Tag: science
Hitting the Books: How 20th century science unmade Newton’s universe
Science is the reason you aren’t reading this by firelight nestled cozily under a rock somewhere however, its practice significantly predates its formalization by Galileo in the 16th century. Among its earliest adherents — even before pioneering efforts of Aristotle — was Animaxander, the Greek philosopher credited with first arguing that the Earth exists within a void, not atop a giant turtle shell. His other revolutionary notions include, “hey, maybe animals evolved from other, earlier animals?” and “the gods aren’t angry, that’s just thunder.”
While Animaxander isn’t often mentioned alongside the later greats of Greek philosophy, his influence on the scientific method cannot be denied, argues NYT bestselling author, Carlo Rovelli, in his latest book, Animaxander and the Birth of Science, out now from Riverhead Books. In in, Rovelli celebrates Animaxander, not necessarily for his scientific acumen but for his radical scientific thinking — specifically his talent for shrugging off conventional notion to glimpse at the physical underpinnings of the natural world. In the excerpt below, Rovelli, whom astute readers will remember from last year’s There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness, illustrates how even the works of intellectual titans like Einstein and Heisenberg can and inevitably are found lacking in their explanation of natural phenomena — in just the same way that those works themselves decimated the collective understanding of cosmological law under 19th century Newtonian physics.
Excerpted from Animaxander and the Birth of Science. Copyright © 2023 by Carlo Rovelli. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Did science begin with Anaximander? The question is poorly put. It depends on what we mean by “science,” a generic term. Depending on whether we give it a broad or a narrow meaning, we can say that science began with Newton, Galileo, Archimedes, Hipparchus, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, or Anaximander — or with an astronomer in Babylonia whose name we don’t know, or with the first primate who managed to teach her offspring what she herself had learned, or with Eve, as in the quotation that opens this chapter. Historically or symbolically, each of these moments marks humanity’s acquisition of a new, crucial tool for the growth of knowledge.
If by “science” we mean research based on systematic experimental activities, then it began more or less with Galileo. If we mean a collection of quantitative observations and theoretical/mathematical models that can order these observations and give accurate predictions, then the astronomy of Hipparchus and Ptolemy is science. Emphasizing one particular starting point, as I have done with Anaximander, means focusing on a specific aspect of the way we acquire knowledge. It means highlighting specific characteristics of science and thus, implicitly, reflecting on what science is, what the search for knowledge is, and how it works.
What is scientific thinking? What are its limits? What is the reason for its strength? What does it really teach us? What are its characteristics, and how does it compare with other forms of knowledge?
These questions shaped my reflections on Anaximander in preceding chapters. In discussing how Anaximander paved the way for scientific knowledge, I highlighted a certain number of aspects of science itself. Now I shall make these observations more explicit.
The Crumbling of Nineteenth Century Illusions
A lively debate on the nature of scientific knowledge has taken place during the last century. The work of philosophers of science such as Carnap and Bachelard, Popper and Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Quine, van Fraassen, and many others has transformed our understanding of what constitutes scientific activity. To some extent, this reflection was a reaction to a shock: the unexpected collapse of Newtonian physics at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the nineteenth century, a common joke was that Isaac New‐ ton had been not only one of the most intelligent men in human history, but also the luckiest, because there is only one collection of fundamental natural laws, and Newton had had the good fortune to be the one to discover them. Today we can’t help but smile at this notion, because it reveals a serious epistemological error on the part of nineteenth-century thinkers: the idea that good scientific theories are definitive and remain valid until the end of time.
The twentieth century swept away this facile illusion. Highly accurate experiments showed that Newton’s theory is mistaken in a very precise sense. The planet Mercury, for example, does not move following Newtonian laws. Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and their colleagues discovered a new collection of fundamental laws — general relativity and quantum mechanics — that replace Newton’s laws and work well in the domains where Newton’s theory breaks down, such as accounting for Mercury’s orbit, or the behavior of electrons in atoms.
Once burned, twice shy: few people today believe that we now possess definitive scientific laws. It is generally expected that one day Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s laws will show their limits as well, and will be replaced by better ones. In fact, the limits of Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s theories are already emerging. There are subtle incompatibilities between Einstein’s theory and Heisenberg’s, which make it unreasonable to suppose that we have identified the final, definitive laws of the universe. As a result, research goes on. My own work in theoretical physics is precisely the search for laws that might combine these two theories.
Now, the essential point here is that Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s theories are not minor corrections to Newton’s. The differences go far beyond an adjusted equation, a tidying up, the addition or replacement of a formula. Rather, these new theories constitute a radical rethinking of the world. Newton saw the world as a vast empty space where “particles” move about like pebbles. Einstein understands that such supposedly empty space is in fact a kind of storm-tossed sea. It can fold in on itself, curve, and even (in the case of black holes) shatter. No one had seriously contemplated this possibility before. For his part, Heisenberg understands that Newton’s “particles” are not particles at all but bizarre hybrids of particles and waves that run over Faraday lines’ webs. In short, over the course of the twentieth century, the world was found to be profoundly different from the way Newton imagined it.
On the one hand, these discoveries confirmed the cognitive strength of science. Like Newton’s and Maxwell’s theories in their day, these discoveries led quickly to an astonishing development of new technologies that once again radically changed human society. The insights of Faraday and Maxwell brought about radio and communications technology. Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s led to computers, information technology, atomic energy, and countless other technological advances that have changed our lives.
But on the other hand, the realization that Newton’s picture of the world was false is disconcerting. After Newton, we thought we had understood once and for all the basic structure and functioning of the physical world. We were wrong. The theories of Einstein and Heisenberg themselves will one day likely be proved false. Does this mean that the understanding of the world offered by science cannot be trusted, not even for our best science? What, then, do we really know about the world? What does science teach us about the world?
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-anaximander-carlo-rovelli-riverhead-books-143052774.html?src=rss
55 Best Podcasts (2023): True Crime, Culture, Science, Fiction
Science and engineering are top careers that can be shaped by kids’ playtime, parents say
No One Knows What Peru’s Mysterious “Gate Of The Gods” Was For – IFL Science
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Is There Any Science To Support Stone Tape Theory?
Ask Slashdot: What’s the Best Podcast About Computer Science?
There’s a developer podcast called “Corecursive” that I like with the tagline “the stories behind the code,” plus a whole slew of (sometimes language-specific) podcasts at Changelog (including an interview with Brian Kernighan). And it seems like there’s an entirely different universe of content on YouTube — like the retired Microsoft engineer doing “Dave’s Garage,” Software Engineering Daily, and the various documentaries by Honeypot.io. Computerphile has also scored various interviews with Brian Kernighan, and if you search YouTube enough you’ll find stray interviews with Steve Wozniak.
But I wanted to ask Slashdot’s readers: Do you listen to podcasts about computer science? And if so, which ones? (Because I’m always stumbling across new programming podcasts, which makes me worry about what else I’ve been missing out on.) Maybe I should also ask if you ever watch coding livestreams on Twitch — although that gets into the more general question of just how much content we consume that’s related to our profession.
Fascinating discussions, or continuing work-related education? (And do podcasts really help keep your skills fresh? Are coding livestreams on Twitch just a waste of time?) Most importantly, does anyone have a favorite geek podcast that they’re listening to? Share your own experience and opinions in the comments…
What’s the best podcast about computer science?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The science experiments that the Crew-6 astronauts will be performing on the ISS
NASA Launches ‘Open-Source Science Initiative’, Urges Adoption of Open Science
But LWN.net notes that the talk went far beyond just the calibration software for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars Ingenuity copter’s flight-control framework.
In his talk, Crawford presented
NASA’s Open-Source
Science Initiative. Its goal is to support scientists to help them
integrate open-science principles into the entire research workflow. Just a
few weeks before Crawford’s talk, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate
published its new
policy on scientific information.
Crawford summarized this policy with “as open as possible, as restricted
as necessary, always secure”, and he made this more concrete: “Publications
should be made openly available with no embargo period, including research
data and software. Data should be released with a Creative Commons Zero
license, and software with a commonly used permissive license, such as
Apache, BSD, or MIT. The new policy also encourages using and contributing
to open-source software.” Crawford added that NASA’s policies will be
updated to make it clear that employees can contribute to open-source
projects in their official capacity….
As part of its Open-Source Science Initiative, NASA has started its
five-year Transform
to Open Science (TOPS) mission. This is a $40-million mission to speed
up adoption of open-science practices; it starts with the White House and
all major US federal agencies, including NASA, declaring 2023 as the “Year of Open Science”. One of NASA’s
strategic goals with TOPS is to enable five major scientific discoveries
through open-science principles, Crawford said.
Interesting tidbit from the article: “In 2003 NASA created a license to enable the release of software by civil servants, the NASA Open
Source Agreement. This license
has been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but the Free Software Foundation doesn’t consider
it a free-software license because it does not allow changes to the code that come from third-party free-software projects.”
Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the article!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Science fiction publishers are being flooded with AI-generated stories
Across the 17-year history of Clarkesworld, a renowned literary magazine of science fiction and fantasy, authors have speculated about how evolving, futuristic technology will impact our world. Now, editor and publisher Neil Clarke is living through a debacle that could very well be a sci-fi story in its own right: His magazine in being uncontrollably […]
Science fiction publishers are being flooded with AI-generated stories by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch