“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'” --Isaac Asimov
TIL Columbo was the ultimate scientist.
“Oh, just one more thing…”
The scientific spirit at work!
TLDR: Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. We can now confirm it’s not measurement error.
Oh. Well. That’s. Terrifying?
don’t worry, we’re expanding with it!
I’m not expanding! It’s just my big bones, y’know!
Uh, why?
I’m afraid of things I can’t understand.
You can make a religion out of that!
It’s not a matter of where we look, it’s the method we use to calculate the expansion. The 2 methods to calculate the expansion rate give us different results. For a good explanation, here is a YouTube playlist of videos by Dr. Becky Smethurst where she discusses & explains the “Crisis in Cosmology”: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn
Dogulas knew:
I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe.
– Arthur Dent, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Series.
Sounds more like Arthur knew…
No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
One of the Wright brothers said that. It’s actually my favorite quote because it always reminds me we have no idea what the fuck we’re wrong about.
No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
googles
Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:
Wilbur in the Cairo, Illinois, Bulletin, March 25, 1909
No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.
See? I was wrong.
HUMANS
Thank goodness computers are never wrong. :-P
Hey, they always do exactly as they’re told!
Hrm, in that case, now I wonder how they are ever correct!?:-P
As a Software Engineer, I ask myself that question several times per day.
Bc chips are as dumb as rocks, but really really really good at repetition:-).
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
– Thomas Watson, president of IBM
I cannot stomach much of it, but it is fun to go back and watch older media related to technology - e.g. the six million dollar man has like spinning tape disks, when computers were entire-room affairs.
So he was right, using the definition at that time, though there was also so much potential for more.
Also it is funny to hear them say that technology would literally make the six million dollar man “better”, not just “well again” or “he will have side effects but his capabilities will be far above the norm” or some such. One glance at Google these days, or a Boeing plane, does not inspire me to think of the word “better” than what came before even from those exact companies. Technology moves forward, but I am not so sure that the new is always “better” than the old. It was an interesting bias that they had though, during the cold war and after the moon landing.
Considering we now have a “CD” that stores 125TB of data ( https://www.livescience.com/technology/electronics/new-petabit-scale-optical-disc-can-store-as-much-information-as-15000-dvds ).
Not all older tech are necessarily worse. An LTO-9 tape can also store 18TB of data per tape. It’s still sold today and great for archival.
Other cheaper, less error prone tech usually gets mass market penetration. But I am happy that massive storage niche tech is still there.
Yeah tape is niche, but still serves its particular purpose well!:-)
And thank goodness it’s not nearly impossible to convince a computer that it isn’t correct when you don’t have admin rights.
sudo you’re a fucking idiot, computer
You were wrong, which proves your point correct. Good job being wrong and right at the same time.
I love this response!
It was a very fitting time to be wrong lol
Oh, and to provide numbers:
https://www.distance.to/New-York/Paris
That’s 5,837.07 km.
As of the moment, the longest flight by distance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_GlobalFlyer
In February 2006, Fossett flew the GlobalFlyer for the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km).
That’s 7.1 times the Paris-to-New-York flight distance.
As for time:
No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping…
The longest flight by time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager
The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base’s 15,000 foot (4,600 m) runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record.
the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km)
That’s 800 miles (1,400 km) longer than the circumference of the Earth. Humans are a trip.
“Brought in its train” what an interesting phrase, do people still say this? Is it the same as “in its wake” we use today?
Yes. Think of weddings. The thing trailing behind the ‘fancy’ ones is called the train.
And 100 years later, in one generation, humans land on the moon.
At a computer trade show in 1981, Bill Gates supposedly uttered this statement, in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC’s 640KB usable RAM limit: “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
That quote was in the context of the 1981 personal computer market, and in that context is correct.
It’s like a game company CEO saying 12GB of video ram is enough in 2024 so we don’t all need an RTX 4090.
Scientists in the 1800s also proclaimed we figured everything out and science was completed.
*1900s. Max Planck famously pondered whether he should pursue physics or music and was told by his professor that Physics was “done except for a few minor details”. Planck then went on to invent quantum physics to screw over students the world over.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-56594-6_11
“except for a few minor details”. Understatement of the millennium.
Planck then went on to invent quantum physics to screw over students the world over.
lol
The most exciting result of scientific discovery is “well that’s odd.”
yo… what
-Science
Peer review is “Hey. You seeing this shit?”
More like “Chat, is this real?” imo.
I still say that’s one of the ugliest sentences ever written.
“Oh no… Oh no… Oh shit… RUUUUUUUUUN!!!”
When I first began learning HTML (way before CSS and the modern web), my most engaged moments were when things broke. Way more satisfying learning how to fix them than having it work right away. What a great observation / comment.
As a professional dev my reaction to broken things is more like “ah fuck, not again! I hope it’s nothing serious.”.
Two hours later: Damn, used an upper case “A” instead of a lowercase “a” in my variable reference
This is amazing news. It’s like being shown that Neutonian physics are wrong, so now we have the ability to come up with a better model, then massive advancements in technology can occur.
We did find out that Newtonian physics is wrong. Einstein got famous for it and we now use general/special relativity and quantum phsyics.
No, Newtonian physics works just fine. Unless things are too big, too small, too fast, or too slow.
At least that’s what a meme I once saw said.
So it works fine on human scales, but for most of the universe it is inadequate. That means it’s wrong. Quantum physics and relativity are also wrong since he are unable to reconcile the two, despite them both being the best models we have for their respective scales. We have known for the past century that we have only just begun to understand the universe, and that all our models are irreconcilable with each other, meaning that they are ultimately wrong.
Just because a model is useful doesn’t mean it is right.
Agreed, but it leads to people who are less knowledgeable to draw the wrong conclusions.
Basically for just about anything you want to do on Earth Newton works perfectly fine. You can send people to the moon using nothing but Newton. Two big things you need Einstein for is the orbit of Mercury and GPS satellites. So from a pure science point of view Newton is wrong or maybe incomplete. From a regular Joe point of view Newton is dead on. By proclaiming Newton is wrong, it leads to people concluding that all science is wrong, because there is always someone working on the next iteration. So people think vaccines are dangerous, wearing masks is dumb, herbs and spices cure cancer, global warming is fake and homeopathic shit does anything except remove money from their wallets. Because what do scientists know, they’ve been wrong all the time in the past.
Newton is not wrong, it’s just incomplete for some very niche things. And Einstein fixed all of that so we’re all good.
In reality it’s good to always be looking to disprove something and create new and better knowledge. But only if that’s your job and only for very niche things. We’ve got the basics down for most things on Earth and there is no reason any regular person should doubt that.
Be careful saying homeopathy only removes money from wallets. Yes it does that but it can be worse. Most of the vials are just water but any with a 1x or 1c designation actually do have some of the herbal element remaining and can cause problems.
You see this thinking in science too. Dark matter has always struck me as an awful solution to a model breaking down. It’s basically “the numbers don’t add up so let’s add a fudge factor to make it say what we want”. But you’re generally considered a kook for questioning it now. People will spout a bunch of big words and hope you shut up if you do.
By proclaiming Newton is wrong, it leads to people concluding that all science is wrong, because there is always someone working on the next iteration
I’ve never had sympathy for this line of thinking. Is the average person truly too ignorant to understand that science is a constantly developing process of better understanding our universe, not some set of unimpeachable rules carved into stone tablets once and forever? The fact that science can be updated, changed, revolutionized, is what makes it powerful.
If people need to be ‘protected’ from that fact, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way science is taught in schools. I can’t accept that the average person can’t comprehend such a simple idea that would take less than an hour to convincingly communicate.
I think you have too much faith in the knowledge and scientific curiosity of the average person.
I sat through years of hard science classes with biology majors who mosty graduated with honors, most who went on to complete graduate or medical schools, and almost all of them still don’t believe that evolution is valid beyond “microevolution.” It’s the overarching and underpinning theory for all of biology and its subdomains, it’s the only theory available that successfully predicts all of the experimental results in the life sciences, and all it took to convince them evolution is completely wrong is a couple paragraphs about Lamarck and giraffes and Haeckel and embryos.
I would say those people all have an above average understanding of science, but still don’t understand the scientific method and how science constantly improves on itself.
all it took to convince them evolution is completely wrong is a couple paragraphs about Lamarck and giraffes and Haeckel and embryos
That’s incredibly shocking and concerning.
I’ve never had sympathy for this line of thinking. Is the average person truly too ignorant to understand that science is a constantly developing process of better understanding our universe, not some set of unimpeachable rules carved into stone tablets once and forever?
YES because often times the opposing model is the Bible, which is updated very irregularly and people will form sects over a single differing interpretation of a single passage.
Changing your mind / learning new information can be construed as the super-hated “flip-flop”.
Unfortunately, the illogical are immune to logic. No amount of it will be effective.
It’s less that Newton is wrong and more like it’s an approximation. Things always get more complicated because we are learning more about everything all the time, but for simple day to day things Newton is fine to be used and even taught.
You could also say it’s important from a historical perspective, learning how we got from Newton to bigger and better things is important too.
Yes, the average person is ignorant of stuff that need to be updated once in a while. There is something wrong with the current form of education. And you need to accept that understanding doesn’t come easy.
If you can’t do that last part, well, there you go. Same thing for the average person.
I think you communicated it well in two paragraphs.
It’s inaccurate, not wrong. Framing things in right and wrong misrepresents scientific progress in a way that leads to ridiculous conclusions like some post-modernist post-truth philosophers came up with.
Conversely, just because a model is wrong doesn’t mean it’s not useful.
Some relevant reading: The Relativity of Wrong, by Isaac Asimov.
I agree with the essence of your point but personally I’d never use the word “wrong”, only incomplete. Seems weird to call Newton’s laws “wrong” when the only reason that we are willing to accept GR is that it reduces to Newton.
It’s not so much that it reduces to Newtonian predictions but that at human scale and energy levels the difference between Newtonian and general relatively is so small it’s almost impossible to tell the difference.
What you’re describing is literally what it means for general relativity to reduce to Newtonian mechanics. You can literally derive Newton’s equations by applying calculus to general relativity. In fact, if you ever get a physics degree, you’ll have to learn how to do it.
All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
I prefer mine:
literally every model is a metaphor and not a true representation of the actual phenomenon it’s modeling.
Why use many words when few will do?
In fact, Lord Rutherford said that “ALL models are wrong, but some are useful” 🙂
While we’re talking about scientific nobility…
“In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.”
– Lord Kelvin
Isaac Newton made some incorrect assumptions. In most situations on earth the error is small enough to ignore (you don’t need to worry about time dialation to calculate the projectile path of a thrown rock), but there’s depreciencies in the cosmos (like mercury’s weird precession). So in a sense, elementary mechanics never was correct, but it was the best humanity had for awhile until Einstein’s relativity and it’s still useful in many not-extreme contexts.
Really, until we actually find dark matter, we can’t say for sure that relativity is correct either, but that’s just science.
I thought we may have found dark matter already, but we lack the ability to measure it and confirm?
We noticy it’s effects on baryonic matter, but have no known way of detecting dark matter itself. It’s a bit like how a fisherman can know that there is a large fish in the pond by the giant splashes and ripples in the water, but he can’t catch it because it has zero interest in any lures or bait he uses.
I think it’s better to say that Newtonian physics is incomplete rather than wrong.
Bingo. All models are “wrong”, good models are useful despite being “wrong”. Relativity is wrong too since it can’t account for anything quantum… Relativity isn’t better, it’s just more accurate under certain conditions - but outside of those conditions it’s more complex than it needs to be, and Newton’s models are good enough.
Ah. So it’s relative.
Ultimately, all science and all knowledge about the universe around us is always going to be relative and incomplete. They are all just models. The only model that’s complete is the universe itself, and we can’t cram that into our tiny brains.
Correction. We can’t cram that into our tiny brains and still be “human”. We would likely be something on a closer level of, say, the “Q” from Star Trek. Or possibly Urza from Magic the Gathering. Which, based on my understanding of the lore of both IPs, I would rather be Q than be Urza.
I think that’s the point they were making.
Neutonian physics are wrong
Dangerous way of putting that since we have so many easily weaponized idiots who will carry that water, a better way to say it would be “our understanding of neutonian physics is incomplete at the moment”
I agree, it is more accurate that way. English is not my first language, so I missed that detail. In South Africa, we also don’t have a significant anti-science movement, so it does not always occur to me naturally. The scientific approach is generally well respected and understood here.
I’d like them to look for repeats of galaxies. Galaxies that may be the same but slightly different or in different parts of the universe. If the universe was its own black hole we might see like a sort of kaleidoscope effect
The trouble with that is the difference in time. Since the light has to travel such a vast distance, multiple images of the same galaxy will show different stages of maturity. Even the stars will have been recycled. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ever demonstrate that two galaxies separated by billions of light years are actually the same galaxy in a curved Universe.
I believe that would be a Torus-shaped universe that could produce that effect, basically a donut where space loops back in on itself. I think it’s something that’s been considered, though it sounds as if there’s no evidence for or against that idea, and it’s not considered likely.
Over and over again. That scope is really opening things up.
It was the same for the Hubble telescope back in the day (and still!)
Good riddance, the answer can never be too simple.
The human need for ‘constants’ may already be too simple. Gravity for example is treated as a constant value in Physics but is actually variable.
I might have missed something, but AFAIK, gravity is the same everywhere. Bigger things, bigger gravity, sure, but two equal things in different locations don’t have different gravitational attraction
Your understanding of what constitutes “Physics” (tip: it’s not a bunch of kids in a classroom) tells me that we can safely ignore your opinion.
Maybe Maybe there’s something seriously wrong with the Universe? Why is it always US who are wrong?
Hey, it’s me, the Universe. I just wanted to say, this is no longer working for me. And if it makes you feel better, sure it’s not you, it’s me. Please don’t call.
The universe is, frankly, a complete shitshow.
From my limited understanding, the discrepancy comes from the two ways to measure the universe’s expansion: calculation from cosmic microwave background and calculating a cepheid variable, which uses pulsating stars (pulsars?)
Isn’t it more likely that one, or both, ways of measuring are wrong? As in, they’re not useful for measuring the universe’s rate of expansion?
Isn’t it more likely that one, or both, ways of measuring are wrong? As in, they’re not useful for measuring the universe’s rate of expansion?
Now, scientists using the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed that the observation is not down to a measurement error.
I’m trying to understand the distinction you are making. Could you elaborate?
I think the distinction is between arguing that there’s a discrepancy because the measurement is bad, or because the measurement doesn’t measure what we think it measures.
Is the theory right and we have a measurement error, or is the theory flat out wrong?
The model is wrong. Get hype
Not a scientist but the article seems to mean that they checked that the tools themselves had no defects giving incorrect measurements.
This comment seems to be questioning the methodology of how we measure the rate of expansion so tackles a different aspect of the conversation.
But that’s about as much as I can contribute haha
Pretty much this. In a (hopefully) more direct metaphor, are we sure we’re using a ruler to calculate the length of a line, and not using a ruler to calculate the temperature of a paper?
Yay!
The Hubble constant seemed determined not to be constant.
Sounds like a quote from the Hitchhikers Guide
Get your freaking towel and get outta here, man!
The Hubble Suggestion just doesn’t sound the same.
We have a very limited view of the universe so it’s no surprise that our theories are often wrong or incomplete. The beauty of science is that when a theory proves inadequate, it gets replaced with a more complete one.
It’s always funny to me when people bring up how science was wrong in the past, as evidence for why we shouldn’t trust it now.
You know what replaced the bad science? Good science.
Or rather, we replace the bad science with the best explanations we can offer, right now.
I’ll take the plumb pudding model over “deity did it, stop asking questions” any day, because you can still do something useful with it.
Doesn’t even matter if our understanding is wrong and will be updated later.
Science is the best philosophy 💪
I’ve always liked the adage: science doesn’t tell us what’s true, only what isn’t.
We don’t know the best way to treat cancer, but we know leeches don’t work.
yeah, but it’s always a shitshow when someone brings alternate theories to the big bang. it’s almost like back in those days when they burned people for suggesting the earth may be slightly less flat than expected.
That’s because alternative models like MOND or string theory end up breaking more things than they solve. Fixing the leak in your roof is great, but doing so by breaking the living room wall isn’t really an acceptable solution.
Isn’t string theory basically dead at this point?
In optimization problems, you can get stuck at a local maxima. It looks like any direction you go makes things worse. But the only way out of that is to try something that does make things worse and try refining from there to see if you can get to something better. Maybe that living room wall does need to come down in the process.
Don’t dare question dark matter in front of a physicist.
One day science will reach the Orphic understanding of the origin of the Cosmos.
Well, maybe at least this version:
Next after them, Epicurus introduced the world to the doctrine that there is no providence. He said that all things arise from atoms and revert back to atoms. All things, even the world, exist by chance, since nature is constantly generating, being used up again, and once more renewed out of itself—but it never ceases to be, since it arises out of itself and is worn down into itself.
Originally the entire universe was like an egg and the spirit was then coiled snakewise round the egg, and bound nature tightly like a wreath or girdle.
At one time it wanted to squeeze the entire matter, or nature, of all things more forcibly, and so divided all that existed into the two hemispheres and then, as the result of this, the atoms were separated.
- Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion book 1 chapter 8
Very fun in the context of Neil Turok’s CPT symmetric universe theory as an explanation for the baryon asymmetry problem, so its discussion of matter being squeezed and then splitting into two which divided the particles may end up on point even if incorrect in their interpretation regarding the atmosphere.
Yay, progress!
But maybe the measurement methods are not correctly understood either, as profen by the brightness of white stars used to determine age, lately.
