The problem with...

[DFW]

using data from only a speck in our galaxy, which is just a speck itself, to formulate theories...

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010...en-worlds-challenge-theories/?test=latestnews

 

[ShapeShifter]

Wait a minute! The earth isn't flat?! WTF, man?!? :file_19:

All my neat, orderly theories must now be defenestrated!

Aaarrrgh!

*throws reams of equations out window*

 

[Mark Morgan]

whrn the speck is all you have you use it

 

[DFW]

whrn the speck is all you have you use it

Sure, but don't hold it as being true and teach it in schools as being anything other than an uneducated guess. That's where myopic scientists fall down.

 

[Blix]

Sure, but don't hold it as being true and teach it in schools as being anything other than an uneducated guess. That's where myopic scientists fall down.

And you know better than they do? It sounds like you think there is a campaign to mislead students in schools and that is not the case at all. And that article summarizes things that have been known about for some time now, this hasn't been hidden from students of the subject.

 

[DFW]

And you know better than they do?

Obviously, when it comes to painting something as fact for the entire universe before the data is in. Any other questions?

 

[Blix]

Obviously, when it comes to painting something as fact for the entire universe before the data is in. Any other questions?

Yes. Provide evidence for your claims.

 

[DFW]

Yes. Provide evidence for your claims.

Read the article...

 

[aramis]

Thread closed due to antagonistic posts, pending further moderator discussion and/or action.

 

[far-trader]

Thread reopened to permit corrections and continued civil discussion.

 

[Blix]

I still await evidence for your claims, DFW. You say "read the article", but the article does not present any such evidence.

To summarize: It states that established models have been turned "upside-down" by recent discoveries. This much is true; but then this is how science works. New data can and does often change or overturn older theories.

The article then goes on to point out some of the new discoveries, while also presenting some of the new ideas that can explain them (e.g. gas giant migration, gravitational interaction, the kozai mechanism). Again, there is nothing in the article to suggest that these new ideas are being hidden from people, or that scientists have been unwilling to incorporate them.

You claim to know better than scientists "when it comes to painting something as fact for the entire universe before the data is in". But what would you propose should be done instead? Should scientists not say anything at all until every single scrap of data that can possibly be gathered has been found? By that logic, you would dismiss Newtonian gravity completely because it fails to explain the precession of Mercury's orbit; yet it worked well enough for scientists for hundreds of years. It is of course impossible to gather all the data about everything before forumulating a theory; as technology advances, new methods of observation and more sensitive instruments will provide new data, and as described above that may cause existing models of the universe to change to accomodate them. Until that time though, the old models suffice (how could it work otherwise?). This is entirely normal for science.

So, in light of all that, why do you think that scientists are "myopic"? Why do you think that everything we know about the universe is an "uneducated guess" (this is particularly nonsensical, given that new theories are built on what came before them, and all are based on solid data and observations. There is nothing "uneducated" about them, and there is no "guesswork" either)? The field of extrasolar system studies and planetary formation is still very new, and we have only had the instruments and the means to study it effectively for the past 20-40 years, so of course it will change dramatically during that time. None of this means that scientists do not know what they are talking about or are short-sighted, and I cannot recall any instance where they have rejected the wealth of observations that contradict the long-established theories. It certainly came as a surprise, but when it became apparent that they were real, they had to be accomodated, and the theories adapted to account for them. Again, this is how science works.

I should note that Traveller's system generation rules have remained somewhat constant during this time, such that they look extremely dated today. It seems that your criticisms would be better directed at the game's authors, given that they have not adapted their rules to the new paradigms that are unfolding in the field.

 

[Peter Schutze]

I'd like to point out a few things about all these new discoveries :-

* they are based on small samples which is unrepresentative ... that almost all exoplanets are gas giants is a reflection of our instruments not the nature of the universe

* the data is usually from quite limited time periods and is often being refined - they are still testing 55 Cancri's data to confirm their calculations. its not that long ago they decided they needed a 5th (small) planet to account for gravitational anomalies in the other planets

I for one see no reason to think that typical systems won't still comply fairlywell with the traveller sysgen rules (of any era generation)

Simple solution I hit on a few years ago was to "rename" a few of the biggest venus type planets as small hot jupiters

If GMs tinker with results to add in a few "new discoveries" like hot jupiters or retrograde giants ..... which are likely to be oddities once we start being able to conduct a proper census of system components, all the better !

 

[Whipsnade]

This much is true; but then this is how science works. New data can and does often change or overturn older theories.

Blix,

That is so very true and the inability to grasp that lays at the root of many people's "trouble" with science.

People want certainties, people want truths unalterable for all time, and people continually insist on mistaking theories for those sort of truths.

When science states "X is Y", science is actually stating "Currently X is Y on the basis of most of the facts and observations".

The inability to be comfortable or even comprehend uncertainty makes many people unable to be comfortable or comprehend science.


Regards,
Bill

 

[saundby]

Another point is that textbook and classroom presentations of science are often strongly overstated compared to what scientists themselves state. And media presentations of science are as bad or worse than film adaptations of written fiction.

New data on exoplanets will become a flood over the next decade. That means we'll be going from the fault of drawing a "best fit curve" through a single data point to having lots and lots of data points that appear to be comprehensive while actually being severely artifacted.

Most scientists in the field will deal with this reasonably, but the media, textbooks, and many classrooms won't get more reasonable. *shrug*

More data doesn't mean a greater proportion of informed people.

Also, so long as we still don't even know what's within 8Pc of us with a high degree of certainty IRL, I don't think we can expect a game to have a high fidelity simulation of astrophysics in it. Good enough is good enough for the game, we just need places for adventures after all.

 

[Blix]

Not to mention that the Kepler mission has already apparently discovered several hundred new exoplanets (the data is still being pored over by the scientists involved in it), and I am sure that will throw some new spanners into the works and cause theories to evolve again. That said, while there are still surprises, I do not think that they are going to be quite as paradigm-shaking as the discovery of the first Hot Jupiter.

Part of the problem is that we were used to things being constant for a long time, then it all suddenly starting changing dramatically. At the start of 1990s, our textbooks were fairly consistent when it came to our solar system, and more to the point we did not really have any data about extrasolar systems at all and so had no reason to think that anything could or would be different elsewhere. When the first extrasolar planet was discovered there was some skepticism about its veracity, but then as more and more were discovered it became clear that things needed to change to explain their existence. And change they did; now our theories incorporate gas giant migration, our computer models of orbital dynamics have been updated, and our theories are more complete, but I'm certain that they will continue to evolve. We have even found evidence of gas giant migration in our own solar system!

The point is to accept this dynamic, shifting landscape as part of science, instead of expecting science to give us absolute answers about everything (which is not and never has been how science works). As I said earlier, our theories are based on the data that are available at the moment, and are subject to change as new data come in.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Part of the problem is that we were used to things being constant for a long time, then it all suddenly starting changing dramatically.

Most of science *is* constant. The Earth still orbits the Sun, water is still H2O, plants still photosynthesise. Most of a 1960 textbook is still valid, and still will be in 2060. It's mostly details that change, or competing theories are resolved.

 

[Blix]

Most of science *is* constant. The Earth still orbits the Sun, water is still H2O, plants still photosynthesise. Most of a 1960 textbook is still valid, and still will be in 2060. It's mostly details that change, or competing theories are resolved.

Plants still photosynthesize, but now there is news that they may even "think and remember" (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10598926 ). The Earth orbits the sun, but Copernicus was unaware of the fact that that the sun also orbits the center of the galaxy.

The big picture may remain reasonably stable, but it is subject to being completely overturned if data disproves the theories, and it all depends on whether new data supports the theories or disproves them or requires them to change. That is what happened with Newtonian gravity, and it resulted in a completely new way of looking at the universe. Another example is the Higgs Boson; if it is not found by the LHC, then it would have serious implications for the Standard Model that has otherwise worked well so far.

And to counter your claim, I own a textbook about the solar system that was published in the 1920s and I can assure you that it is completely out of date today because interplanetary missions totally revolutionized our knowledge of the solar system in the 1970s and 1980s. I dare say that a lot of other textbooks written from that era would no longer be remotely accurate today.

Science is never constant, and the details are everything.

 

[aramis]

Most of science *is* constant. The Earth still orbits the Sun, water is still H2O, plants still photosynthesise. Most of a 1960 textbook is still valid, and still will be in 2060. It's mostly details that change, or competing theories are resolved.

Sorry, but when it comes to medicine, biology, astronomy or physics, no, a 1960's textbook will be outright fallacious on anything past the elementary level.

The content will, in the more advanced areas, need to be adjusted with so many caveats that the text is worse than no text at all.

In 1960, the texts said the fundamental particles are protons, neutrons, and electrons and for advanced books, mesons.

In 1985, the new texts had quarks and, the old still had the 1960's stuff, as the fundamental particles, but also antiprotons and positrons, and more mesons and bosons.

Current top end are looking at the stuff that quarks are made of... and will include string theory, particle theory, wave theory and wavicle theory. But only ones produced by certain subgroups will claim that protons, neutrons, and electrons are the fundamental building blocks of matter. (The 1960's texts replaced the older ones claiming the atom was... from the 1920's-1940's era...)

Medicine likewise is changing rapidly, because of an understanding of healing and growth that is vastly different from that of the 1960's textbook writers. Doctors have lost malpractice suits because the common practice has changed so much that their training 30 years ago is counter to law now... and is counter to law because it's been shown to have been based on misunderstandings of biochemistry and cellular biology.

Likewise, the new understandings of cellular biology and biochemistry have revolutionized what is taught at the high school level, let alone college. The observed facts countered many theories taught in the 1960's, proving them wrong by the direct observation now possible. the 1960's taught Mendel and a bit about DNA; the revolutions in understanding of DNA, and of RNA, and of the genetic markers that wrap & disable DNA... the fundamental processes of the cell are so much better known, that, past the elementary level, it's a wholly different basal understanding.

And an astronomy text from 10 years ago is so out of date as to be irresponsible to use in the classroom; so much knowledge is amassed so fast, that last year's has to be amended in class to be used.

 

[JustinInOz]

Thanks for opening the thread again. Closing of threads tends to get my attention.

Having read the article I could not really see the connection between the article and the argument that followed. First point being that the headline seems to have been written by an editor rather than the author of the article. Editors tend to want to grab attention. They don't hesitate to focus on something inflammatory or tangential to the substance of the article. Even more interesting articles can be found. For example: http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.2799 would be a good place to look.

I am fascinated by the exoplanet discoveries that are happening. I am quite aware that what we have been discovering initially were only the easiest to discover of planets. Really big ones, very close to their stars. By the very nature of the detection methods, we have been unable to spot any planets that would be in a system remotely resembling our own.

For me I have found the teaching of science follows a process of simple models that are always in the final assesment "wrong". The fact that they are "wrong" in no way invalidates them. As long as a model provides some useful analysis and information, it has value. The fact that it does not represent every aspect of the situation it describes is not the point. In physiscs class it was a bit of a joke that most explanations began with something like "imagine a cow that exisits on a frictionless plane and has mass m and centre of mass located at (x,y) and has no length, width or height" This cow is clearly a fiction and "wrong" in many ways. These failings in no way invalidate its usefullness in explaining the actions and behaviours of real cows.

In the same way Santa Claus is not true. That does not stop him from being a very useful figure in explaining the virtues of generosity and gift giving. The invisible hand of the market is equally fictional. We don't get so upset at economists when the markets or interest rates behave differently. It seems that scientists have a greater percieved "burden of truth" upon them for telling us what happens outside of our solar system.

The models that have been taught in schools are generaly "true" for the situation they describe. The fact that they fail in other circumstances is nothing to be sad about. Admision of ignorance is the first and most delightful step in the increase of knowledge and understanding. I am delighted when I get to say "I am wrong" or "I don't know"

 

[aramis]

Heck, some of the minor discoveries in our own system are recent: pluto, a so-called dwarf planet, has 3 moons, not one.
Eris is orbited by Dysomia, and yet, we're not positive of the diameter of either...
Haumea has 2 moons, as well.

In the 80's, KBO's were conjecture. In the 90's, they were considered a form of comet or protocomet. in the 2000's, they are a mixture of cometary, asteroidal, and dwarf planets...

Heck, the general definition of a planet in the 80's was a body large enough to round itself and in orbit around the sun rather than some other body. There was no formal definition for moons, planets, nor stars, but lots of working definitions. Some books didn't require a body to round itself to be a planet, and others did. Moon was clear: it orbits a planet. Asteroid was a chunk of rock too small to round itself...

But Ceres being discovered to be quite round made for it being questioned as a planet.
Eris and Haumea alone were thought of as "new planets" for over a year, driving the IAU into an uproar...

Here's an irony: due to the trojan asteroids and centaur asteroids, Jupiter and saturn technically fail to meet the definition of "planet", since they haven't cleared their orbit of coorbital debris.