Tag Archives: science

Science and stupidity

If you haven’t been paying attention to the discoveries of the James Webb telescope, you are missing out on an opportunity to really understand what Science is all about. Scientists start with a hypothesis then they look for reasons for that hypothesis to be wrong. That’s happening right now.

“…results from the James Webb Space Telescope have hinted at galaxies so early and so massive that they are in tension with our understanding of the formation of structure in the universe. Various explanations have been proposed that may alleviate this tension. But now a new study from the Cosmic Dawn Center suggests an effect which has never before been studied at such early epochs, indicating that the galaxies may be even more massive.” (Source)

These ‘too massive’ galaxies do not jive with current hypothesis, and they challenge what scientists think they know about the origins of the universe. These discoveries are forcing our greatest scientific minds to question their own research and beliefs.

Meanwhile, we still have people believing that the world is flat and that for some unknown reason NASA is nothing more than an instrument of the government used to keep us in the dark about our flat world… As if there is some mastermind ploy to keep us ‘in the dark’ because [input ridiculous theory here].

Oh, and as for these ‘look at the horizon, it’s flat just like the earth’ believers? Any time a scientist course corrects and changes their hypothesis, or admits that they have new insights and information, is proof that they don’t know what they are talking about. This process of learning more and changing trajectories isn’t seen as an incredibly brilliant approach to new discoveries. Instead it’s seen as a weakness in thinking. But they don’t see the weaknesses of their own ideas, and the inadequacies of their ‘evidence’.

But this isn’t just about flat-earthers. It’s about unscientific and conspiracy thinking that seems to be growing. Scepticism in science is being confused with scepticism of scientific thinking. Terms like ‘sheeple’ are used to describe people who believe in science, in NASA, and in things like research at CERN. With CERN there is even a conspiracy theory that it is the cause of the Mandela Effect. The basis for this? Nothing.

It’s sad that there is such an anti-intellectual movement happening right now. It seems that people have access to as much misinformation as they do information, and for a small but every growing number of people the misinformation, the un-scientific ‘evidence’ is more compelling than what our best and brightest scientists think… And somehow a guy making videos based on conjecture and stupidity in his basement gets to have equal or more airtime than the brightest minds on our globe, who are making amazing new discoveries about the universe.

Health and history

I had a dental cleaning today. I get one every 6 months. As I was sitting in the chair I thought about how far we’ve come in dental hygiene over the last few hundred years. I thought about how debilitating it would have been to need a root canal before root canals were a thing. Tooth aches can be an all consuming pain, and life before dentists could have been an agonizing experience.

So many inventions have saved lives: from penicillin to pacemakers, vaccines to vitamins, antibiotics to aspirin… science and medicine have been invented, created, and discovered to make our lives less painful and a lot safer.

We still have a ways to go with the likes of cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases yet to be beaten, but we’ll get there in my children’s lifetime, if not mine. Technology is getting better and the science of longevity is very promising. Soon our visits to the washroom will be more like doctor visits, with our urine and faeces being sampled and tested by our toilets, and an app on our phones will notify us if there are any health concerns to worry about.

It’s a marvel to think about how much has been done in the world of science and medicine to make our lives healthier and longer. It took a dental assistant getting plaque off of my not-flossed-regularly-enough teeth to help me appreciate the value of modern science. And, I’m happy to report that I’m cavity free!

Discovered more than invented

Is Math invented or is it discovered? Is Math a human, or at least biological construct that helps mammals understand the world we live in? Or does it exist inherently in the universe and is it revealed to us through curiosity and scientific discovery?

I’ve shared my fascination in playing, learning, and discovering secrets held in Geometry (here and here) with Joe Truss.

Recently I watched a video that quoted Galileo Galilei:

“Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”

With everything Joe and I have been playing with, I thought of an adaptation of this quote:

The universe is written in the language of geometry, and Mathematics allows us to measure it.

When I shared this with Joe, he tweaked it:

The universe is written in the language of geometry, and Mathematics allows us to take its measure.

I like this because it speaks to the idea of Math being discovered, of it being inherent because it is present in the geometry. It is Geometry that is the underlying language. Math is the alphabet, the universe is written in geometry. This is why Pi pops up where you don’t expect it; why the Fibonacci sequence is prevalent in nature; why we can land a ship on the moon and Mars; and even why our religious symbols come out of geometry.

The challenge we have is that we don’t fully understand the geometry, sometimes rather than discovering the true essence of the mathematics, we have to invent approximations that help us make sense of universe. Understand the geometry and maybe we can remove infinities and irrational numbers in our calculations… Understand the geometry, and the math becomes more accurate. Understand the geometry and maybe we can unify our theories that currently seem to contradict themselves.

Discover the geometry and we discover the math behind it, no longer needing to invent approximations of the math to translate the geometry into a world of calculations and numbers that don’t quite fit with they universe we are trying to describe. When we discover the geometry, we no longer needs to invent Math, the geometry allows us to take its measure… And in fact we can explain the universe with the geometry, and then we don’t have to be a physicist or mathematician to understand it.

Baked just right

It would have been harder 150 years ago to bake bread or a cake to perfection. There were no thermometers in the oven, few clocks to tell how long it was in the oven, no real way to regulate the heat. It was an art as much as a science.

That idea of being baked just right comes to mind when I think about our universe. So many things had to be just right to ‘cook up’ our existence. If we live in a multiverse with countless other universes, it is likely most of them would harbour conditions impossible for a planet like earth to exist. This is for some people a way to reconcile their belief in an omnipotent and omnipresent God. For without the divine intervention of a ‘designer’ we could not exist.

But for me this is simply a game of numbers. In the billions of universes in a multiverse, we were the lottery winners. We won the grand prize of being able to harbour consciousness in a universe among so many others that did not have the right ingredients, did not have the right conditions, and/or were baked for too long or not long enough.

We exist because our universe was baked just right. And the fact that it was right enough for us, suggests to me that it is right enough on another not-so-near-by planet. We probably aren’t alone in this universe, but our universe is probably lonely in comparison to other universes.

We might not be the only one, but just like we are alone in our galaxy, our university is probably alone in being baked to perfection… for us. Maybe there are some nitrogen breathing conscious beings in another universe writing about the crazy possibility of oxygen breathing beings in a universe like ours?

We probably won’t need a couple hundred more years to figure this out. We are too inquisitive and we keep looking out into the universe and asking complex questions beyond my understanding. What I do understand is that we live in a universe that was baked well enough to produce us, and while we may not be baked to perfection, we are the lottery winners (or likely one of very few lottery winners) in the multiverse.

The future is now

I’ve shared Chat GPT a couple times (1, 2), and I really think that tools like this are going to create a massive shift in jobs, education, and creativity. It can been seen as both scary and exciting.

On another front, scientists have achieved ‘ignition’ in a nuclear fusion test. This is the creation of a fusion reaction where the energy output is greater than the energy input. For over a decade this was an unachievable goal, any reaction created required so much energy to produce that the costs were greater than the returns.

If you showed someone from 1995 the technology we had 25 years later in 2020, they would be impressed and amazed. I’m reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But what I’m seeing right now seems like magic.

I think the leaps in technology and ingenuity that will happen in the next 25 years will so far exceed what we saw happen in the last 25 years that it will feel more like we are 50 years in the future rather than just 25. So, buckle up and get ready for a wild ride into the future… it’s just getting started now!

We are One

There are two ways that we separate ourselves from ourselves that I think does more harm than good:

  • Body and Mind
  • Conscious Mind and Unconscious Mind

We are one person. We have one mind, (one conscience). One.

There is tons of evidence that suggests our body influences our mind, from obvious feelings of pain distracting us and making it hard to think, to evidence that our gut biome can influence our thoughts. Our mind and body aren’t just connected, they are One.

There are also huge debates about whether we have free will or not because you can connect someone’s brain to sensors and determine the answer to a question you ask them before they are consciously aware of an answer. That’s not actually proof of some sort of determinism, it’s only significant if you separate the conscious mind from the unconscious… if you suggest they are not the same person making the decision. Our conscious and unconscious minds aren’t just connected, they are One.

Have you ever heard, “Your body is your temple”? No it isn’t, your body is you, your mind is you, it’s all you. When your body is sick, you are sick, heal all of you. When your mind is spiralling to dark places, it’s all of you that is spiralling. That’s why exercise can make you feel better. That’s why looking up (literally lifting your head up) or going for a walk can make you feel better. It’s why physical touch, like a hug, or emotional support from a friend can make you feel better mentally and physically.

Ever notice how a friend or a team can push you to physical feats you couldn’t do on your own (in the gym or in a high stakes game)? Mind and body are One.

We break ourselves up into separate objects and I think that does more to harm us than to help us… and I haven’t even spoken about spirit or spirituality, but you can guess my thoughts on this unnecessary separation… we are all One.

We will never have time travel

I’m not a physicist and I don’t play one on the internet, but I believe that we will never have time travel. My premise is simple: if it was invented 50, 250, 500, or even 5,000 years from now, there is no way that the first time we’d ever discover someone from the future was 2022. Surely if it will ever be invented a time traveller would travel to somewhere in the past before us, and we don’t have evidence of that… so at no time in the future will a time machine be invented.

The only possibility that I see for a time machine to work is that we live in a multiverse and if a person did go back in time then they wouldn’t change our history, they would create another new history splitting the history we know and creating a new one that they know… and so in this case while I’d be wrong, you and I will never know.

In the future, if we don’t blow ourselves up and send the world back into the Stone Age, we’ll get closer and closer to traveling the speed of light. A very long time from now humans will visit other planets beyond our solar system. Those travellers will experience time differently than anyone who stays on earth. But while they will age less, they won’t be going back in time.

Time travel like H. G. Wells wrote about will never exist. It’s a fun thing to think about, but the reality is that if it ever was to be invented, we’d already know about it… we wouldn’t have to wait for some time in the future to learn about it.

Doing STEM

‘Doing STEM’ or ‘Doing STEAM’… there is a saying, “Put lipstick on a pig, and it’s still a pig.”

I don’t want this to sound like a rant, and I don’t want to knock teachers for trying to do STEM projects. I do want to say that if 5 years ago a teacher did a project with kids where they broke them into groups and had them assemble a limited number of straws and a specific length of tape into the tallest possible tower, and if they do it again today it isn’t suddenly a STEM project.

Now, if that same lesson included teaching geometry and/or structural integrity; or if students had to design it such that their design had to have a function such as offices or apartments; or hold a weighted satellite dish; or if it had to factor in wind resistance (such as a blow dryer at close range); or if they had to model their design first and estimate the height they will achieve… if there was some thinking, designing, modelling, or estimating that was required before or even during the build process, well then it’s looking more like STEM.

Hands-on does not equal STEM. Building something does not equal STEM. Group challenges does not equal STEM. Meaningful integration of cross-curricular concepts, where problem solving requires thinking in more than one subject area relating to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math is STEM. It doesn’t have to check all the boxes, but it should include thoughtful integration of at least a couple of these.

It’s about making the cross-curricular connections explicit, or at least thinking through how the outcomes and expectations relate to these connections. It’s about developing competencies in the areas of STEM and not just doing a project that looks like STEM.

We don’t really understand

We don’t really understand exponential growth. It’s too hard to comprehend because when we look at growth, we tend to focus on what we’ve seen already, and project forward, but what has already happened is always less significant in length or size than what is still to come. So when we compare what has happened already to what is still to come, we are not comparing equal things.

Fold a piece of paper in half 6 times. How thick do you think the stack would be? Let’s have some fun and look at the folding paper challenge:

It was an accepted belief that folding a piece of paper in half more than 8 times was impossible. On 27 January 2002, high school student, Britney Gallivan, of Pomona, California, USA, folded a single piece of paper in half 12 times and was the first person to fold a single piece paper in half 9, 10, 11, and 12 times. The tissue paper used was 4,000 ft (1,219 m; 0.75 miles) long. ~ GuinnessWorldRecords.com

So she needed a 4,000 foot, (1,219 metres) long piece of paper to achieve this. It’s easy to look at this image of her folded paper and figure out how big it was at 11 folds and before that 10 folds, by halving the amount once then twice. But what if she were to fold the paper more times? How many more times would this image represent?

This image represents folding the paper just 3 more times… a total of just 15 folds.

At 23 folds this would be about a kilometre high (3,280 feet). At 30 folds, you would be entering space. 42 folds gets you to the moon. The 51st fold would get you to the sun. Beyond that it doesn’t matter because our brains won’t truly appreciate the scale anyway.

So I can see the difference that folding a piece of paper just 6 times (64 pieces of paper high) to 12 times (the first image of Brittany above) looks like, but I really struggle to extrapolate from this that 24 folds would be 2 kilometres high.

So when we look at things like technological advancements, we don’t really see well into the future. When I bought the 16k adapter for my Commodore VIC 20 computer to get me to a whopping 36k of memory, I could not fathom the idea that I’d one day be buying 2 Terabytes of memory to store photos that were 8 megabytes large. And I’ll have an even harder time imagining what kind of data I’ll be storing 10 or 20 years from now.

Watch out Metaverse here we come! What does this mean? It means that in 20 years we’ll look back at the technology we have right now in the same way someone who lived 160 years ago would look at our technology today.

That’s mind blowing!

Downward Spiral into the mud

My grandfather had a saying, and I’ve shared it often, “Never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty but the pig likes it.”

The pig has some success no matter what. This is something that I think is playing out with anti-vax and conspiracy arguments… they have some success every time we argue. The reason for this success is that they are operating from a fixed mindset, their minds are made up… but they are often arguing with people who have a growth mindset and are open to some level of persuasion. It’s a guaranteed downward spiral, with some of their fixed and misguided ideas seeping into the consciousness of people who try to factor all things in to their understanding.

An example of this is when the twin towers fell in New York. There were all kinds of conspiracy theories that started with the premise that ‘steel towers can’t crumble like that just because a plane crashed into them’. Spoiler alert, they can. But at the time we had no examples to go by, no science to support the possibility, and so just raising this concern could put doubt into a reasonable person’s mind. Then came the videos. Google something like “twin tower conspiracy video” and you’ll see what I mean. These videos are well crafted and convincing.

If you are someone prone to the idea that there is some cabal that has a master plan to rule the world, the fall of the twin towers easily fits that narrative. However, if you are someone who looks at evidence and makes sound decisions based on the information you have, too much of this convincing misdirection and misinformation could influence your thinking. In other words the spread of well constructed fake news has influence on all parties… meanwhile simple logic and boring facts only work on those with growth mindsets willing to do the research work.

The pig wins the moment you engage you in the fight. They get you dirty. Here is a study done at MIT, ‘Does correcting online falsehoods make matters worse?‘, which looks at how pointing out mistakes doesn’t help the argument:

Not only is misinformation increasing online, but attempting to correct it politely on Twitter can have negative consequences, leading to even less-accurate tweets and more toxicity from the people being corrected, according to a new study co-authored by a group of MIT scholars.

The study was centered around a Twitter field experiment in which a research team offered polite corrections, complete with links to solid evidence, in replies to flagrantly false tweets about politics.

“What we found was not encouraging,” says Mohsen Mosleh, a research affiliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, lecturer at University of Exeter Business School, and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “After a user was corrected … they retweeted news that was significantly lower in quality and higher in partisan slant, and their retweets contained more toxic language.”

And the article goes on to say,

“We might have expected that being corrected would shift one’s attention to accuracy. But instead, it seems that getting publicly corrected by another user shifted people’s attention away from accuracy — perhaps to other social factors such as embarrassment.” The effects were slightly larger when people were being corrected by an account identified with the same political party as them, suggesting that the negative response was not driven by partisan animosity.

Now in this case the ‘evidence’ will often degrade, and so it may not be too convincing, but research like this suggests that the conspiracy or fake news spreader is very unlikely to change their minds given sound evidence against their ideas… but when their false ideas are well crafted and instil doubt, the same can’t be said for thoughtful people who aren’t fixed in their opinions.

Social media engagement is more likely to influence people towards believing aspects of fake news that to promote facts and sound evidence. It’s a downward spiral, and it’s getting us all a little dirty.