July 5th on The Colbert Report, the theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, made some pretty interesting claims. For example, some of the things we have dreamed up in SciFi will make it into reality in the not so distant future, like Time Travel. When Stephen Colbert mentioned that we would already know about it because we would see the people traveling back in time, Kaku said that we will have an invisibility cloak within the next ten years. Um, okay. That's going to make marking absences in class a little more difficult, but whatever.
Kaku had also mentioned the illusive link between Quantum theory and Cosmology, saying that we are looking for a "1 inch equation." He alludes to the E=Mc2 equation. I asked hubby, "what if the link is just not so simple or elegant as E=Mc2?" What if we are ruling out the "mind of God" connection because we want something so small that it can fit on a license plate? (see http://mkaku.org/ ). Hubby answered that usually the most simple is usually the right answer, and we promptly started washing the dishes.
Fast forward to a very enlightening conversation I had with Rich Tollerton yesterday. He was referring to some reading he has been doing about how science and religion have interacted through the ages and came up with a quip that stopped me dead in my tracks. When asked to write it down to be quoted, he was hesitant, but came up with "[When facts are dealt with,] scientists are concerned with beauty." but when he first said this, he said something more like "Scientists seem to be looking more for beauty than truth." (I think he found this comment to be too damning for scientists, whom he emphatically supports/reads/enjoys; this was spoken more in frustration I think, but I digress.)
This reminds me of Einstein who rejected a lot of proven material because it was not beautiful and it was too complicated. It also reminds me of Aristotle, the Father of Science, who discussed his scientific hypothesis with other people without trying anything out. Truly, we have a lot of stuff to rule out to even form a hypothesis, (can I mention the parental anecdote of attempting to figure out why a baby is crying? 'Is the diaper wet? Is she hungry? Is she hot? Is there some variable I'm not aware of?') but can't this process of ruling extraneous material out end up being less about trying to discover truth and more about the justification of one's preferences?
I've also been reading a lot lately on the power of assumption and how assuming can be helpful. If you had to prove to yourself every morning that your car will turn on when you turn the key in the ignition, chances are you would be late a lot; however, if you assume that your car will start no matter what, there are chances that you will be very wrong and, perhaps, this assumption could be harmful if you don't, say add oil to it and maintain it because you just assume that it will all be okay.
So, in conclusion, I am not all that sure of Michio Kaku's hypothesis that we will go sneaking around invisible, or that it is even a good idea, (can I say terrorist attack?) but I do hope for the part about unifying the micro to the macro in physics, I just don't think it has to be so simple to be correct or even work, and, frankly, I do not trust Michio Kaku. He's too... flashy. I'm sure the long, silver hair and bombastic claims get him coveted spots on the Colbert Report and other perks, reminiscent of Tycho Brahe, (had to throw that in, Rich,) but that doesn't make him reliable.
Maybe what we should be looking for, not just in science but in art, entertainment, history, and current events, is the reliability factor - not just how cool something looks.
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ReplyDeleteThe "1 inch equation" isn't really an exaggeration, but what Kaku leav/es out of that phrase are the meanings of the variables. General relativity can be almost completely described by one or two small equations... but the meaning of those variables is immensely more complex than college calculus, and the concepts imply vastly more equations than that one theorem. But the 1-inch equation nails it down and with only one or two hardcoded parameters defined empirically (gravitational constant and cosmological constant). In contrast particle physics requires 19 numeric parameters, similarly defined empirically, with no rational justification behind them.
Einstein didn't "reject proven material". Special Relativity didn't even introduce any new equations! (It was a reinterpretation of existing Lorentzian transformations.) General Relativity wasn't even really falsifiable for a long time. To this day the observed precession of the perihelion of Mercury deviates from what is predicted by GR to greater than predicted measurement error; deflection of light by a massive object (the sun) was a profoundly inexact measurement. It really took over 40 years for any truly accurate verification of GR to be made, and a lot of aspects of it are still quite loosely verified. IIRC, Martin Gardner once mentioned ("Relativity Simply Explained" - great book, 50 years old, get it) that, had Einstein not devised general relativity, somebody else would have discovered it - but only decades later, because the evidence justifying it simply would not have existed until then. What drove GR was conceptual evidence, in the form of inconsistency, and not so much experimental evidence. Such inconsistencies still exist in physics, but nowhere near as gaping.
It's worth noting (even it is is a little mean) that, given Dr. Kaku's field of comptency is in string theory/supersymmetry, it is extremely likely that he has never made a scientific claim which has been verified by physical evidence. (Not his fault.) Instead existing hypotheses are being excluded as additional evidence is found, and the remaining debate is largely on very abstract, borderline-subjective lines. And, moreover, that he is more or less forced to use gee-whiz physics applications like cloaking devices to sell physics education to the public, because it is just so much harder to see cutting-edge physics making meaningful contributions to everyday society like it used to (before the 60s). So again... not his fault.
ReplyDeleteThe "1 inch equation" isn't really an exaggeration, but what Kaku leav/es out of that phrase are the meanings of the variables. General relativity can be almost completely described by one or two small equations... but the meaning of those variables is immensely more complex than college calculus, and the concepts imply vastly more equations than that one theorem. But the 1-inch equation nails it down.
Einstein didn't "reject proven material". Special Relativity didn't even introduce any new equations! And outside of one or two measurements with high error bars, GR wasn't really validated for 40 years. There was little evidence either for or against it.
It's worth noting (even it is is a little mean) that, given Dr. Kaku's field of comptency is in string theory/supersymmetry, it is extremely likely that he has never made a scientific claim which has been verified by physical evidence. (Not his fault.) Instead existing hypotheses are being excluded as additional evidence is found, and the remaining debate is largely on very abstract, borderline-subjective lines. And, moreover, that he is more or less forced to use gee-whiz physics applications like cloaking devices to sell physics education to the public, because it is just so much harder to see cutting-edge physics making meaningful contributions to everyday society like it used to (before the 60s). So again... not his fault.
Interesting discussion.
ReplyDeleteRichard puts it very well: just because you can write down theories in a "small" set of equations does not mean that you've reduced the complexity of the situation. Actually, quite the opposite is true. It's a matter of symmetries and patterns: the more sense make out of a physical (or any mathematical) system, the more patterns and relationships you discover, hence the "simpler" it becomes. Not *simplistic*. For example, if you wanted to try to understand electric charges and magnetic fields from scratch, you would initially find an utterly bewildering array of messy and complicated expressions that seemed to be completely independent of each other. If you kept working, though, in principle you would eventually discover symmetries that click together like puzzle pieces (the Maxwell equations) which not only explain away the messy mathematics, but also predict things that you hadn't seen, all within one model.
And, correct, Einstein did not reject proven material, let alone because it didn't fit with his assumptions. The opposite was true: experiments such as the Michelson-Morely experiment violated the scientific assumptions of that time, and Einstein et al were looking to challenge all of those assumptions in order to find something closer to reality. Which is why we have special relativity today. The same applies to quantum theory.
That said, Kaku's interview is another matter entirely. You are very right to be skeptical. I saw the Colbert Report episode (big fan) and I was not impressed with Kaku. I enjoyed his book _Hyperspace_ years ago. But he's really NOT a prominent figure in the string theory community. As far as I know, he hasn't published a single research finding since the mid-90s, and this is significant because -- even though he is billed as a leading "string theorist" -- he didn't participate in any of the developments in the late 90s and into the 2000s when the scene exploded.
Instead, he's found his niche as a science "popularizer" (which he is good at), more and more shooting his mouth off on sensational claims that he cannot support. The bit about the invisibility cloaking devices explaining why we haven't seen people from the future is cute, but a cop-out. I actually know quite
a bit about the "cloaking device" stuff -- there's a group here at Duke working on it, in fact -- and (of course) it's not as simple as Kaku describes it.
BTW, he really is not doing the physics community any favors by fueling more nonsense over time travel. Enough already. Yeah, yeah, I've heard the claims made about wormholes, blah, blah, but it's all just the stuff of science fiction. And he should know better.
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