You cannae break the laws of physics, cap'n... Boffins call BS on 'impossible' black hole, fear readings were botched An impossibly massive black hole that defied conventional theories has been called into question after multiple researchers suggested the data used to estimate the object’s mass may have been wrong. The stellar black hole was first reported to be 70 times as massive as the Sun, according to a Nature paper last month. Stellar …
This is why we have science! Not every theory is correct, not every observation perfect but by thinking, re-evaluating and critiquing we can improve our understanding!
Hopefully we can find the truth of the matter be it by improved equipment or better understanding of the gathered data or by confirming that the original idea was correct and other models need improving.
Science!
/rant
Thousands of people all agree a good narrative sells better than dull facts.
19C Scientist: "I must find the explanation for this phenomenon in order to truly understand nature."
21C Scientist: "I must get the result that fits my narrative so I can get my paper into Nature."
Indeed. That's why we know that when oil companies with billions of dollars to spend, and an enormous and very obvious vested interest in an area of science not being correct, fail to show that it is not correct that it we can have very high confidence that it is, in fact, correct.
It's the same argument as to why faster-than-light travel is not possible: if it is possible then it is trivial (technically quite demanding but easy to do if you have the money) to construct a time machine which will send information into the past. If you can do that then you can win the financial markets. So there's really no limit to the amount of money such a device is worth, and there are plenty of people who already have vast sums to invest. Yet they don't exist, so we can have very high confidence that they no-one knows how to make them, or that they can't exist, which is more probable I think
Or of course it could all be a giant conspiracy by liberal elitists: who knows?
This uber-rich uber-elite creation scenario is also why magic powers, psychic powers and communing with gods, demons or djinn to gain are all bunkum, too.
Even if we only consider telekinesis, anyone with it would excel, become rich and famous and get lots of chances to breed. Within a few generations, every human would be his offspring and would have super-powers.
The same works for any magic. The genetic advantage given by possessing such a tool would be overwhelming. Keeping it secret would be impossible.
With this in mind, we know magic, psychic powers and favours from super-beings are not real.
And never have been.
"published in a top peer-reviewed publication"
Let this be a lesson folks, just because it's been peer-reviewed it doesn't necessarily make it true and even theories that we have accepted for centuries might not be right or paint the correct picture, see orbit of Mercury and classical Newton mechanics. However science unlike religion is prepared to accept that we might have the wrong picture and is prepared to accept change, I know which I prefer.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/09/reliability_of_new_drug_target.html
Faith should be when you hope or trust in something. Hope and trust are based on evidence.
Anyone saying anything else is trying to trick you or is bias. Yes there is fake "faith" but there is also fake science. Know how to spot both errors.
Logic and emotions are important and both can be working well or broken.
And besides deliberately "fake" science, there are incompetent science, experimental errors in well-intentioned science, and so on. It's impossible for human beings to remain perfectly vigilant against the many psychological traps which impair our reasoning ability, and impossible to make any system error-free.
And there are realms of thought where science does not apply; that's why we have philosophy. (In Connections to the World, Danto argues that science and philosophy are completely distinct: any question which can be addressed by science is therefore not the province of philosophy, and vice versa.)
Methodologically-sound science remains our best set of epistemological protocols for investigating questions of material fact. That doesn't mean it's perfect, just that it's better than the alternatives. This story is a good example of that, and I too agree that it's encouraging to see this debate play out in this way.
I don't think it was a basic error. It seems that it was an honest mistake made by misinterpreting what a given data variation meant.
Personally, I've already a hard time understanding what exactly the error is, so I find it understandable that the initial authors made the mistake.
Richard Smith, MD, former editor of the British Medical Journal, has claimed that peer review is "ineffective, largely a lottery, anti-innovatory, slow, expensive, wasteful of scientific time, inefficient, easily abused, prone to bias, unable to detect fraud and irrelevant; Several studies have shown that peer review is biased against the provincial and those from low- and middle-income countries; Many journals take months and even years to publish and the process wastes researchers' time. As for the cost, the Research Information Network estimated the global cost of peer review at £1.9 billion in 2008."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review#Criticism
Okay, so PR as part of the scientific process is crud, awful, drek and useless.
So what do we do instead?
Popular vote? Review by the contributors to sci.physics newsgroup? Just publish everything and let people try to make all of it work in the hope that the dafter ideas [like the Plutonium Atom Universe, inhaling bleach to cure the 'flu and phlogiston] die off eventually?
PR may be dreadful but what do you suggest could be better? Review by local magistrates and TV personalities?
Hmm, well, yes, to a degree.
But have you ever done any scientific peer reviewing? It is very demanding to do, and only rarely do any "obvious errors" stand out. Indeed, any putative errors sufficiently obvious to be *easily* picked up during a few hours of a peer reviewer's time would be more likely to have been spotted by the authors' during the months of actual manuscript writing. So what you mostly are left with is errors or misconceptions - if there are any - that are plausible enough to seem true, within the context established; and as a result they can be remarkably hard to spot.
IMO, in many ways scientific peer-review is more of a plausibility check, rather than a badge of guaranteed correctness. Any sort of aura of "guaranteed correctness" only follows after the work is repeated in various ways by various other researchers, who all get the same - or similar enough - answers. And naturally, any published paper that fails an expert reader's plausibility check by a sufficiently large amount will result in disputes like the one here.
IMO, in many ways scientific peer-review is more of a plausibility check, rather than a badge of guaranteed correctness
Agreed. And in this particular case, it still appears the work and conclusions of the original team are strong enough to have warranted the initial publication and continued investigation into the matter. They may well be wrong, but that hasn't yet been established to a sufficient degree of confidence to call the matter settled.
"... Indeed, any putative errors sufficiently obvious to be *easily* picked up during a few hours of a peer reviewer's time would be more likely to have been spotted by the authors' during the months of actual manuscript writing.. ..."
This may not be universally so. When I was a programmer, I used to have my wife, a total non-programmer, look over the code. She found things that I missed. 0 instead of O or vice versa and suchlike idiocies. It is entirely possible that a dispassionate, uninvolved third party might do the same with scientific papers.
It's the many-eyes principle. With many eyes, many bugs are shallow, or the guy looking over your shoulder can sometimes spot what you are too close to see.
Yes. I commented about that on the original article as well - there's absolutely nothing impossible about this black hole and it's extremely misleading to keep calling it that. However, it is both unlikely and, importantly, never previously observed.
For the former, the important point is that you don't get entire stars simply falling straight into a black hole and disappearing. The process is actually extremely messy and results in huge amounts of material being blasted away rather than falling in - that's why we see very active accretion discs, jets of material and radiation, and so on. So to form at ~10 solar masses and increase up to ~70 doesn't mean eating 60 stars (which would already be a lot), but probably several hundred at minimum. Aside from being unlikely to start with, since pretty much nowhere has that many stars positioned in a way that they'll collide (even dense globular clusters and galactic cores are noted for having a lot of closely packed stars that aren't actually constantly colliding), that sort of thing should leave plenty of evidence behind.
As for the latter, the fact we've never seen it before obviously still doesn't mean it's impossible, but it's always going to raise questions about why we haven't seen any others. New discoveries that also contradict existing theories are always going to suffer under Occam's razor. If theory says something shouldn't exist, and all previous observations agree that it doesn't exist, you need pretty good evidence to support a claim that it actually does. The original guys might turn out to have been right after all, but at this point it seems relatively unlikely.
True. But it should always be "we have this data" and just the theories that are questions and the methods of sata collection checked.
Too often we can get stuck in arguments that the aerher is much better a theiry abd GR or QM is too impossible. Thankfully it was only the masses making those arguments and not all of the peers to scientific study back in the day. But such conflicts almost prevented progress.
The error in the neutrino FTL measurements was a good example of trying to be modest and level headed from all parties. The error in data collection and the honest "um we got weird results, please check em but don't go to town on us, we are working hard." :)
Yes, this annoys me as well: in particular the 'you can't break the laws of physics' thing. The laws of physics allow BHs with any mass (well, perhaps not very very light ones, where they would evaporate quickly and we end up dealing with bits of physics where we don't yet know the laws).
This is really about the laws of statistics I think: we know a lot about the statistics of galaxies and of stars in galaxies, and we think that this makes it unlikely that very many ~100 solar mass BHs have had time to form, because it would take them an absurd amount of time to accrete enough mass. I suppose that if such accreting-objects happened at any rate they would also be spectacularly bright, so we would see them, and (I suppose) we don't.
On the other hand, given GW150904, we know that BH-BH collisions occur and can result in objects with ~62 solar mass objects, so we should expect some such objects (and objects resulting from events like that would be electromagnetically bright when they form, of course).
It seems to me that one star, one black hole would be the most common way black holes form.
But we are pretty sure that, if black holes exist, then there is a non-zero chance that two black holes can merge. (We think we've "seen" that: LIGO page from CalTech). And as the gravitational well grows, it may capture another black hole... or a neutron star... all of which increases the original hole's mass.
So it would seem to my non-astrophysicist mind that while holes in the 70-sol mass range might be rare, they are expressly permitted by the laws of physics, and there is a plausible mechanism for their formation. No laws were broken. Physics police may stand down.
Supermassive black holes may originate:
1. By the collapse of supermassive gas clouds (perhaps early in the life of the universe);
2. By multiple collisions of stars in a crowded stellar neighborhood, like the center of a galaxy;
3. and / or by accretion of stellar black holes.
I have just been reading some remarks by C.S. Lewis about how the mediaeval world view compares with today's. In olden times, as Lewis propounds, educated people thought objects fell to earth because they had a natural affinity with it, as the heaviest substance. Today, we reason about "natural laws". But, Lewis suggests, the medieval idea of natural affinity may actually be closer to reality than our notion of natural "laws". No policemen forbid objects to fall upwards, after all.
Nature behaves as it must, and scientists form hypotheses to explain how it works - and in due course, if they seem to correspond to reality, some hypotheses are promoted to the exalted status of "theories".
But one confirmed case in which a theory fails, and (in theory) it is discredited and abandoned.
When reality clashes with theory, reality does win. Honestly.
And post his explanation of how to build scientific theory.
"Explain to me how this literature expert and Christian apologist knows anything about science?"
Your question is difficult to answer, because of the sheer quantity of ignorance and prejudice that it displays.
There is nothing to prevent an extremely clever and learned person from learning about science. Indeed, science is one of the easiest subjects to learn about.
Has it occurred to you that Lewis frequently met, talked to, and sat at High Table beside some of the world's greatest scientists? For instance, Schroedinger was a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford at the same time as Lewis. He would also have known Heisenberg, Dirac and many other great scientists.
As for "Christian apologist", suffice it to say that virtual all scientists prior to 1900 were Christians, including Bacon, Kepler, Leibniz, Newton, Euler, Gauss, Babbage, Pasteur, Maxwell, Faraday and Lord Kelvin.
20th century scientists who were Christian include Heisenberg, Dyson, Barrow, Hewish, Knuth and literally scores of others.
suffice it to say that virtual all scientists prior to 1900 were Christians
Oh? There were no Jewish scientists prior to 1900? What about Koller, von Lieben, Lippmann (oh, hey, Nobel in Physics, but maybe not a scientist?), Caro, the other Caro, Frank, Haber (Nobel in Chemistry), Michelson (agnostic but from a Jewish family, Nobel in Physics), Goldsmid-Stern-Salomons, Mond, the other Mond, the other other Mond, and so on and so on?
Apparently some dude named Einstein, too. May have done his published work after 1900, but I think there's grounds to suggest he was a scientist before 1900. Could probably make the same argument about e.g. Franck.
There were no Islamic scientists? No Hindu scientists? No Buddhist? No atheists? I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you're wrong about that.
I'm assuming in you aren't including mathematicians as "scientists", since that would make your statement not just insultingly ignorant but prima facie absurd.
A couple of years back at Blue Dot I was chatting to one of the scientists behind the neutrino experiment that published data that suggested neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light.
After they calmed down and reflected on the data they decided to double check everything and found that the detectors at one end had longer cables than the other end, this 20 metres of extra cable at one side had skewed the numbers sufficiently to make it look like the neutrinos had got to their destination more quickly than the timing signal.
It's a magic number. If you don't believe in magic it ceases to exist!
1) Since all speeds are in the range zero to c, and the mechanism for light moving and matter moving must be the same (they're interchangeable matter to photons, photons to matter)....
1a) Which means the oscillatory motion of matter and light are the same.
2) And since your perception of time is motion of electrons and ions in your brain.... i.e. a function of the velocity mechanism mentioned in 1).
2) And measurements of time all depend on motion, even that oscillation in the atoms in an atomic clock is a function of 1a.
3) If local speed of light was different, then so would your perception of time, and so would the oscillation in an atomic clock, giving you an apparent "constant". Not really a constant, rather a measurement you can only measure as the same, because all the ways you measure it depend on the same mechanism of motion. If a chemical reaction takes N units, then if the velocity was 10x faster it would take n/10 units of time, but then your atomic clock would also run 10x faster and your perception of time would also be 10x faster, giving you a measurement of n no matter what.
Almost like magic! A constant! From NOWHERE!
Given the limit case, and given everything must be moving by the same mechanism including neutrinos, you can see why neutrinos cannot travel faster than light if they're in the same system where the same parameters defining motion 1 are the same.
You probably shouldn't rely on this constant though. Its not universal and you'll get yourselves into all kinds of confusion if you think it is.
If that's what the person said, they probably did not work very closely with the OPERA people. In fact there were two problems: a connector was not properly screwed in, which caused a delay in the detection of pulses arriving at it (pretty much it took longer for the signal to climb to the point where the edge-detector sees the edge), and a clock which was drifting. There was no cable-length problem.
These two problems are described here.
“We showed that the velocity of the H-alpha emission line is not changing with time - it's constant,”
Observed over how many centuries or even decades?
Meanwhile, there are other measurements to ascertain if one is observing an accretion disc or not, especially shifts toward blue or higher on a side facing our observation point.
Dopplering is also obvious, which won't be so extreme for an orbiting dwarf.
So, let the peers argue and observe, we'll see an eventual final verdict.
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