blog. However, when you go on a tear about how you are always right, like some religious fanatic, all you do is become a troll.

Ron

Tony said...

Ron:

I never, ever said our physical knowledge was complete. You can go back and look. The point I've been trying to make is that there are practical limits to the acquisition of knowledge, which we are coming cloe to achieving. That's verifiable fact. If insisting on living in a world of verifiable fact is trolling, then I want to be a troll forever, and there's one whole heck of a lot of us out here that qualify.

jollyreaper said...

Compare scientific knowledge to geography.

There are no new continents out there to discover. There aren't even new islands. Everything there is to discover has been found in the broad strokes and all that remains is physically going somewhere to find something interesting. Even when we have a lost city found by satellite survey in a jungle, that's a great find for archaeology but does little to expand our geographical knowledge.

Even for the areas where we have blanks on the map such as in the deep ocean, we have an understanding of the boundaries on those maps. We are not going to discover a new continent, a new mountain range, or a hole leading into the hollow center of the Earth.

Tony's contention seems to be that we have enough of a grasp on the fundamentals of the way the world works that there's nothing left to knock us on our ass and show us how little we know.

While I concede that is one possibility, I wouldn't want to hang my hat on it. I find it likely that we're still going to find things that will cast what we think we understand in a new light. I don't think we have physics mapped out quite as thoroughly as world geography. Note I say likely, not certainly, but I won't tell you it's a fact because it's impossible to prove. It is fun to speculate about.

Cordwainer said...

New islands appear out of the ocean from volcanic upwelling, and we are discovering new undersea geography all the time, jollyreaper. Not to be critical but that is a bad analogy. But, like you I tend to think we haven't worked the theoretical kinks in physics out as nearly as well as Tony tends to believe. Whether anything new to be understood in that area will knock us on our ass, is debatable though. Love anonymous's comments! You should join the blog, anybody that can put the druther's to Tony when it comes to logic and semantics is okay in my book.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Tony's contention seems to be that we have enough of a grasp on the fundamentals of the way the world works that there's nothing left to knock us on our ass and show us how little we know."

Ummm...nope. All I've said is that there are practical limits to the acquisition of knowledge. I've also insinuated that I think we're probably closer -- way closer -- to the end than the beginning. That's all.

Byron said...

Cordwainer:
New islands appear out of the ocean from volcanic upwelling, and we are discovering new undersea geography all the time, jollyreaper. Not to be critical but that is a bad analogy. But, like you I tend to think we haven't worked the theoretical kinks in physics out as nearly as well as Tony tends to believe. Whether anything new to be understood in that area will knock us on our ass, is debatable though. Love anonymous's comments! You should join the blog, anybody that can put the druther's to Tony when it comes to logic and semantics is okay in my book.
It's not a bad analogy. Actually, it's quite a good one. We don't see new islands that often, and those that we do see are in somewhat predictable places, and are also rather small. In the grand scheme of things, they don't really matter. Undersea geography can be compared to the murkier realms of physics. We have the broad outlines, and the specific details don't matter that much to anyone except an oceanographer (or a submariner, but all analogies eventually break down).

Cordwainer said...

Agreed, Byron. All analogies do break down at some point and I wasn't trying to be snippity. As to whether knowing the broad outlines of oceanography really doesn't matter that much I would tend to agree. Although much of what occurs geologically and biologically below the Earth's surface could have some very big implication's for our energy futures if hydrocarbon ices prove a sustainable and mineable resource.

Which brings up a point I was too tired to elucidate last night. What we don't know in regards to how future technology may effect our socio-political landscape. In past blogs I brought up the idea that we might see the formation of mega-states in the future. What if our recycling, efficiency, energy independence and resource allocation/exploitation technology becomes so advanced that small nation-states and hermitage life-styles become the norm?What breakthroughs would be required to bring about such a world? What technologies are already in the making that could have a drastic effect on our energy independence and could drastically improve our ability to generate energy?

Also, as an aside for those in the audience with engineering degrees which do you think is more likely? Fusion energy or Photo-phoresic cells capable of capturing most of the Sun's energy?

Rick said...

Nodding in general agreement with both sides of the argument ...

Cordwainer said...

I would also like to mention that while most of the physical and mathematical underpinnings of our universe are well understood. There are still some areas for which a greater understanding could have valuable results from an engineering point of view. For instance; fractal theory, stochastic dynamics, and fluid dynamics of "foams" and other transitory states of matter as well as the electrodynamic effects on those same states of matter to just name a few....

Anonymous said...

Cordwainer:

Also, as an aside for those in the audience with engineering degrees which do you think is more likely? Fusion energy or Photo-phoresic cells capable of capturing most of the Sun's energy?

This is the type of question where Tony's practical insight should be applied.

Mainstream attempts in fusion research use massive machines generating powerful magnetic fields or gigantic arrays of powerful lasers. These devices cost a fortune, yet have not succeeded in producing a useful fusion reaction. Even if they do reach a breakeven point in energy production, you need better than that for a commercial power plant. Maybe in the future we will build fusion power plants, but it is not going to be easy or cheap.

The interesting thing about solar power is that you don't need solar cells with a high efficiency. So even if photo-phoresic cells capable of capturing most of the Sun's energy are impossible, just doing the research can improve what we already have. Right now, solar power is a little too expense, but it wouldn't take much of an improvement to make it practical to slap solar panels on nearly every roof. Large scale energy storage is a problem, but that is more of an engineering issue.

Basically, fusion research costs a fortune and may not pan out. Solar power research will probably not reach very high efficiencies, but incremental improvements found along the way could lead to practical widespread use.

Ron

Byron said...

Cordwainer:
Also, as an aside for those in the audience with engineering degrees which do you think is more likely? Fusion energy or Photo-phoresic cells capable of capturing most of the Sun's energy?
This is a tricky question. Strictly read, and treating "most of the Sun's energy" as "with an efficiency greater than 50%" the answer is the solar cells, which are already getting into that ballpark. If the question is "which is going to solve our energy problems first" the answer is fusion, because ground-based solar is not a viable means of powering society as a whole, no matter how efficient the panels get. The space requirements are too large, and the sun is blocked by night and bad weather. Space solar is a different matter.

What technologies are already in the making that could have a drastic effect on our energy independence and could drastically improve our ability to generate energy?
No technological breakthroughs needed, just a political one. Nuclear power would solve most of our problems in this area, if we were willing to let it.

What if our recycling, efficiency, energy independence and resource allocation/exploitation technology becomes so advanced that small nation-states and hermitage life-styles become the norm?
Why would we expect this to happen? States have tended to become larger as time goes on, not smaller, and I see no reason for that to change. Strength in numbers and all of that.

Anonymous said...

Byron:

If the question is "which is going to solve our energy problems first" the answer is fusion, because ground-based solar is not a viable means of powering society as a whole, no matter how efficient the panels get.

Good point. Solar power can become a useful addition to power production, but it cannot be a primary source.

Fusion would be the answer to our energy problems. However, since we have been working on it for over half a century and are still decades away from its use by best estimates, I have lost confidence in fusion power. Just my opinion.

Ron

Byron said...

Ron:
Fusion would be the answer to our energy problems. However, since we have been working on it for over half a century and are still decades away from its use by best estimates, I have lost confidence in fusion power. Just my opinion.
I'm not exactly a fusion optimist myself. However, there is at least a chance that it might happen sometime in the future. Nuclear is the current solution, but the populace is proving too thick-headed to realize that.

Cordwainer said...

Well I was going more for something like Heinlein's sun screens not traditional UV photovoltaics. We already have photovoltaics that make use of a larger spectrum of UV and are able to include some infra-red. If we could design something like a sun screen that absorbs multiple spectrums then I think "solar" would have a great deal more benefit than current thinking holds.

Also, hybrid photo-voltaic/solar thermal systems can produce a great deal more energy while using less land, albeit they are only best suited to specific areas geographically.

As I have mentioned before solar energy can be very practical at the home use level, even to the point of getting one off the grid completely. Other options like wind and geothermal, along with a more distributed and efficient grid could greatly reduce our need for hydrocarbon fuels. The real issue would be the industrial power needs that run 24/7 and require huge amounts of power. That along with personal transportation would be the hardest areas to manage for a "green" power infrastructure. Homes and farms are probably an easier fit for an off the grid approach or a distributed "green power " grid. Although, energy can be stored for night time use and efficiency improvements might result in a lessened need for power.

I tend to agree that States do tend to get bigger at least in their geo-political reach over time but this does not mean that the trend always results in geographically large states. Look at the break up of the Soviet Union and the fractiousness of many states in Sub-Saharan Africa for instance. I'm saying we may have a Western bias due to the "colonial empires" of the past. If the technology develops to permit or aid the creation of greater self-determination then we may very well see the creation of many small states that are less dependent on large populations and natural resources than the current dichotomy.


Byron said...

Cordwainer:
Also, hybrid photo-voltaic/solar thermal systems can produce a great deal more energy while using less land, albeit they are only best suited to specific areas geographically.
No, they can't. The absolute limit is solar irradiance, which is something like 1 kW/m2. Nothing that can be done will change that. Between that and the duty cycle issues, replacing a 1 GW power plant will take several square kilometers of land, as well as a significant amount of energy storage. Rooftop solar has promise in some areas, but it's never going to be practical everywhere. Take Spokane, Washington. In the winter, we get maybe 6 hours of sunlight, and the intensity is pretty low. Also, there's clouds a lot of the time. Heat has to come from somewhere else. In Arizona, solar is much more practical.


As I have mentioned before solar energy can be very practical at the home use level, even to the point of getting one off the grid completely. Other options like wind and geothermal, along with a more distributed and efficient grid could greatly reduce our need for hydrocarbon fuels. The real issue would be the industrial power needs that run 24/7 and require huge amounts of power. That along with personal transportation would be the hardest areas to manage for a "green" power infrastructure. Homes and farms are probably an easier fit for an off the grid approach or a distributed "green power " grid. Although, energy can be stored for night time use and efficiency improvements might result in a lessened need for power.

These statements are always made by people who haven't done enough math on the problem. All "green power" is inherently unreliable, except for geothermal. I'm not sure why we don't use more of that. These are not words the power companies like to hear. Also, they take up lots of space. Nuclear solves all of these quite handily.

I tend to agree that States do tend to get bigger at least in their geo-political reach over time but this does not mean that the trend always results in geographically large states. Look at the break up of the Soviet Union and the fractiousness of many states in Sub-Saharan Africa for instance. I'm saying we may have a Western bias due to the "colonial empires" of the past. If the technology develops to permit or aid the creation of greater self-determination then we may very well see the creation of many small states that are less dependent on large populations and natural resources than the current dichotomy.
I'm not sure why technology would develop towards greater self-determination. If anything, the opposite seems to be the case, and power is becoming more centralized worldwide. The Soviets breaking up is an exception, but I'd call that a case of overstretch, not a genuine trend. States tend to grow towards a survivable size, and I'm not sure why that size would go down.

Cordwainer said...

Good points, Byron. Still large "green power" sources could be feasible. Duty cycle issues might be solveable, while increased land use doesn't necessarily preclude their use.
I'm not supporting green grids and I'd prefer it if people were a bit smarter in the types of green power used. Geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal power, photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind or vortex power can be very effective supplements to power generation for certain applications in certain areas. Most of the power from large power plants doesn't actually get used, a more self-sufficient and distributed grid could be more efficient. Demand on the global scale will increase in the future and neither conventional, nuclear or green sources will always be a good fit for some areas. Nuclear can fulfill most of our future needs if we expand it and develop more efficient nuclear generators(Gen IV types and Fission-fragment types) but such development leads to two possible outcomes. One outcome being greater proliferation of nuclear weapons. The other being greater dependance of some nations on others due to the limited supply and geographic allocation of fissionable materials. It's one thing if your a nation without a lot of fossil fuels, you simple switch to alternate sources of power like green or nuclear and build an infrastructure fueled by cheaper or more efficient fossil fuels like the economies of Japan and Europe. But, if your a country with no fissionables of your own and you have to depend on other nations who want to control those fissionable sources, then what. At it's worst you get nuclear empires with the power to hold a nation's entire power grid hostage. At it's most likely then you have nation with rolling blackouts whenever the price of uranium goes up, because mining projects get cancelled/held up or some speculator decides to mess with the market price. Nuclear suffers from the same political drawbacks as green solutions. NIMBY! While land use may be less I doubt that will calm the public's fears. No doubt more nuclear power plants will get built in the future, but how many and how quickly?

Off the grid homes and buildings and net power homes are a reality. If you can greatly reduce the amount of energy that is needed at the endpoint then you don't need as many power plants or large green power farms. Compared to other industrialized nations the U.S. experiences more line losses and is more inefficient in its power use by end users than other industrial nations

Why technology might create a need or ability for greater self-determination? Look at how information technology has been used by the Arab Spring movement and mass media has been used to uphold the cause of democracy in China or the independence movement in Palestine. Increases in dissident crackdowns and censorship can have the opposite effect making people even more discontented with autocracy. If technology makes it possible for geurilla fighters to take out air power and important infrastructure, if information technology makes it possible for them to get out their propaganda first and if new power generation, education and service based technologies make it possible for smaller countries to be as prosperous as large resource wealthy countries then I don't see why such an outcome is unlikely. You sort of answered your own question on this one, Byron. If power becomes more centralized then the need to develop technology that decreases reliance on government increases. Centralized governments are more likely to become either autocratic, bureaucratic or minarchist "watchdog" due to over reach. People come to fear and hate the resulting autocracy or become fed up with a bureaucratic or minarchist government due to it's inability to handle matters in a timely or effective fashion at the local level.

Tony said...

Cord:

"Why technology might create a need or ability for greater self-determination? Look at how information technology has been used by the Arab Spring movement and mass media has been used to uphold the cause of democracy in China or the independence movement in Palestine. Increases in dissident crackdowns and censorship can have the opposite effect making people even more discontented with autocracy. If technology makes it possible for geurilla fighters to take out air power and important infrastructure, if information technology makes it possible for them to get out their propaganda first and if new power generation, education and service based technologies make it possible for smaller countries to be as prosperous as large resource wealthy countries then I don't see why such an outcome is unlikely. You sort of answered your own question on this one, Byron. If power becomes more centralized then the need to develop technology that decreases reliance on government increases. Centralized governments are more likely to become either autocratic, bureaucratic or minarchist "watchdog" due to over reach. People come to fear and hate the resulting autocracy or become fed up with a bureaucratic or minarchist government due to it's inability to handle matters in a timely or effective fashion at the local level."

The difficulty with that line of reasoning is that high technology doesn't happen without large, stable states in which to develop and maintain the necessary infrastructure. Also, it doesn't happen without secure international trade, which the large, stable states promote and protect.

Cordwainer said...

Also, Byron I was curious where you were getting your solar irradiance limit. I thought they were about double that. By the way what would be the limit for a multi-junction node hybrid photovoltaic, thermo-voltaic, photo-electrochemical cell with solar concentrators.

Cordwainer said...

Good point, Tony. But we are talking about an evolutionary process that doesn't appear out of a vacuum. Large states exist now and will no doubt continue to exist in the future. I wasn't envisioning a future as a thousand Rwanda's and Singapore's. I was merely postulating that smaller states might become more common and sustainable due to technological advances and more permissible due to changes in political and social policies. Also historically plenty of small states had large empires and political reach as well as strong economies and militaries that were capable of securing international trade. While they were dependent to some extent on larger states they had the ability to play off one nation against another and therefore maintain a modicum of independence.

Cordwainer said...

Survivable size of a nation largely depends on natural resources and geography. If technology nullifies these disadvantages then nation size is largely dictated by political motivations and "softer" social needs. In other words you graduate from the bottom of Maslow's pyramid and move on to the next levels. We already see technology eating away at the geography/natural resources advantage. Telecommunications, air travel, cargo palletization, nuclear weapons, ballistic missile technology are just a few things that have recently upset this balance.

JIm Baerg said...

Cordwianer: "Nuclear can fulfill most of our future needs if we expand it and develop more efficient nuclear generators(Gen IV types and Fission-fragment types) but such development leads to two possible outcomes. One outcome being greater proliferation of nuclear weapons. The other being greater dependance of some nations on others due to the limited supply and geographic allocation of fissionable materials"

Actually proliferation of nuclear weapons is almost totally unrelated to civil use of nuclear power. Most (if not all) of the countries with nuclear weapons developed them before building nuclear power plants. Also see this: http://depletedcranium.com/why-you-cant-build-a-bomb-from-spent-fuel/

Two factors make a nuclear equivalent of OPEC much less likely than the actual petroleum one.
1) the much greater energy density of uranium (& thorium) than fossil fuels makes it easy to stockpile years or decades worth of fuel.
2) it may soon be feasible to extract uranium from seawater, so any country with a sea coast can have its assured supply.

On another point in your post, I'll note that Small Modular Reactors would tend to help your notion of self determination for smaller nations.

Tony said...

Cordwainer:

"Survivable size of a nation largely depends on natural resources and geography. If technology nullifies these disadvantages then nation size is largely dictated by political motivations and "softer" social needs. In other words you graduate from the bottom of Maslow's pyramid and move on to the next levels. We already see technology eating away at the geography/natural resources advantage. Telecommunications, air travel, cargo palletization, nuclear weapons, ballistic missile technology are just a few things that have recently upset this balance. "

Singapore is one nuke away from being nothing. It's one carrier battle group away from being flat broke. Size still matters.

Cordwainer said...

Well Tony, one could say the same of Great Britain, France the Benelux or Japan. Influence and technological sophistication matter size is largely irrelevant in an interconnected world. Besides its not always the biggest bully that wins on the playground either. Also, you don't see too many people aiming their sights at the Singapores and Switzerlands of the world. Being small has it's advantages to in that people are less likely to perceive you as threatening.

Cordwainer said...

Yes, Jim there are numerous technologies and different reactor types that would make nuclear proliferation less likely. But unless you have some sort of economic and or political inducement to adopt such technologies and stay away from enrichment then you always run the chance some nation will try to join the nuclear weapons club. Also, while you can't build from spent fuel what's to stop some country from stockpiling fuel as you have pointed out they could do. Uranium from seawater just increases the supply and the political risks involved. If anything a nuclear fuel form of OPEC would be more likely in a world where nuclear power and nuclear fuel is common place. The only truly safe solution might be to ban uranium fuels and build only thorium reactors. Of course when you wager in the high initial cost of nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel programs and all of the associated security risks, bad press and public opinion. Then it becomes highly unlikely that nuclear power will ever become as common as some of us, including myself might hope for.

Byron said...

Cordwainer:
Also, Byron I was curious where you were getting your solar irradiance limit. I thought they were about double that. By the way what would be the limit for a multi-junction node hybrid photovoltaic, thermo-voltaic, photo-electrochemical cell with solar concentrators.
Wikipedia (I know, but bear with me) says that it's 1366 W/m2 at the top of the atmosphere, and 1100-1200 at the surface. This accords with what I've seen elsewhere. If you doubt me, look it up. These are zenith figures, and are the maximum that is possible for any figure of solar energy collector. Period. However, the sun isn't always at the zenith, which brings up an interesting dichotomy. While the panels can be tilted to always achieve a reasonable fraction of the zenith figure (although a rooftop installation might not be able to), the amount of power they can generate is tied to the area of land they occupy, not the panels themselves. At lower sun angles, the shadows of the panels will either fall on each other or limit how close together they can be placed, bringing the energy absorption down to that of a fixed zenith array. In practice, I believe the achievable would be about 700-800 W/m2 of land allocated to the solar system (of any kind) averaged over the whole day. I hope I've answered your question.

Thucydides said...

Size matters only marginally in terms of politics and geopolitics. Many "small" states had outsized influence due to their better internal organization and ability to manage the resources at hand. The common factor there is these states had generally more "liberal" (in the classical sense) political organizations than their neighbours.

Athens was a small city state, yet was able to organize a coalition to defeat the vastly larger, more populous and richer Persian Empire. Later, during the Peloponnesian Wars, Athens lost much of her army and fleet, as well as many of the allied states of the Delian League yet continued to fight against Sparta and Her Allies (bankrolled by the Persians) for another decade.

We see similar examples such as Elizabethan England or the United Provinces (the Netherlands) vs Hapsburg Spain, or the Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta vs the vastly larger Ottoman Empire.

Today we can contrast the "Tiger" economies against China.

Size may ultimately matter in a very long term struggle, where the resource or population base of the larger entity finally overwhelms the qualitative advantage of the smaller entity, but in the case of Venice, this process took over two centuries (and the mistaken decision by the Venetians themselves to turn away from the Sea and become involved heavily in the struggles between city states in mainland Italy).

The United States has the distinct advantage of having perhaps the most liberal (in the classical sense of Individual Liberty, Property Rights and the Rule of Law) political environment ever conceived coupled to a continental base of resources and population.

Technology which assists in maintaining or allowing the exercise of classical liberal rights can assist in energizing a polity, but technology is neutral and can equally be used by oppressive entities to stifle liberty, and ultimately lead to stagnation and decline.

Geoffrey S H said...

The ability of Imperial China to keep the Portuguese out of their territorial waters when the latter were sweeping all else before them in the 1500's does suggest that there is a limit to that analogy though. A well organized large state will be infinitely superior to a well organized small state, even if through sheer numbers and wealth.

As regards my home nation of Great Britain, I gotta say I'm with Tony on this one. Large states are less likely to change in shape (Russia and China especially) and so are stable for longer than smaller nations. They also have essentially free access to large world influence due to their heavily concentrated wealth, population and resources. The UK certainly has non chance of this kind of power on account of its small size. In fact I wonder if us Brits are merely deluding ourselves in thinking we have ANY real influence on the world stage. Self delusion can cover up a lot of cracks if its intensely applied. The willingness of other nations to humor us enforces the false reality of that delusion. But hey, so long as we still have access to cheap food and clothes, who cares.

Cordwainer said...

Glad to see Thucydides joining the conversation! Been reading through Thom S. comments on scientific synthesis and a possible movement away from the larger questions of physics that we have difficulty with. I would say we already see that to some degree. Physics has always drawn or been part of other fields, because the physics of kinetics is important to all fields. As one poster already stated gravity is the force that essentially or initially powers all actions and reactions in the universe.(I'm paraphrasing)

Which brings up my point that a better understanding of physics may not bring about spectacular new theories, but that doesn't mean it won't bring about spectacular advances in technology and engineering. Proper study, application and synthesis of "new physics" that is not currently well understood could result in advances particularly at the nano-scale. Some pretty cool advances in biochemistry, chemistry, genetics, nano-technology, fluid dynamics, electronics and structural materials could occur within the next century or so. After all I don't think anyone foresaw the direction of developments that micro-chip and wireless technology would eventually take. People knew it would be big, but they couldn't have imagined all of the results we see now.

Cordwainer said...

I agree that from a defensive stance that having a large well organized state does help. But many small states have been surprisingly aggressive and maintained large empires for long periods of time, Great Britain being a prime example. If I remember the British did essentially dismantle China as a powerhouse during the Opium Wars.

Also, modern liberal political systems have only been around for a short time. I don't think we have a really good measurement of their persistence as entities yet.

One could also make the point that we are living in an age of resource scarcity, so like our gracile ancestors outcompeted Neanderthals small more well managed states may outcompete larger less well managed states in certain arenas. Take the dismal trade imbalances, poor healthcare and education in the U.S. compared to much of the rest of the world. We have developing and Third World nations beating us in some areas.

While Great Britain's influence has certainly waned they along with France and Germany are important members of NATO and the European Union. Much can be accomplished through international dialogue and loose association or confederacy, without having to resort to a large well organized state. It's not about how well resourced you are it's about how you manage those resources and how well you manage your adversaries in terms of information, diplomacy, trade and war.

Thucydides said...

Continuing on with the argument about "large and stable".

The Arab Spring and earlier "Green Revolution" in Iran used social media tools to attack the existing regimes in those places. In the case of Iran, there was no "protected locality" that the Greens could retreat to in order to regroup, train and mass resources. The regime had the edge in resources and was able to hunt the Greens and prevent them from massing and gathering resources.

In the case of the Arab Spring, the Islamic radicals who have essentially won the contest had the protection and support of the masses who had been organized over a period of decades by groups like the Muslim Brotherhoods. While the regime had access to more resources, they were incapable of effectively deploying them, and the moderates discovered that autocratic groups have short term advantages in massing resources (in the longer term, since the resources can be massed and deployed quickly but not always efficiently, misallocation of resources becomes an issue which drags the society down. The current virtual collapse of Egypt is the most recent example, but historians can find their own).

So once again, technology is neutral, the institutions and cultures that it is embedded in can allow for the effective use (or misuse) of technology.

Anonymous said...

Well, any time you have a large, but mismanaged or poorly managed, company (or country), vs. a small, but well-managed company (or country),the well-managed one usually does well in most areas, excepting long, drawn-out wars.

Ferell

Tony said...

What I find particularly intriguing is the willingness to invoke the power and supposed neutrality of technologies without the willingnes to recognize the power and non-neutrality behind them. Does anybody here actually believe that if the US had not been supportive of the rebel in variou spot in North Africa, that they would have had internet or even international cell phone access? Net neutrality is a neat thing to talk about, but it's not a reality if the people who own and operate the network don't want it to be.

Also, high technology takes the power of knowledge, the integration of large industrial infrastructures, and -- yes, I'll say it again -- large, stable states to protect those things from interference.

Cordwainer said...

Technology may be neutral but the environment that gives rise to their effective use is not. I would say that current trends in multiple areas, social, political, economic and in the areas of advances in transportation, communication, power generation and information technology tend to level the playing field between large entities/polities and small ones. While large polities can make use of these same advancements, the environment is far more permissive to the creation of smaller polities than in times past.

Cordwainer said...

Tony does make a good point about neutrality of technology. Technology is only as neutral as those who oversee it and have a greater level of control over it. Russia owned Georgia in cyberwar during the Abkhazia revolt. That being said control of a network is not necessarily as easy as controlling your local switch, your Tier 2 regional switches are really your pivot point for cyberwar and the internet is so interconnected that short of degrading your own systems it really comes down to who has the best hackers and not necessarily who has physical control of the switches.

Russia had better resources and control than Georgia, but on the flipside China and even France has handed the U.S. our asses a few times when it comes to cyber operations.

Cordwainer said...

Another point to be made is that some technologies tend to have a life all their own, in that they are difficult to regulate and have a mass appeal. To remain relevant Renaissance aristocracy had to adopt gunpowder and the printing press. Similarly modern autocratic regimes have had to adopt information technologies to stay relevant. Censorship and legal controls are only so effective, piracy and hacking are as much a problem for Russia and China as they are for "free and democratic societies". The idea that technology is entirely neutral or does not impact the evolution of societies and polities seems flawed to me, Thucydides.

Tony said...

There seems to be a thought -- or maybe it's jut a feeling -- here that once a technology is invented, it belongs to anybody who can get their hands on the knowledge. That is sooooo not the case.

The Japanese invented the cavity magnetron (the thing that made high-resolution microwave radar possible in WW2) independently. They even made a few primitive radar sets using that technology. What they couldn't do was mass produce and mass maintain such technology, simply because they didn't have the industrial infrastructure to do it. Similarly, the British invented their own cavity magnetron, but brought it to the US for mass production during the war.

Or, going back to the so-called Arab Srping, yes, it might have been possible to make some use of internally sited internet technology in Egypt and Libya, but Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail weren't in Egypt, and access to those resources could have been cut at the sources, in the US and Europe, if the US government cared to flex a little bit of domestic and diplomatic muscle.

The playing field just isn't as level as people think. Nor is military power only relevant in direct application. If a large power says, "We want that little guy cut off, or else," guess what? Little guy gets cut off. Also, coalitions of small powers have so much friction built into them that they just can't respond as quickly and effectively as large, homogenous powers can.

In the end, size and stability really still do matter.

Cordwainer said...

Well, size and resources matter when it comes to influence. That being said small nations can have lots of influence if they control a valuable resource or are well connected to a world power like Kuwait or Israel. In the vast tableau of nations though I would say it doesn't matter that much if your a little guy,though. After all, how often is that small guy going to be a threat that the larger powers or going to have to deal with or have to deal with in such an draconian way as shutting off their internet, other technologies or resources. For instance if your doing information operations in Afghanistan or Iraq your not going to shut down the cell phone services to get a few terrorists, your going to monitor their transmissions and movements and strike when the opportunity raises itself. Plus there are ways to circumvent such tactics if you have the capital to do so. Stand-alone switches, satellite radio/phone in a box systems, and subscribing to multiple providers in multiple nations. These technologies are not even all that expensive. Haiti uses stand alone wireless networks, India's news networks make use of satellite telecom in a box technology. Greed, liberal politics and social media make for a far more permissible environment for small entities to operate in, Tony. I never said it was all about technology it's also about how that technology effects societies. Also, it was difficult for even the British and U.S. to produce radar sets until a cheaper method for producing highly-refined silicon was created.

Cordwainer said...

Also, if size is such a hallmark of stability then why are the majority of nations in the world small and medium size nations many of whom have existed for centuries even thousands of years(Japan, Vietnam). Management and control of resources along with technology are probably the real measure of stability. Which means that good political and social institutions are paramount to a nations survival.

Thucydides said...

Cord,

If you re read my post I said

technology is neutral, the institutions and cultures that it is embedded in can allow for the effective use (or misuse) of technology.

So polities with stable institutions and a culture which is not wedded to violence will probably make much better use of any particular technology than a polity with unstable institutions or no well defined and regulated means of dealing with disputes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, these are the same attributes of Classical Liberalism (i.e. Edmund Burke); Individual Liberty, the unfettered use of personal property and the Rule of Law.

Cordwainer said...

Thucydidies, I'm not arguing that technology is not neutral by itself. I'm arguing that technology is never neutral because it does not exist in a vacuum. Technology influences societies to some extent whether a society has good institutional controls or not. While a societies culture and the resources societies have at their disposal influence how technology gets used in those societies.

Also, getting back to the idea of this blog "How Much Do We Know". Most of what has been presented here due to my little exercise or thought experiment about polity size and influence has largely brought about mostly opinion-based prescriptive arguments that are largely untestable(although I'm sure some sociologist has tried to test some of the arguments we have made).

Namely, ideas like:

1. Geography is culture (good rule of thumb, but social media and transportation technology as well as pan-regional institutions like political ideaologies and religion have an influence as well)

2. Size matters. Technology matters.(Only in as much as societies take advantage of either one)

3. Technology is neutral or always under the control of the societies that make use of it.(Sometimes technology does get adopted even when a society attempts to prevent it's adoption or technology has unintended consequences on a society or effects things on a global level)

4. Good Managers and Good Institutions are paramount. (A bad leader can maintain power if they have proper backing and are not effectively opposed, weak and ineffective institutions can be maintained for centuries if the culture approves of them) Many empires and societies have been maintained through nothing more than blind imitation and social mores.

In the end it it comes down to who has the best team of Lawyers, Guns and Money. Not who has the best leader, best institutions or natural resources. Quality is key, Quantity helps.

I think the original point I was trying to make was that the upward and downward limits of nation-state size is expanding due to changes that advances in technology is having on humanity. Some will say that it is due to changes in politics and culture, but many of those changes would not have occurred without those advances in technology.

Thucydides said...

Here is a case of where the limits of knowledge result in experimental results that do not "explain" things the way they were expected. While this is "speculation" about the result, it certainly demonstrates we don't have quite a firm grasp on things:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/06/multiverse-evidence-from-higgs-boson.html#more

Multiverse evidence from Higgs Boson Details

In order for the Higgs boson to make sense with the mass (or equivalent energy) it was determined to have, the LHC needed to find a swarm of other particles, too. However, None turned up.

With the discovery of only one particle, the LHC experiments deepened a profound problem in physics that had been brewing for decades. Modern equations seem to capture reality with breathtaking accuracy, correctly predicting the values of many constants of nature and the existence of particles like the Higgs. Yet a few constants — including the mass of the Higgs boson — are exponentially different from what these trusted laws indicate they should be, in ways that would rule out any chance of life, unless the universe is shaped by inexplicable fine-tunings and cancellations.

The LHC will resume smashing protons in 2015 in a last-ditch search for answers. But in papers, talks and interviews, Arkani-Hamed and many other top physicists are already confronting the possibility that the universe might be unnatural. (There is wide disagreement, however, about what it would take to prove it.)

“Ten or 20 years ago, I was a firm believer in naturalness,” said Nathan Seiberg, a theoretical physicist at the Institute, where Einstein taught from 1933 until his death in 1955. “Now I’m not so sure. My hope is there’s still something we haven’t thought about, some other mechanism that would explain all these things. But I don’t see what it could be.”

Physicists reason that if the universe is unnatural, with extremely unlikely fundamental constants that make life possible, then an enormous number of universes must exist for our improbable case to have been realized. Otherwise, why should we be so lucky? Unnaturalness would give a huge lift to the multiverse hypothesis, which holds that our universe is one bubble in an infinite and inaccessible foam. According to a popular but polarizing framework called string theory, the number of possible types of universes that can bubble up in a multiverse is around 10^500. In a few of them, chance cancellations would produce the strange constants we observe.

Either we live in an overcomplicated but stand-alone universe, or we inhabit an atypical bubble in a multiverse.



The Higgs boson has a mass of 126 giga-electron-volts, but interactions with the other known particles should add about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 giga-electron-volts to its mass. This implies that the Higgs’ “bare mass,” or starting value before other particles affect it, just so happens to be the negative of that astronomical number, resulting in a near-perfect cancellation that leaves just a hint of Higgs behind: 126 giga-electron-volts.

Physicists have gone through three generations of particle accelerators searching for new particles, posited by a theory called supersymmetry, that would drive the Higgs mass down exactly as much as the known particles drive it up. But so far they’ve come up empty-handed.

The upgraded LHC will explore ever-higher energy scales in its next run, but even if new particles are found, they will almost definitely be too heavy to influence the Higgs mass in quite the right way. The Higgs will still seem at least 10 or 100 times too light. Physicists disagree about whether this is acceptable in a natural, stand-alone universe. “Fine-tuned a little — maybe it just happens,” said Lisa Randall, a professor at Harvard University. But in Arkani-Hamed’s opinion, being “a little bit tuned is like being a little bit pregnant. It just doesn’t exist.”

SOURCE - Scientific American

Cordwainer said...

Well a little bit pregnant does happen.(ie. polar bodies, stone births etc.) Perhaps what we are seeing is not really a Higgs boson in the sense that the Standard Model defines it. Or perhaps like quarks there are different types of Higg's bosons or the Higg's particle is it's own anti-particle. At the energies they are looking at it might be extremely hard to detect the differences in the "flavor" of a particle. I guess will have to wait till 2015. That being said I am partial to multiverse theory, the problem is most data points point to our universe being flat and closed which would seem to err against a cyclical multiverse scheme. Although our universe could be part of a single generation of universes created at the same time floating in foam of many universes side-by-side. A flat open universe would tend to be more to be natural so you would probably need some unnaturalness to explain any major fine tuning of the Higg's particle if that makes any sense.

Thucydides said...

The real issue with this result is that the Standard model makes some very clear predictions about the Higgs boson.

Since the Standard model has been correct to a very large number of decimal places prior to this, the result is quite unexpected. Now there is always the possibility that this is an error in the machinery (remember FTL neutrino's?), all the way to very exotic explanations like the multiverse theory.

OF course, as Tony pointed out upthread, there are very few practical applications to this discovery even if it indeed proof of the multiverse. The scale of the event and the scope of the machinery needed to make this discovery puts it literally out of reach. Unless there are some serious errors in classical, quantum or relativistic physics, there is little chance you can make a "tabletop" device to examine or exploit this discovery.

Cordwainer said...

Well, such an unlikely result would have consequences to Brane and M-theory which might change the math in regards to determining the curvature of space-time, gravitational correspondencies between gravitiational bodies and any future Grand Unification Theory of gravity and the other forces. Any advantages to increased spaceflight efficiency(like better calculations of gravity turn and slingshot maneuvers or better plotting of the Interplanetary Transport Network) that this would give us would likely be minor unless it turns out Mach effects do exist.

Anonymous said...

The Standard Model is an amazingly accurate theory, but it is built on a score of assumptions. It could easily lead to an intellectual dead end if we don't see any deviations from it before our particle accelerators reach their practical energy limit and that will happen soon.

Supersymmetry theories were supposed to be our way past the limitations of the Standard Model. The Higgs at around 126 Gev pretty much kills Supersymmetry. WIMPS as dark matter is based on Supersymmetry, so you can write that off too.

The various versions of String Theory, such as M-Theory, are elegant math, but are really philosophy instead of physics. To be science, your theory has to make predictions that can be tested. String Theory fails that criteria. Most of the popular science your read about is based on String Theory, so take it with a gain of salt.

Since we know nothing about dark energy, dark matter, and very little about gravity, it is obvious that there is a lot about the universe that we don't know. Unfortunately, we may not be smart enough to figure it out. The PNF will probably look a lot like what we have today with some minor engineering improvements.

Maybe the next Einstein or Newton will step up with an inspired theory that will get us going again. Until that happens, we can still read and write sci-fi to keep us entertained. Also, there's always the next exciting blog entry from Rick to look forward to.

Ron

Cordwainer said...

Well the whole dark matter/dark energy thing confuses me since scientist keep having to change there models to make sense of all the contradictions they find. At first it was a mixed model then Lamda CDM now it's anybody's guess. If WIMP's and LSP's our out what are we left with "dark fluid" or "modified gravity"? If the orthodox physicists can't get a good handle on answering questions like superinflation and the observed lack of matter and homogeneity in the universe then they don't really have much of a leg up over the "philosophy" of theoretical physicists in my opinion.

Anonymous said...

50,000 years and we've just realized we don't even know what 96% of the universe is made of. We see our theories of the way the universe work become uncertain but we haven't come up with anything to replace it with, yet. It may be that we'll spend years, or even decades, searching for a replacement theory to test and refine for another century or more. How much do we know? Not nearly as much as we thought we did, just a few years ago. I think we have a very long way to go.

Ferrell

Cordwainer said...

Well, the Universe likes throwing curve balls and often what are seen as unorthodox theories over time become the prevailing theories. It reminds me of the 19th century when you had all these different theories regarding evolution and the origin of species. Along comes Darwin with an outside view that no one likes but is eventually adopted as the dominant view. Now, over a century later the even more pariah idea of Kropotkin's that fitness is not all about tooth and nail selfishness but about reciprocity and cooperation is getting wider acceptance. I sort of think the physics community needs an outside the box thinker to shake up the orthodoxy a bit.

Geoffrey S H said...

Early astro-dynamic models of the solar system in the 17th century had little practical use, and the means to exploit the movement of the planets outside of quack theories on astrology didn't exist. Now, with better technology and a higher energy limit, we have the limited means to study, land on and exploit these planets. Maybe the knowledge of something coming long before the energy limit allows its exploitation is to be, and has been a common thing in our future and past.

Even if we had discovered ftl neutrinos a while back, it could have been a thousand years before we had the technology to make use of them.

Thom S said...

Cordwainer,

To be fair to Darwin, his theory was never about nature as red in tooth and claw so much as it was about the survival of the fittest - the fittest being simply those with heritable traits that provided a reproductive advantage (of which living to reproductive age was a large part).

As to cooperation, things like kin selection work perfectly well for explaining how a seemingly-altruistic set of behaviors can work in one's reproductive favor.

As for physics, my opinion is that what it needs is not an out-of-the-box thinker (there are plenty of those) but rather some way to confirm if any of the out-of-the-box thoughts are correct (so what Ron said, basically).
I also don't have much faith in this idea of the genius as some sort of singular anomaly that arrives to gift us with his (or her) unique worldview. Rather, the genius is simply the first person to codify and explain the new zeitgeist.

Cordwainer said...

True, Darwin never quantified what "fitness" any trait could be considered more fit by virtue of environment and whether it provides a benefit for the passing on of genes. Kin-selection though does not pass the test for the evolution of all altruistic behaviors that we see in both animals and humans, such as symbiotic or cooperative behaviors between species and sacrifices made by humans due to larger social activities than those between family groups. Selfishness is a virtue as Ayn Rand was want to point out, in humans though selfishness extends far beyond what is just good for an individual. Humans are social animals that are governed by concepts like disgust, virtue, modesty and reciprocity. Like many well known theories their proponents often attempt to reduce those theories to their base elements or take them out of context to support their own views. Such as the flawed interpretation of Social Darwinism or the inflexible and simplified interpretation of Clausewitz that many politicians and military planners have used in the past.

Cordwainer said...

To put it more simply human beings have an inflated sense of self-importance that longs for cultural continuity, even if that continuity does not directly benefit our progeny. As long as it benefits those that share our behavioral and genetic imperatives then that is enough for the "harsh hand of natural selection". It may be that sense of self-importance that actually slows our progress in some scientific fields. Because of self-importance we tend to become very pigeon-holed in our thinking and very possessive of our own ideas. Rather than taking a holistic and syncretic view and engaging in interdisciplinary cooperation we end up at odds with one another.

Anonymous said...

right: we humans want what is best for ourelve, for our families, for our community, for our culture. Sacrificing for one to benefit another builds on that concept.

Ferrell

Thom S said...

It should be understood that things like neutral selection, genetic drift and co-selection are elements as well. But to just dismiss kin selection in favour of what seems to be some sort of group selection is folly. Selection always happens at the level of the individual (as hereditary traits are exactly that), so group selection fails by simple virtue of not addressing how how a trait is going to get established in the group in the first place. If it provides a reproductive advantage then it falls under standard selection; if it allows the trait to propagate indirectly then kin selection is at play. To simply argue for some diffuse concept of 'good for the group/species' is to commit one of the classic errors of understanding of evolution.

For a more plausible explanation in humans, consider that a trait that evolved under kin selection (altruistic behaviour towards in-group members) can then be co-opted by society as a whole once things like agriculture provide a society to co-opt them.
Even so, talking about social traits as if they are hard-coded misses the point that people are not automatons. We have this amazing set of cognitive tools that, while helping us to survive, also allow us to do other things as a happy (or not - see depression) byproduct.

Finally: symbiosis, which you just sort of chucked into the mix, is a clear example of standard natural selection as both parties accrue an advantage from the arrangement. The interesting stuff, for a evolutionary biologist at least, happens when such an arrangement breaks down.

Thom S said...

To tie this point to the larger discussion, I should mention the eternal refrain of the scientist (besides 'more research is required' and 'please give us funding'):

"I think you'll find that it's more complicated than that."

This is why I'm a little leery of extending my opinions on physics to actually engage with the central question of the OP, at least until there's a bona fide physics major in the house to moderate and elucidate.

Cordwainer said...

True kin selection can and has been co-opted to produce behaviors that mimic or give rise to true group selection. I was not arguing that kin selection does not have a role, but group selection or pseudo-altruism does exist and has been largely been proven through games theory and animal behavioral studies. Also, the fact that two symbiotic parties chose to engage in a symbiotic role is not always as straightforward as a win-win strategy for both parties, sometimes their are happy accidents and some times their are unequal partnerships. That being said altruistic behaviors seem to go beyond mere kin-ship modality among hunter-gatherer groups, other primates and elephants so while agriculture and other socio-technological developments certainly nuanced those behaviors. previously developed among our earlier ancestors. It is quite possible their development was not entirely based on either standard or kin based selection criteria.

So a 15-year old developed a thermoelectric flashlight recently. I want one just to see if my poorly circulated cold hands will power one. Of course its the potential temperature difference that matters so it should work unless your skin temperature is roughly the same as the air temperature outside, right? Seems like a better idea than those wind-up piezo-electrics that only seem to work half the time.

Cordwainer said...

I meant there not their, its late on the West Coast. Also, as far as I can tell I never made any comment that would seem to indicate that standard, kin or group selection was something that would not occur at the individual level. I don't even think that in the case of hive or colony based insects that those forms of selection don't occur somewhere at the individual level. Although, in the case of kin-selection based altruism even William Buckley had to admit that the individual organism is not the sole vehicle for the selection and dispersal of genetic and behavioral traits. It is a combination of factors within an animals physical and social environment that determines fitness.

Cordwainer said...

Plus all natural selection arguments really become "a what came before the the chicken or the egg question" once you get down to the mitochondrial microbiological level.

Thom S said...

Cordwainer,

I'm just going to have to disagree with you then - my understanding (ie: what I was taught) is that group selection is dead and almost entirely disproven, with about 5 second's worth of searching turning up stuff like this:
http://ib.berkeley.edu/courses/ib160/past_papers/beroukhim.html

You are entirely correct that the definition of symbiosis includes things like mutualism (which I was speaking of), commensalism and so on. The point - that standard selection (or lack thereof) still applies - stands. Again, you have to provide a mechanism for heritable transfer of traits. Once you posit that selective advantage is accruing to individuals within a group (thus allowing them to propagate a group-helpful trait) you're straight back to standard selection with benefit to the group tacked on as a 'by the way'.

That environment (including social environment) affects phenotype affects fitness is pretty bedrock stuff. I honestly don't know anyone who would even try to claim that we're genetically pre-programmed automata or something. But again, this has no bearing on group selection unless you can posit a way in which social environment somehow produces a group-wide heritable trait. Saying that altruistic behaviours go 'beyond kin-ship modality' is just assertion without evidence. While I am pretty partial to the nostrum that behaviours can be passed down from parent to child, the lack of a granular mechanism (you can pick up behaviours from books too. Or TV. Or your neighbour. Or by using drugs. Or...) means that it is neigh-pointless to try and fit it within an evolutionary framework.

I also don't see how natural selection stops working at the cellular level - you can map population changes in semi-autonomous organelles - so there is really only an egg: the events that led to the first self-replicating lifeform (which is, to be blunt, so broad a question as to fit in another field entirely). Everything else is just chicken, chicken and more chicken.

Anonymous said...

Thom S:

This is why I'm a little leery of extending my opinions on physics to actually engage with the central question of the OP, at least until there's a bona fide physics major in the house to moderate and elucidate.

No need to wait, jump right in.

I have a BS in physics with concentration in astronomy, but I never brought it up because why should anyone believe someone's post on the Internet.

Even if real PhD scientists were contributing to this blog, people with set opinions would still shoot them down. That's just life on the Internet.

Just express your ideas as opinion, not as the Gospel, and you'll be fine.

Ron

Cordwainer said...

Hive/Colony organisms do exhibit pre-programmed automata that is determined by standard selection by the head of the colony ie. Queen, so this is a form of pseudo-group selection. Also, cognitive choice is not something just demonstrated among humans or higher forms of life. Even lower life forms like fish demonstrated kin-selection within a group that lead to larger scale effects for the group that exclude or don't directly benefit some individuals who sacrifice their genetic contribution for others.(avuncularism, homosexuality, peer pressure) Of, course this is "group selection" as "by the way" as you put it. Congo River studies of fish by the way pretty much shows that environment can produce group wide heritable traits. Commensalism itself is largely dictated by physical and social environment that select for a group of genes (like neoteny) not necessarily a specific individual of kin-ship group, as long as that genetic make-up is met it doesn't matter which group those genes came from. I think we are arguing semantics on what "group selection" means not necessarily whether it's the chicken that choses. Some choices for the "chicken" though are already mapped out and influenced to some degree by social environment as well as physical environment.(domestication, geographic isolation) On the other hand cognitive problem solving skills can overcome physical and social environmental norms. For, instance the behaviors of some "rogue" wolves in Yellowstone are a good example of behavioral paradigm shift.

If you have a useful skill or degree in a particular area then you really should speak up. You have a duty to educate and the whole point of a blog is for lively debate. Just remember what my IT instructors have told me in the past. A room full of average Joe's can often come up with better ideas than a room full of technocrat's. At the end of the day a degree is just a piece of paper it's what you do with that degree and whether you maintain your knowledge in that skill area that matters.

Cordwainer said...

An, additional caveat. Behaviors like adoption and the passing on of learned skills to individuals who are not kin is also pretty well documented among animals. (elephants, wolves etc.)Behaviors such as subtle cheating and ostracism also occur. I am willing to admit that "group selection" is just other forms of selection that is co-opted to form an institution of cultural continuance that may benefit more than one group or a particular set of groups, if your willing to admit that evolution is sometimes cooperative in nature.

Thom S said...

Cordwainer,

With regards to hive organisms, it is known now that the Queen is less taskmaster and more information centre + genitals of a larger organism (which is to say that the workers, by and large, are the ones making decisions). Even so, each organism in the hive is looking after its own interests.

One of the interesting things about the hymenoptera (which is an order that includes the bees, ants and wasps) is that they have genetics which make them uniquely prone to the sort of selfish altruism that kin selection is built around. In effect, a worker is more related to her sisters than she is to her offspring. By helping mom to breed, she is therefore increasing her fitness more than she would if she went off on her own to do so.

In bees, this is especially interesting to study because there are a whole range of species sitting in graduated sequences along the path to hive-hood (although even the most social of bees aren't quite there yet - witness the anarchy of a late-stage colony for instance). The result is that a biologist can actually look at the steps leading to something like a hive organism.

As for the semantics of group selection: part of the problem is that the term has mutated to fit everything from 'extended' kin selection all the way to some sort of mystical meta-imperative to 'improve' species.

The group selection that I am talking about here is the idea that traits that benefit a group (without regard to individual fitness improvements) can be passed on and selected for somehow. This is, as I've said, a concept lacking a mechanism in a world where only the gene (which is to say DNA plus associated heritable expression machinery and so on) gets to be a permanent storage system for traits.

This is not to simplify the situation of course. We are, as I said, not automatons rigidly pre-programmed by our genes. Rather, we are intricately complex things - computers executing programs with input from the environment which, in the case of multi-cellular life, include the creation of meta-computers which in turn can have complex, non-deterministic interactions with other iterations of ourselves.

It's just that, in all this wonderful complexity, only the code itself is eternal.

Thom S said...

Post was getting too long, so I split it.

In regards to admitting the cooperative nature of evolution - in what sense? That organisms can have complex interactions with each other and that these can modulate their relative fitnesses, is again bedrock stuff. We are not islands, after all.

I'd modify your IT analogy a little - average Joes and technocrats could both have the same level of knowledge regarding coding. With that in mind, it would then become about who was willing to listen to an actual programmer.

What people overlook is that that piece of paper is not given out simply on a whim. A degree is a tangible symbol that the person holding it took in and understood a body of knowledge that the (hopefully!) best and brightest in their field thought necessary to understand their subject of study. It says that the person holding it had to sit and prove, bit by bit and year by year, that they weren't wrong. And keep doing it for the three-plus years that were necessary to satisfy the requirements of the course.

There are ignorant people with degrees, of course, and knowledgeable people without. But the person with a degree is far more likely to have a broad, deep understanding of the subject than a layperson. Hence my pleading for someone with actual knowledge of physics (thanks Ron!) to make sure that it's not just the blind leading the blind.

Speaking of Ron, I'd hope that we're trying to not be the typical internet here. So feel free to correct our misconceptions in person. Though adding references helps too :)

Cordwainer said...

I wasn't making an argument for a group meta-imperative for species improvement, in fact I was actually trying to say our own need for social continuity may at times give rise to a misguided social imperative to do so as in the case of Social Darwinism and eugenics in the past. While many organisms have greater cognitive abilities than biologists have given them in the past it is doubtful that most of them are capable of such a cognitive choice since this requires a great deal of sentience. That being said social interactions within a species and between species can result in selection of targeted groups that go beyond general kin selection. While kin selection and standard selection influence these choices in the case of sociable animals forces like reciprocity, fair play and peer pressure can also influence these choices. Whether this actually creates and environment where all members of a species have an equal ability to reproduce is debatable and may very well exclude some individuals. If the majority benefit then that group selection holds. If members of a species are incapable of at least some group selection or extended kin-selection whereby we look at traits that are desirable in ourselves or a mate and select for ourselves or others from foreign groups for those traits then we would not see the diversity of traits that we see in species and conversely the evolution of ethics would have never happened. I might not like my brother's girlfriends parents but if my brother sees something in her that I agree with then I'm not going to kick the future in-laws out of the tribe. Sometimes the choice of a trait is not just for one's self and sometimes it is influenced by other members of a group. Most animals can select for the inclusion of a foreign or larger group if it satisfies standard or kin-selection in some degree. I agree it is unlikely that there are any mechanisms for excluding oneself entirely from the choice of a group trait that one does not possess and will not benefit from, who knows though human self-loathing and peer pressure are powerful forces. I do think though that social animals often do chose traits from groups or individuals that only benefit them indirectly, such as traits that benefit the group as a whole and thus increase everyone's survival and ability to procreate.

Cordwainer said...

This being a "science fiction" blog and not a "science fact" blog one has to consider very carefully what factual interjections one makes, not only out of a sense of politeness but also since it tends to stunt creativity.

For instance although I think it very unlikely that there is any scientific validity to the theory I am about to suggest, it makes for an interesting thought experiment.

What if the universe is composed of some sort of "dark fluid" and whatever super-symmetry we see is a sort of super-asymmetry. The basic forces of the universe don't actually unify into a "god particle" but instead are the result of "blending" of elementary particles wave functions. What we are seeing is not a "Higgs particle" but actually a conglomeration of other particles that form a dense plasma or "dark fluid". If a "God particle" does exist it only existed at the begging of the Universe and acted as a catalyst for the "dark fluid" and conversely the material expansion of the Universe. Or there are quasi-higgs particles that result as product of "blending" that have different masses due to the local interaction of light and gravity that is moderated differently in different parts of the Universe due to the interaction of "dark fluid". Think of the universe as a sink that fills with fluid from the "Big Bang" and that fluid has ripples, turbulence and pressure differences due to the energy released from "Big Bang", inflationary events and fluctuations of higher dimensional space that may be the product of zero-point or negative energy leaking in from a multiverse "foam" or some sort of 4-dimensional particle field that moderates time as an actual force and not a result of forces.(a chronatron for lack of a better term)

Cordwainer said...

beginning not begging

Anonymous said...

Interesting; you could use it as a basis for a story about "the next big standard in physics".

Ferrell

Noclevername said...

Tony: "The point I've been trying to make is that there are practical limits to the acquisition of knowledge, which we are coming cloe to achieving. That's verifiable fact."

Verify it, then.

Cordwainer said...

While we are coming to a practical limit in the area of designing linear accelerators for investigating higher energy physics. There are certainly other areas that may yet yield observable phenomena that will expand our knowledge in this area. Such other disciplines like cosmology, astrophysics, and nanotechnology could provide us with valuable insights. After all know one predicted we would ever see gravity lensing or Bose-Einsteinian Condensates in outer space yet they're there.

Cordwainer said...

Well as Tony will no doubt point out such a preposterous theory would only be of value if we were to figure out a way to effect the "dark fluid" or "Einsteinian-Aether" whose existence such a theory would allow for. Building huge linear accelerators or Ford-Seitner mirrors would be costly and the resulting work gained would be limited in use and probably cost more energy then the benefit gained.

Cordwainer said...

On a more realistic foot since we have an actual physicist in the room. Would it be possible to combine thermo-power wave technology with a nuclear thermal rocket engine or a stirling radio-isotope generator. I know nano-tubes and graphene is expensive but the cost might not be exorbitant if we stick to a small-scale design. I was thinking you could surround a cermet tile with an inner layer of non-porous carbide or graphene but use a porous layer of nanotubes or fibrous graphen as the outside layer instead of porous pyrolytic carbide. Shape your your fuel rod into a tube or force cone and run your working gas/propellant through and/or over the porous layer of nanotube. Great care would have to be taken in the design to insulate, cool and protect the wires that would carry any resulting electrical charge from the thermopower wave generated, though. I don't know if the gain in electricity generated as an addition to conventional methods would be worth it, but it could boost the energy obtained from conventional heat exchangers or stirling engines that use heat from a nuclear source.

Thom S said...

Complete tangent incoming - This post by Derek Lowe* (http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/06/28/hybrid_biomolecules_edible_and_not.php) jibes very nicely with the idea that any putative alien biology will most likely be very different biochemically.
The end result being that, were your space cowboy to get eaten by that giant Rigellian squid-monster, the most likely result would be that it would suffer from severe indigestion due to not being able to actually break down and use the poor unfortunate's mortal remains.

I'm having images of spore-ships resulting in non-interacting -biochemically, at least- ecosystems on the same planet.

* Whose blog is well worth frequent visits.

Cordwainer said...

Yes, but the Rigellian probably won't find our dear astronaut toxic or entirely unappetizing. Just hard to digest like galactose or olestra is to humans. Also, if our dear alien is an extremophile it will probably be adept at digesting things we mortals have difficulty digesting like bones and plastic.

Cordwainer said...

Interesting hypothesis though on what might occur if some species were to take up the project of "seeding" other solar systems for future biosphere modification.
Would make for a strange environment for sure. Would intelligent species compete for colonization rights for a planet by seeing who could seed it with the most successful organisms?

Anonymous said...

Cordwainer:

On a more realistic foot since we have an actual physicist in the room. Would it be possible to combine thermo-power wave technology with a nuclear thermal rocket engine or a stirling radio-isotope generator.

Well, I only got a Bachelor of Science degree, which means I am only worthy of getting coffee for a PhD, but I'll give it a shot.

Thermopower wave refers to the self propagating wave of the chemical reaction of a fuel, so that doesn't really apply to nuclear thermal rockets or Stirling radioisotope generators.

http://web.mit.edu/stranogroup/index.php/research/22-thermopower-waves.html

Stirling radioisotope generators are an attempt to get more electric power than you can from thermocouples. You get more from our short supply of plutonium. The disadvantage is the Stirling engine introduces moving parts. If NASA can get one that runs for years, then deep space probes can have more power intensive instruments.

If you need to generate electricity from a nuclear thermal rocket, you can make it bimodal. Basically, a combination rocket and power plant.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Nuclear_Thermal

I don't think adding thermocouples would be worth the effort. You wouldn't get much power out of them and since you are moving heat away from temperature dependent systems, you are reducing their efficiency.

For anyone who hasn't already done so, go read every single page of the Atomic Rockets website. It is a great resource.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

Also check out Rick's earlier blog entries. There are a lot of good discussions in there.

Ron

Anonymous said...

I was thinking, even if Tony is right and theoretical science doesn't come up with anything we can use for engineering, we can still have a Rocketpunk future of sorts.

As Heinlein said, "If you can get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere." Once we get past the very hard part of establishing a presence in orbit, we have the whole solar system ahead of us.

It now looks like there is enough water on the moon to start a refueling infrastructure. Build ships at EML-2, fuel up, and off to the rest of the solar system.

Landing on Mars and taking off again would be a pain, so we can just play around with asteroids or the rings of Saturn. Maybe it would be worth it to drop colonies on Mars, just don't expect to change your mind and come back.

OK, no galactic empire, but it still would be pretty cool.

Science and engineering isn't really the problem. Economics is. How would you justify the expense?

Ron

Cordwainer said...

I've read atomic rockets page several times now, Ron.

As for thermopower wave I would think it has more to do with the Seebek coefficiency of the material and whether you can propagate a high enough temperature wave at high enough speed from a nuclear thermal source for the thermal wave to attach to electrical charges created by electrostatic friction and electron-phonon coupling. So whether the fuel is embedded in the material, diffused in to the material as reactive cryogenic gases or heated by a nuclear source prior to being pressure fed through shouldn't matter. The problem that one might have would be maintaining proper alignment of the nanotubes for coupling to take place if you were to just force feed propellants into a well aligned nanotube matrix/mesh. Also I'm not seeing where their would be a whole lot of loss with a stirling radio-isotope generator, yes a lot of the gases heat would be lost to the nanotube blanket but the gases would still come out the end at high enough pressures and heat to drive the free-piston. I mean we are talking very high temperatures here, most thermopower waves measure around 2800 to 3000 K, whether nuclear fission could produce temperatures that high for prolonged periods without creating safety or technological feasibilty concerns is debatable. I imagine that like plasma these waves probably dissipate their heat rather rapidly since they are moving so rapidly they spread their heat over a wide area also they've only been demonstrated at small scales. Like how a gun produces enormous amounts of heat and pressure in the barrel but most of the heat and gas goes out the front end, most of the heat would be lost to space. So you might need a very large and/or cryogenically cooled heat exchanger to soak up the discharge, but you would need that for a bi-modal NTR anyways. I agree it wouldn't make for much of an increase over conventional methods and might be too expensive to be used for anything other than boosting small scale nuclear powerplants. I don't really see a common-sense reason to developing such a device though, any energy gain probably wouldn't be worth the cost.

Cordwainer said...

In other words thermopower waves have so far only been demonstrated with solid propellants that essentially create a shaped charge with a shock-wave effect that propagates the thermal wave at the right temperature and speed. Alternating currents are possible by mixing propellants with different burn rates. There has also been some interest in developing thermopower devices that utilize liquid oxidizers and liquid propellants to produce thermopower waves in a kind of pulse detonation thermopower wave pulse-jet.Producing an intermittent pulsed wave through nuclear thermal means might be difficult but you might be able to accomplish it through some type of LANTR cycle.

Anonymous said...

Cordwainer:

So whether the fuel is embedded in the material, diffused in to the material as reactive cryogenic gases or heated by a nuclear source prior to being pressure fed through shouldn't matter.

It makes a big difference on what the fuel is and how it is used. Thermopower waves use a chemical reaction. It is not a simple thermocouple.

Stirling engines use a working fluid. In a Stirling radioisotope generator the plutonium is the fuel. No chemical reaction.

Thermal nuclear rockets use a working fluid as the propellant. The fuel is the radioactive material in the reactor. No chemical reaction. A LANTR engine injects LOX so you could get a reaction, but are you seriously suggesting placing the thermopower wave device in the exhaust of a rocket?

Thermopower wave devices might have a future as very small power sources or even replacements for fuel cells, but I don't see how they can be used in the applications you are discussing.

Ron

JIm Baerg said...

Getting a Stirling RTG to run for years may not be all that hard. After all, refrigerators run for years without maintenance.

The main factor making this possible is that all the moving parts are in a closed system with no way for dust to get in & cause wear in the moving parts. The stirling RTG will have that factor automatically.

Anonymous said...

JIm Baerg:

Getting a Stirling RTG to run for years may not be all that hard. After all, refrigerators run for years without maintenance.

Good point, it is a sealed system.

I found a NASA PDF on their Stirling RTG. As of its writing, a pair of ASRGs had run for 51,600 hours (almost 6 years).

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/rps/docs/ASRGfacts2_10rev3_21.pdf

Ron

Cordwainer said...

Yes, I was actually suggesting sticking a thermo-power wave device in the exhaust of a rocket, albeit a small one. We are talking about carbon-carbon materials that would be more than capable of withstanding such stresses at least temporarily. WIth small scale devices and proper design to cope with heat stresses of course. Who knows it might be plausible?

Anonymous said...

Cordwainer:

Who knows it might be plausible?

Why make the system more complicated and reduce its efficiency? Putting something in the exhaust will block part of the flow and reduce your thrust. It will have to be designed to survive the pressure of the exhaust in addition to its heat. This device is becoming very massive for what little electricity you are producing. Sure it is plausible, but it is also pointless.

Remember, each new system you add is far less than 100% efficient. You will be increasing losses. You can't cheat thermodynamics, especially with thermocouples or anything else that uses the Seebek effect.

Now let's look at a theoretical nuclear rocket for the near future. Take a LANTR for propulsion. Most of time the core just sits there and sizzles. Add Stirling engines and now you have a bimodal NTR. Thrust and electricity, just not necessarily at the same time.

If you need emergency power or power during an engine burn and it is not practical to run the Stirling engines at the same time, add a thermopower wave device. It should be more efficient than a fuel cell and you are carrying hydrogen and oxygen for the LANTR.

Of course, if you are in the inner solar system, just use solar panels.

Ron

Cordwainer said...

Well, I already admitted it wasn't very practical particularly if your concentration is as part of a propulsion device. Perhaps it could be useful though as an addition to boost a power generation system.

Other more or less practical ideas I had were:

1. Bundle a number of small thermo-power pulse jets together into a propulsion core. This would effectively give you a weak chemical rocket with a high level of throttle, that you could use to power or recharge onboard power systems. You might even be able to redirect the current produced back into the rocket's exhaust to excite the exhaust into a plasma giving you even greater throttle. The ability to send as well as receive current through the nanotubes might also allow some fuels like methane to be ignited in vacuum during a cold start.

2. Lace a microwave rectennae/sail with thermo-power wave devices and use the energy from a microwave laser to ignite the fuel. This would give you a hybrid light sail/rocket that also generates power.

3. Small scale power device whereby you place a pyroelectric screen far enough away from the thermo-power devices exhaust stream that it collects the heat from the exhaust without melting. Use high temperature pyroelectric materials like lithium tantalate and properly vent to shorten and diffuse the exhaust stream. At the end of your ported tube place a tuned nano-photonic crystal panel and bounce the heat waves back at a frequency easily absorbed by a high temperature rectenna screen placed after your pyroelectric screen.

Cordwainer said...

As to the first idea on that list you there would be some issues with the increased complexity. You would have to design a method for fueling and igniting separate rocket tubes in the module without impairing the function of other tubes. Also there would be some trade-offs in regards to fuel efficiency and over-all thrust. At low thrust fuel efficiency would be less than a similarly powered ion thruster, while at high thrust the velocity of the exhaust would be lower thus resulting in less thrust compared to a similarly liquid fueled rocket. Although one could appropriately shape the porous nanotube barrier to allow fuel to stick to the surface making for more efficient deflagration burns. The high throttle-ability might make it very useful for station-keeping and orbital maneuvers.

Cordwainer said...

The other possibility that I was considering involved using thermo-power wave to power a gas dynamic laser. Exhaust from the thermo-power device is used as a lasing medium to provide population inversion, while electricity generated by the thermopower wave is used to power the electrical discharge, flashlamp or laser diode used to optically pump the laser.

Thucydides said...

If you are looking to generate electrical energy (or even mechanical energy) while the engine is running, it would be much simpler to tap some of the rotary energy from the turbopumps.

This would even be true in a NTR, and when the NTR is in flight idle, reactor heat can still be tapped in this fashion (although the reaction mass running through the reactor as coolant would then have to be either sent to a heat exchanger or vented overboard).

Nothing is free.

Cordwainer said...

Well if you are using a LANTR then you can burn some of the fuel in a pre-burner first. If you have your NTR run on a simple hypergolic fuel first then helium you could pressure feed the hypergolic and then use an expander cycle to feed the helium. Problem would be heating hypergolics or simple hydrocarbons like ethylene in an NTR could cause caustic containment problems.

Some other possible uses of thermopower-wave devices.
1. Kinetically spinning up a homopolar flywheel with the explosion while charging the electromagnets with the electricity produce by the thermopower wave.
2. Initial chemical launch of a projectile and simultaneous charging of the rails to a railgun.
3. Providing the kinetic energy to the motion of a rolled linear motor(Sawyer motor) while while powering the electromagnets. Essentially giving a rocket powered boost to the linear motors motion.

Rick said...

There is - belatedly! - a new post on the main page:

Worldbuilding on the Fly?

TOM said...

Well, personally, i prefer the theory of superfluid vacuum compared to the extra dimensions of superstring theory.

I always failed to understand, why they keep saying FTL could violate casuality, just because you can observe the past, that doesnt mean you can CHANGE it... Cherenkov radiation doesnt violate casuality.

If the theory of superfluid vacuum happens to be true, and space is a bit like to an ocean... and no extra dimensions to get out of it... then the only possible way to go faster is to build a pipeline through it.

It is a big question (if it is theoretically possible) whether this can be achieved without planet killer energies??
Or rather than transport matter, transport only information through some entanglement stuff, and build things from local energy and matter based on pure information?

Anonymous said...

A few things I've picked up on to comment.

The only reason they knew there was dark matter was because of General Relativity - not despite it. General Relativity has even been used to map the Dark Matter, it just doesn't explain what it is.

Newton, Einstein, and the folks who came up with Quantum Mechanics were all correct, the more complete understanding doesn't throw out the other theories it, refines our understanding of them. The same is happening with Standard Model and this more recent Higgs testing at the LHC. They may seem to contradict but that is not because they all can't be correct.

Most physicists are pretty adamant that Quantum Entanglement will not allow for FTL communication - especially not at interplanetary/interstellar distances.

Whether or not String Theory (or the String Hypothesis collections) is right or wrong, Space-Time is still not empty, even the parts we consider empty. However those who specialize in dealing with this part of theoretical physics have stressed there wont be any way to exploit that fact, rather that is part of why things in Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are the way the are.

To the consternation of Sci-Fi enthusiasts, the new theories wont be proving Einstein or the others wrong, instead they will be further explaining why Einstein was right for where his theory has been proven right.

So new science wont be coming along to allow "an out", but it might come along to allow certain things that haven't yet been proven impossible (Wormholes, etc)

--
NH

TOM said...

http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.2528

Why doesnt FTL violate casuality.
(That dont say it will be possible for us, just counters the ultimate argument)

Anonymous said...

That of course is just an idea why FTL wouldn't violate causality. Without predictions that can be tested it would be impossible for it to be more than that. Which on a bigger scale is the big criticism of String Theory.

For one thing you'd have to assume that time actually exists and progresses in some way separate from Space-Time which some have proposed (Such as Dr. Lee Smolin) a sort of Universal Clock. This is by no means certain, and not even the prevailing thinking right now.

If Space and Time are linked, FTL violates causality as a consequence of GR.

--
NH