Scientific Science
-
Instead of spreading news about Highly Scientific Science into too many different threads, let's start collecting them here. Actually,
prevents me from looking up the messages already available in those other threads and putting them here.Anyways, let me start with
https://www.science.org/content/article/primate-research-center-head-will-keep-job-despite-misconduct-provoking-shock-andwill retain full duties despite falsifying and fabricating data in a monkey study
-
@BernieTheBernie The thing that bothered me about that story was the implication that research involving non-human primates somehow had a higher ethical bar than research involving humans.
But those of us working with nonhuman primates should be held to the highest ethical standards
Why does it make a difference if the primates are human or not? And do, say, dogs or cats matter less than monkeys?
-
Monkey
businessScience
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Scientific Science:
@BernieTheBernie The thing that bothered me about that story was the implication that research involving non-human primates somehow had a higher ethical bar than research involving humans.
But those of us working with nonhuman primates should be held to the highest ethical standards
Why does it make a difference if the primates are human or not? And do, say, dogs or cats matter less than monkeys?
I'll bet that was something that got changed a zillion times in editing. "Animals." OK, but what about snails? Who cares about them? Etc, etc, and then they just ended up with something specific to the case at hand. Which of course leaves them open to
attacks like yours.
-
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Scientific Science:
And do, say, dogs or cats matter less than monkeys?
Logically, yes, if you recognize a difference between species in the first class. Politically, no.
-
This post is deleted!
-
And a little scandal in research on spider behavior:
How a scandal in spider biology upended researchers’ lives
Nature - Although Jonathan Pruitt, the researcher at the centre of a retractions scandal, has resigned, former lab members and collaborators continue dealing with the fallout.
Asked about the university’s lack of transparency, Donovan, McMaster’s spokesperson, says the university cannot release more information, owing to Ontario’s privacy laws. According to the university’s research-integrity policy, even if Pruitt is found guilty of misconduct by the hearings committee, McMaster is not obligated to publicly release either the outcome or its investigation report.
Publish faked data, keep findings on the facts private.
That's Trustworthy Science.
-
Now let's continue with Chemistry: forged crystal structures.
Major chemical database investigates hundreds of suspicious crystal structures
Nature - An unprecedented number of crystallography database entries are undergoing extra checks amid fears that they are based on fabricated data.
-
@BernieTheBernie said in Scientific Science:
Now let's continue with Chemistry: forged crystal structures.
I might have just an introductory course to mechanical engineering behind my belt, but I am pretty sure that creating crystal structures is the whole point of forging.
-
https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-bang-didnt-happen-auid-2215
Readers may well be wondering at this point why they have not read of this collapse of the Big Bang hypothesis in major media outlets by now and why the authors of so many recent papers have not pointed to this collapse themselves. The answer lies in what I term the “Emperor’s New Clothes Effect”—if anyone questions the Big Bang, they are labeled stupid and unfit for their jobs. Unfortunately, funding for cosmology comes from a very few government sources controlled by a handful of committees that are dominated by Big Bang theorists. These theorists have spent their lives building the Big Bang theory. Those who openly question the theory simply don’t get funded.
Gawrsh, Mickey, I wonder whether that happens in other parts of the Science (with a capital S) world, too...
-
-
@lolwhat said in Scientific Science:
Gawrsh, Mickey, I wonder whether that happens in other parts of the Science (with a capital S) world, too...
If you want to go against the established norms for your field, you'd better have done your homework. In particular, you want to account for an awful lot of the evidence out there (including virtually all the bits that prop up the orthodoxy), and you don't want to come across as the next Time Cube guy. That article has dangerous levels of "highlight this stuff in red" that make the sanity level of the author seem suspect.
-
@lolwhat said in Scientific Science:
I guess they have an answer somewhere but I didn't see it in TFA explaining the red shift. Though my immediate counter to his hypothesis is not that the Big Bang didn't happen but what if we got the timing wrong?
Still, pretty cool stuff. As usual, we'll probably have to wait for some people to die before all the new observations get properly accepted in updated theories.
-
@dkf said in Scientific Science:
@lolwhat said in Scientific Science:
Gawrsh, Mickey, I wonder whether that happens in other parts of the Science (with a capital S) world, too...
If you want to go against the established norms for your field, you'd better have done your homework. In particular, you want to account for an awful lot of the evidence out there (including virtually all the bits that prop up the orthodoxy), and you don't want to come across as the next Time Cube guy. That article has dangerous levels of "highlight this stuff in red" that make the sanity level of the author seem suspect.
That's true but it's also often true that stuff the people think must have been based on lots of good foundational research often aren't. Some fields are worse than others in this respect and the social aspects of this sort of thing often have massive effects.
-
@lolwhat as soon as you find a better way, let us all know would you.
-
@boomzilla said in Scientific Science:
That's true but it's also often true that stuff the people think must have been based on lots of good foundational research often aren't. Some fields are worse than others in this respect and the social aspects of this sort of thing often have massive effects.
Well, yes, but a lot of the people crying that their views are being suppressed are just cranks. Don't take anyone seriously if they aren't making testable predictions that can be used to check which theory is better.
Don't get me wrong; cosmology is definitely based on a lot of assumptions, some of which may turn out to be very wrong. (That's definitely happened in the past!) The assumption that worries me is that the Copernican Principle — that we're not anywhere very special, and hence that it is worthwhile trying to understand the cosmos from our telescopic observations — is being converted into assuming that the expansion rate is the same in all directions. A fractal or pseudo-fractal arrangement of matter would also satisfy the Principle, but might lead to different expansion rates. I'm nowhere near good enough with either math or cosmology to check whether that is a legitimate concern, or whether it's ignored, or even already accounted for.
-
@dkf I'm also dubious about the source - it's always concerning if someone from a completely different field (Eric Learner states on their website that he's done research in Plasma Physics) tells an almost completely unrelated field that everything they worked on is wrong. He better have some very strong evidence.
Not to mention that he used the JWST images which supposedly have shown "galaxies which are too old". We now know that it was a problem with the JWST being too sensitive to IR, thus skewing the results. This has now been corrected for and the supposed contradiction went away.
So, not a problem with a theory, just a problem with a new instrument where the results were not properly calibrated.
-
@dkf said in Scientific Science:
@boomzilla said in Scientific Science:
That's true but it's also often true that stuff the people think must have been based on lots of good foundational research often aren't. Some fields are worse than others in this respect and the social aspects of this sort of thing often have massive effects.
Well, yes, but a lot of the people crying that their views are being suppressed are just cranks. Don't take anyone seriously if they aren't making testable predictions that can be used to check which theory is better.
This guy has a link to a paper he published online before the JWST images were released where he predicted what they would show.
According to his explanations, the actual images match his predictions rather than the predictions made by the BBT model. He's also citing a bunch of BBT people saying that the JWST images are far enough away from BBT model predictions that it's a "crisis."
If this guy were bullshitting me, I'd fall for it. I don't know enough about cosmology that I'd recognize that. But he looks to have made testable predictions that seem to be bearing out.
My guess as to whether the BBT being wrong is being covered up is that it's not. It's been a very short time that we've had the JWST, and the majority of BBT scientists haven't figured it out yet.
Journalists don't know what redshift is. They're probably going to cover the end of BBT when most of the scientific community have a better consensus. When Global Warming model predictions are tested and come up with the wrong answers, scientists from that community don't go around calling it a crisis.
I think cosmologists will get there eventually. And then we'll be able to get to the real purpose of killing the BBT: getting CBS to cancel Young Sheldon and run ads for better shows during Jets games.
-
@GuyWhoKilledBear
No, it's a JWST calibration problem.Well, not exactly. I think I read a preliminary explanation. But this seems to be a more reasonable explanation:
James Webb Space Telescope catches 'imposter' galaxies red-handed
Dusty, red galaxies could be posing as extremely high-redshift galaxies in JWST's images, astronomers warn.
So, I'd wait with dismantling the BBT.
-
Posts moved
as requested.https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/28584/scientific-trolleyscience
-
@loopback0 Dammit, Jim! I wasn't even in this topic, but I got jelly-potatoed to the new topic when you jeffed the posts.
-
@HardwareGeek said in Scientific Science:
@loopback0 Dammit, Jim! I wasn't even in this topic, but I got jelly-potatoed to the new topic when you jeffed the posts.
NodeBB works in mysterious ways.
-
@loopback0 For mysterious definitions of "works".
-
@HardwareGeek said in Scientific Science:
@loopback0 For mysterious definitions of "works".
Have you tried sacrificing a virgin to the Node gods?
-
-
@HardwareGeek said in Scientific Science:
@izzion said in Scientific Science:
sacrificing a virgin
Do those still exist?
I’m sure if you visit any gaming house you’ll find several
-
@lolwhat scientists aren't panicking. They're creaming their pants at new data.
For example, scientists are now proposing a new quantum field called the "Quintescense" which seems to be defined on a projective space of the space-time manifold to explain dark matter and gravitation. This is based on... observations like how the cosmological constant probably isn't constant.
-
@boomzilla said in Scientific Science:
That's true but it's also often true that stuff the people think must have been based on lots of good foundational research often aren't.
We're not talking about yet another "coffee makes you live x years longer/shorter" study with 14 participants here, but a truckload of data collected by countless telescopes and satellites costing many billions of dollars, and analyzed independently by many of the world's most qualified scientists.
The premise is wrong to begin with, that "they" are trying to cover up that everything is wrong. From the little pop-sci I know about cosmology it is clear that the scientists involved are very much aware that they don't know everything and that their current models have many short-comings, which is almost obvious or they could just stop any further research. They just haven't found any models yet that are actually better at explaining the observed data.
Like the whole dark matter theory stuff. Nobody knows what it's supposed to be, which makes it so far a very unsatisfying state of affairs, but the theory still being prevalent is (from what I can tell) not a result of censoring any other models, but instead alternative models like MOND failing to adequately explain the observations.
If the guy actually has a better theory, it will win out by its own virtue, but he needs to have that first.
-
@Captain said in Scientific Science:
observations like how the cosmological constant probably isn't constant.
Hmm. I've long wondered whether other fundamental constants (speed of light, gravitational constant, etc.) are really constant. Our entire understanding of the universe is based on the assumption that they are, but those assumptions are basically untestable, at least on a human time scale. It seems reasonable to me that any variation in a century or so, the time that we've had the ability to measure them, is likely to be small relative to the precision with which we can measure them. The fact that we haven't observed a change in the last hundred years doesn't prove they had the same values billions of years ago. And everything we know about what happened billions of years ago is inferred using those assumptions of constancy.
-
@topspin yeah my comment was more general, like the comment I was replying to (or so I read it).
-
@HardwareGeek there is definitely evidence that they are 'almost constant' (i.e., imperceptibly different from constant) even on large time scales. But the "inflation" of the early universe isn't easily explained if it's constant.
So the idea is that there was a "phase transition" in the early universe which "changed the laws of physics themselves". (Or rather, if we think of the universe today as being "like a gas", the universe was like some "exotic" state of matter like Einstein-Bose condensate with different properties. I do not claim that the early universe was E-B condensate, but just suggesting a parallel) The phase transition is what caused the changes, and they aren't going to change by themselves, aside from random quantum fluctuation.
There is evidence of a few phase transitions, such as the electroweak symmetry break which turned electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force into separate forces.
What If Dark Energy is a New Quantum Field? – 16:19
— PBS Space Time
-
@lolwhat said in Scientific Science:
It is very easy to say something that is wrong. A counter-argument explaining exactly WHY it is wrong is usually much more difficult. This guy seems like someone who is taking advantage of that fact. (There seem to be a lot of them these days).
-
@Rhywden said in Scientific Science:
research in Plasma Physics
I've had plasma physicists claim that they're qualified, as the universe is mostly a plasma. (It was hyperbole, but the people in question were collaborating with actual astrophysicists, who did want to use their knowledge of simulating plasma for looking at thin interstellar media. IIRC.)
As has been stated, this seems to be jumping the gun. JWST data is just coming out. That our view of cosmology isn't complete is well known. Most scientists are, as @Captain says, creaming their pants over all the new data.
-
@HardwareGeek said in Scientific Science:
Hmm. I've long wondered whether other fundamental constants (speed of light, gravitational constant, etc.) are really constant. Our entire understanding of the universe is based on the assumption that they are, but those assumptions are basically untestable, at least on a human time scale. It seems reasonable to me that any variation in a century or so, the time that we've had the ability to measure them, is likely to be small relative to the precision with which we can measure them. The fact that we haven't observed a change in the last hundred years doesn't prove they had the same values billions of years ago. And everything we know about what happened billions of years ago is inferred using those assumptions of constancy.
While it is theoretically possible for the speed of light to be non-constant, that would require a complete rethinking of physics as base equations as simple as E=MC² will no longer be correct.
-
@Captain There's a book by Alastair Reynolds called "Pushing Ice" which has some alien artifacts which according to the book's lore are completely impossible to build nowadays but were possible to build quite a while back due to important constants being slightly different.
-
@Dragoon said in Scientific Science:
@HardwareGeek said in Scientific Science:
Hmm. I've long wondered whether other fundamental constants (speed of light, gravitational constant, etc.) are really constant. Our entire understanding of the universe is based on the assumption that they are, but those assumptions are basically untestable, at least on a human time scale. It seems reasonable to me that any variation in a century or so, the time that we've had the ability to measure them, is likely to be small relative to the precision with which we can measure them. The fact that we haven't observed a change in the last hundred years doesn't prove they had the same values billions of years ago. And everything we know about what happened billions of years ago is inferred using those assumptions of constancy.
While it is theoretically possible for the speed of light to be non-constant, that would require a complete rethinking of physics as base equations as simple as E=MC² will no longer be correct.
Oh, the problems would crop up much earlier as the meter's definition is based on the vacuum speed of light.
-
@cvi said in Scientific Science:
@Rhywden said in Scientific Science:
research in Plasma Physics
I've had plasma physicists claim that they're qualified, as the universe is mostly a plasma.
At the risk of upsetting him who says there’s only one joke in this show:
The Big Bang Theory: "Who's Radiohead?" – 01:08
— MlordE: goddamnit youtubebox
-
@Rhywden said in Scientific Science:
@Dragoon said in Scientific Science:
@HardwareGeek said in Scientific Science:
Hmm. I've long wondered whether other fundamental constants (speed of light, gravitational constant, etc.) are really constant. Our entire understanding of the universe is based on the assumption that they are, but those assumptions are basically untestable, at least on a human time scale. It seems reasonable to me that any variation in a century or so, the time that we've had the ability to measure them, is likely to be small relative to the precision with which we can measure them. The fact that we haven't observed a change in the last hundred years doesn't prove they had the same values billions of years ago. And everything we know about what happened billions of years ago is inferred using those assumptions of constancy.
While it is theoretically possible for the speed of light to be non-constant, that would require a complete rethinking of physics as base equations as simple as E=MC² will no longer be correct.
Oh, the problems would crop up much earlier as the meter's definition is based on the vacuum speed of light.
That’s an engineering problem, not a physics problem. A meter is a meter (at least if you ignore SR and reference frames and things like that), its meaning didn’t change when the definition was based on light speed instead of a physical stick.
-
@topspin said in Scientific Science:
its meaning didn’t change when the definition was based on light speed instead of a physical stick.
I once had to prove that to a professor. Well, not so much that it didn't change as that the exact conversion factor between meters and inches was still exact after the redefinition; for the purposes of what I needed to prove, the length could have changed entirely as long as the conversion factor didn't. And since the yard is legally defined in the US as 0.9144 meters, and the inch is defined as 1/36 of a yard, the conversion is exact, no matter how the meter is defined.
-
@topspin This was an argument between different fields of physics.
Clearly, if you want to know anything (that matters) about the world and/or universe, you should ask a physicist.
-
@cvi said in Scientific Science:
@topspin This was an argument between different fields of physics.
Clearly, if you want to know anything (that matters) about the world and/or universe, you should ask a physicist.
But only if you don't mind getting an answer based on a spherical cow approximation back.
-
-
It seems a bit odd, then, that it uses such an old technology; according to Dashevsky and Balzano, the language the scripts are written in is called Nombas ScriptEase 5.00e. According to Nombas’ (now-defunct) website, the latest update to ScriptEase 5.00e was released in January 2003 — yes, almost two decades ago. There are people who can vote who weren’t born when the software controlling some of the JWST’s most vital instruments came out.
At least it's not NPM-based.
Filed under: security by obsolescence
-
@Zerosquare said in Scientific Science:
security by obsolescence
The "Things that remind you of TDWTF members" thread is
.
-
@HardwareGeek said in Scientific Science:
@Captain said in Scientific Science:
observations like how the cosmological constant probably isn't constant.
Hmm. I've long wondered whether other fundamental constants (speed of light, gravitational constant, etc.) are really constant. Our entire understanding of the universe is based on the assumption that they are, but those assumptions are basically untestable, at least on a human time scale. It seems reasonable to me that any variation in a century or so, the time that we've had the ability to measure them, is likely to be small relative to the precision with which we can measure them. The fact that we haven't observed a change in the last hundred years doesn't prove they had the same values billions of years ago. And everything we know about what happened billions of years ago is inferred using those assumptions of constancy.
Osborn's Law: Variables won't; constants aren't.
-
@Zerosquare said in Scientific Science:
It seems a bit odd, then, that it uses such an old technology; according to Dashevsky and Balzano, the language the scripts are written in is called Nombas ScriptEase 5.00e.
On a related note, Brave Search for Nombas ScriptEase points not to a Wikipedia article, but to the talk page on EcmaScript.
-
@HardwareGeek said in Scientific Science:
I've long wondered whether other fundamental constants (speed of light, gravitational constant, etc.) are really constant.
Those are not actually fundamental. For example speed of light is just defining the relation between meter and second in space-time where spatial and temporal coordinates are inherently interdependent. Fundamental constants are those dimensionless (fine structure constant, strong coupling constant, masses of standard particles (relative to each other, or to Planck mass) and some parameters of quarks and neutrinos).
But basically if laws of physics varied in space and/or time, the conservation of momentum and conservation of mass-energy would no longer hold.
… which, IIRC, for “dark energy” they actually don't.
-
@Bulb said in Scientific Science:
But basically if laws of physics varied in space and/or time, the conservation of momentum and conservation of mass-energy would no longer hold.
… which, IIRC, for “dark energy” they actually don't.
I'm not a physicist (as you can tell) but many people have wondered if dark matter and dark energy are just fudges. This seems like another reason to wonder.
-
-
@jinpa said in Scientific Science:
@Bulb said in Scientific Science:
But basically if laws of physics varied in space and/or time, the conservation of momentum and conservation of mass-energy would no longer hold.
… which, IIRC, for “dark energy” they actually don't.
I'm not a physicist (as you can tell) but many people have wondered if dark matter and dark energy are just fudges. This seems like another reason to wonder.
Basically. They're concepts that were invented because they're the best way to reconcile two sets of data that both look perfectly correct by themselves but are quite incompatible with one another without "dark" fudge factors bridging the gap.
The James Webb Space Telescope runs JavaScript, apparently
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23761934/main_image_star_forming_region_carina_nircam_final_1280.jpeg)
