[HN Gopher] Arno A. Penzias, 90, Dies; Nobel Physicist Confirmed...
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Arno A. Penzias, 90, Dies; Nobel Physicist Confirmed Big Bang
Theory
Author : gumby
Score : 270 points
Date : 2024-01-23 02:05 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| gumby wrote:
| I worked with Arno about a decade ago and he was still sharp as a
| tack.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What did you collaborate on?
| gumby wrote:
| Not what you might expect: we were building small distributed
| solar thermal plants that stored energy in a tank of
| supercritical water (basically: inject steam into tank of
| water -> it condenses; open a valve on the top and it flashes
| out as steam).
|
| Since the pressure varies depending on solar flux and how
| much was in the tank we couldn't use a turbine (the shape of
| the turbine is tuned to a constant flow) so instead used
| multi-stage steam engines (the first new steam engine
| designed probably in 75 years. These were ordinary container-
| sized pressure vessels and the steam engines were built into
| a container too. Easy to repair; you could make your own
| parts, and last forever.
|
| Cheap PV and batteries killed it.
|
| Arno was full of good advice.
| elcomet wrote:
| What's PV?
| phreeza wrote:
| Photovoltaics, aka solar cells.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Thank you for asking. I'm always vexed by impenetrable
| acronyms here, as if everyone's expected to know them as
| part of a common knowledge base.
|
| Positive Q sign = lying in bed unconscious with tongue
| drooping down one corner of mouth; means either dead or
| will be soon.
|
| Source: Retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years
| in practice)
|
| My proof: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5DdrM
| c8AAAAJ&hl=en
| dmd wrote:
| ... what
| zafka wrote:
| Ha, Thanks! I just ran into the other room and asked my
| wife who is a retired OR nurse what "positive Q sign"
| meant and she stuck her tongue out of the side of her
| mouth. I love learning new terms :)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| That's the best thing I've read all day: thank you!!!
| dmd wrote:
| Maybe you can tell me what I'm missing here. What does
| his comment have to do with anything else in the thread?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Oh that sounds like a ton of fun. In the 90's I was working
| on solar concentrators because the panels were so bloody
| expensive. Funny how that got entirely obsoleted by
| economies of scale.
| parthianshotgun wrote:
| Is there still a niche for concentrators? Like for cloudy
| weather or restricted space. Or does the economy of scale
| eclipse even that accessory market
| jacquesm wrote:
| Cloudy weather is harder, not easier when using
| concentrators (because it concentrates parallel rays of
| sunlight, not ambient light). Restricted space would
| still need to be covered with something and here you'll
| find that covering it directly with photovoltaic panels
| is more cost effective _and_ will get you more power for
| a given area. As far as I 'm aware concentrators are
| pretty much dead except for when you need lots of
| localized heat, for instance a solar oven. There they
| definitely work better than anything that is based off
| photovoltaics and because they tend to be totally passive
| probably more rugged and reliable too.
| gumby wrote:
| To my surprise there seems to be a small revival, though
| I don't quite understand the applications (not that I
| follow it closely).
|
| In general land is less expensive than the cost of
| trackers or concentrators (capital cost incl
| installation, plus op ex of maintenance & power) so you
| deal with your cosine loss by just installing more
| panels.
| blacksqr wrote:
| The Skinner Universal Unaflow? Fascinating!
|
| https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/terrajoule-
| unst...
| gumby wrote:
| Ha ha I'm glad my dog made it into that article.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Another fascinating and refined mechanical contraption
| killed by solid state innovation
| gumby wrote:
| Definitely. Though being a 21st century mechanical device
| it was heavily instrumented and had an electronic control
| system. Amusingly, our electronic cylinder indicator
| showed a problem in one of the stages but the old-school
| mechanical one did not. The ME's told me "your instrument
| is bad" but when the stage was taken apart...sure enough
| the head gasket had a hole.
|
| The advantage of the mechanical system is that it would
| last indefinitely and could be repaired on site. People
| in India could make most of the spare parts themselves
| and do the maintenance themselves.
|
| But the advantages of the semiconductor + battery systems
| were: 1 - no moving parts and 2 - massive economies of
| scale due to mass factory production of highly uniform
| parts that could be used in lots of applications. Makes
| sense that it won -- our approach was superior only in
| certain applications.
| koblas wrote:
| I have some good memories and little stories from my brief time
| working with him. Great guy.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| He was the VP of research at Bell Labs during my postdoc 30+
| years ago. Imposing in stature both as a scientist and as a
| person. RIP.
| nxobject wrote:
| Would that have been in the late 80s-90s? I wonder how Bell
| Labs was doing then, after the AT&T breakup.
| vmurthy wrote:
| Not to take away anything from Mr Penzias but here's how I
| remember his name :-)
|
| "Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic
| background radiation, didn't know what it was when they had found
| it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in any
| paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The
| Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis
| Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor
| Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had
| found until they read about it in the New York Times"
|
| - Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
|
| RIP Mr Penzias
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Without aspersion on Penzias and Wilson, Robert Dicke should
| have been recognized in due time. He was a supremely gifted
| experimentalist on top of everything else. Credited with
| inventing the lock-in amplifier, he graciously deferred to
| others. His radiometer and switch also had great impact.
| Stockholm should hang its head for this oversight.
| blawson wrote:
| OT but this book is so incredible. The breadth of information
| covered is amazing, even for being ~20 years old at this point.
|
| The audiobook at .7 speed is my sleep aid.
| m463 wrote:
| > The audiobook at .7 speed is my sleep aid.
|
| I love little hacks like this.
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| Have any other Nobel Prizes been awarded to someone who only
| discovered some phenomena but didn't do any further research to
| advance our understanding of it? It seems to me that that falls
| in the category of blind luck rather than research and
| shouldn't qualify for the Prize.
| evanb wrote:
| Many. Just to give an example, the very first Nobel in
| physics was awarded to Rontgen, who discovered 'A new kind of
| Ray' (which only later named x-rays and were shown to be
| photons with a different wavelength). He noticed a detector
| going off even though his device was in a sealed box.
| neuromanser wrote:
| Btw X-rays are called "rentgenove zareni" ("Roentgen
| radiation") in Czech.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| In lots of languages, both are used (thought X-rays
| becomes more and more common).
| bbojan wrote:
| I believe in German-speaking countries the X-ray machine
| is called Rontgen? E.g. in a hospital you will have
| directions for "Rontgen".
| mr_mitm wrote:
| We call it "Rontgenstrahlung" (X-rays), "Rontgengerat"
| (X-ray machine), "Rontgenaufnahme" (X-ray picture). We
| even made a verb out of it, even though that's probably
| colloquial: "Wir mussen Ihr Bein rontgen" (we need to
| X-ray your leg).
| neuromanser wrote:
| Rentgen is a noun in Czech meaning 1. the machine, 2. the
| picture, the root of an adjective (rentgenovy), Amd the
| root of a verb (rentgenovat).
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| a lot of languages call it Roentgen rays or similar
| oh_sigh wrote:
| At my work maybe 10 years ago, we had a little trivia
| competition on a fun day, about 25 people taking part -
| one of the questions was "who discovered the X-ray?", and
| all 7 of the eastern Europeans got the correct answer,
| but none of the Americans, Indians, or Asians in the
| group got it right (except for me, but I'm special).
| sidkshatriya wrote:
| The nobel prize is granted for discoveries that advance human
| knowledge. Whether that discovery is through chance, sheer
| hardwork or some linear combination, what matters is the
| discovery. It is not not disputed (by anyone) that the
| discovery was important here. The theory of the Cosmic
| microwave background was already out there -- it just needed
| someone to confirm the theory !
|
| One could argue that the microwave background radiation was
| discovered precisely by the nobel winning experimenters
| because they refused to explain away the "noise". They were
| persistent and kept trying to eliminate possible sources of
| this noise. Perhaps other similar horn antennae had the same
| noise but this noise was just explained away by the other
| experimentalist as being an artifact of the equipment ? One
| may never know.
|
| Lastly, it has been my experience that luck seems to strike
| competent and fastidious researchers more often than average
| ones.
| ioblomov wrote:
| Here, here. We take it for granted now, but even such
| things as HBO's white-noise intro, the echoes of creation,
| is a cultural artifact of their tenacious attention to
| detail.
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| Let's suppose for reasons of this discussion, that Bell
| labs had assigned a junior engineer to determine how noise
| was getting into the antenna, not a couple of PhD's who
| were well along in their careers. Further, let's also
| assume that, through sheer hard work, some innate
| brilliance, and maybe some consultations with his mentors,
| this engineer arrived at the same discovery. Do you think
| that he would be awarded a Nobel Prize or would he be
| ignored because he doesn't sport the right credentials?
| otteromkram wrote:
| Not a scientist chiming in, but I'd guess that the
| project had "lead" scientists who set everything up for
| the antenna experiment and any data from the junior
| scientist (what I think you meant) would need to be
| vetted and still fall under the purview of the lead(s).
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Discovery of penicillin
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_penicillin
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Allan_Penzias
| nevster wrote:
| https://archive.is/8Ekg6
| _kst_ wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rVBu6i6Qwk
| elashri wrote:
| The title could be about Cosmic Microwave Background radiation
| instead of talking about Big Bang Theory. Yes, he and Wilson
| discovered it.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Big bang theory is not elegant. Inflation is a dumb Suskind
| idea. Not elegant at all.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Who cares? There is no reason why the universe needs to be
| elegant.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Oh yes the hell it does.
| nabla9 wrote:
| In early 1960s statistical evidence from radio astronomy ruled
| out the steady-state model.
| vijayr02 wrote:
| RIP Arno. Here's the video and write up of the gag Dennis Ritchie
| and Rob Pike pulled on him:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxMKuv0A6z4
|
| https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/labscam.html
|
| Edit: just wanted to say the hum of the universe dulled a little
| bit with his passing
| zubairq wrote:
| Yes Arno was very interesting! Gonna read up more on the Big
| Bang and his work now, thanks!
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
| TheRoque wrote:
| "confirms theory" I know it's valid, but it sounds weird
| mocha_nate wrote:
| I agree. Makes me think someone over-spiced the headline
| cryptonector wrote:
| How is it valid? "Conforms" to theory would be OK. "Tends to
| confirm" would be OK. "Fails to disprove" would be OK. We
| don't "confirm" theories. We don't "prove" theories.
| eisvogel wrote:
| Tired light forever!!!
| flykespice wrote:
| What does it means to confirm a theory?
| cryptonector wrote:
| It's unscientific nonsense.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| What are you all on about? This phrase is used all the time
| in science.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Since Karl Popper we take science to be the development
| of _falsifiable_ theories and experimentation to show
| them to be false (therefore ruled out) or not-false,
| therefore still theories. We don 't say that General
| Relativity is proven -- we say that it is in agreement
| with all experiments carried out so far.
|
| One does not 'confirm' the Big Bang theory. One finds
| evidence that does not disprove it. Or one finds evidence
| that does disprove it, then someone (possibly the same
| person or persons) elaborates a variant of that theory,
| or a whole sale replacement of it.
|
| Note the prominence of the need for falsifiability in the
| following:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=karl+popper+falsification
| +qu...
|
| So, _yes_ , speaking of how a Nobel physicist "confirmed"
| the Big Bang [theory] is unscientific nonsense. What
| should one expect though? It's a headline in the New York
| Times, not Nature!
|
| My above comment is at -3, which normally I'd not care
| about, but collective ignorance of what the scientific
| method is is a bit depressing.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| You're acting like the people posting here don't know
| that about theories. Language works within contexts, and
| the context for "confirm" in science reporting tends to
| be finding strong supporting evidence. Since the
| discovery of the CMB ruled out a large chunk of the other
| theories and left the Big Bang as the leading candidate,
| it obviously fits the finding strong supporting evidence
| case.
|
| We see similar titles every once in a while when someone
| does a new kind of test for relativity too.
| passedandfuture wrote:
| It's clear by the title an athiest wrote this.
| Jensson wrote:
| Why couldn't god have created the big bang? Science has
| nothing to do with religion.
| ken47 wrote:
| A scientific theory cannot really be "confirmed." The word
| choice is suspect. The Big Bang Theory is consistent with
| many properties of the known universe, but cannot
| adequately explain others. Claiming it is the ground truth
| takes a leap of faith, which however small compared to
| religion, requires a measure of faith as implied.
| Jensson wrote:
| What does that have to do with atheism? You don't think
| that people who believe in God sometimes makes mistakes
| when picking words?
| ken47 wrote:
| It begs the question as to whether the author of the
| title actually believes the Big Bang is confirmed from a
| scientific point of view. That would suggest an atheistic
| belief.
| pvg wrote:
| You're conflating confirmation with some type of
| irrefutable proof which is both pedantic and plain wrong.
| ken47 wrote:
| The job of people who write titles like this is to be
| very pedantic about word choice. I'll have to disagree
| with you on this being a "plain wrong" interpretation of
| the given wording.
| pvg wrote:
| It's not the job of the people who write titles to be
| pedantic although it is reasonable of them to expect most
| readers to know the difference between confirmation and
| absolute proof. The problem here is not with the title.
| ken47 wrote:
| If they were targeting an adequately scientifically
| trained audience, sure. I don't think they are.
| pvg wrote:
| That doesn't have much to do with it, you're just
| mistaken about the (fairly common) usage 'confirms
| theory'.
| misja111 wrote:
| The Bible states that God created light, stars and earth in
| seven days; on day 3 He created the earth, on day 4 the
| stars. That seems rather incompatible with the big bang
| theory.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents, definitely
| not flamewar tangents, and especially definitely not
| religious flamewar tangents. That's the last thing we need
| here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ken47 wrote:
| The semantics of the title seem off and written by a non-
| scientist. A scientific theory cannot be proven, so the
| significant word choice of "confirm" is poor.
| Jensson wrote:
| > written by a non-scientist
|
| Yes, journalists aren't scientists.
| ken47 wrote:
| Shame that instead of highlighting one of the many great
| things that this man did, they use incorrect phraseology to
| claim he did something he didn't do.
| Gimpei wrote:
| Why not? Are you making some oblique reference to Popperian
| refutationalism or is your point just that it's very
| difficult to 100% prove something, so often it's more a
| matter of a significant updating of priors? If it's the
| latter, using "proof" doesn't seem like the worst shorthand
| to me. Anything more involved would go over the head of the
| average nytimes reader.
| ken47 wrote:
| I assumed the average New York Times reader is above
| average in intellect and could appreciate an irrefutable
| word choice, like "advanced" in place of "confirmed." I
| could be wrong.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Evidence of [x] is not proof of [x], but in this specific
| case the claim is particularly unreasonable.
|
| Because while a cosmic microwave background radiation is
| something that would be expected from a Big Bang, its
| actual reality is weird and contradicted previous
| expectations. It has to do with casual connectivity. "A"
| can only possibly influence "B" if A could reach B at the
| speed of light. But the relative homogeneity of our
| universe is suggestive that parts of the universe which
| should not be casually connected, _are_ causally connected.
|
| So this discovery quickly led to the invention of cosmic
| inflation [1] whereby the early expansion of the universe
| is said to have dramatically accelerated well beyond the
| speed of light, and then slowed down - in order to enable
| these regions of space to become causally connected. No
| possible means or mechanism have been suggested, so it
| remains nothing but a rather inelegant hack to try to make
| what we observe fit a preexisting hypothesis that it
| largely contradicted.
|
| As experiments to try to provide supporting evidence for
| inflation have also turned up negative, it's also becoming
| one of those contemporary model driven hypotheses that
| requires ever more exotic physics to even make it possible,
| as each failed prediction gets assimilated into the model
| to make it keep fitting what we see. Just add more
| epicycles. [2]
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#M
| otivati...
|
| [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_hypothesis
| mr_mitm wrote:
| > A scientific theory cannot be proven,
|
| Yes, that's why the title doesn't say "Physicist proves Big
| Bang theory"
| abrarsami wrote:
| RIP Arno
| notso411 wrote:
| Confirmed how. It is a theory. CMBR discovery is not confirmation
| of anything other than the existence of CMBR
| nabla9 wrote:
| "it's just a theory" slur is misleading and conflates two
| separate meanings of the word theory.
|
| There is lots of mysteries related to big bang, but steady-
| state model of cosmic evolution has been falsified. In early
| 1960s statistical evidence from radio astronomy ruled out the
| steady-state model.
| bleeprot wrote:
| But isn't saying that the big bang theory has been
| "confirmed" also misleading? That seems like a fair critique
| to me. Not to dismiss anybody's work, but it is important to
| express scientific accomplishments and advancements
| accurately (especially to a public that is vulnerable to
| manipulation by sources they deem to be authoritative).
| nabla9 wrote:
| All words are misleading without appropriate knowledge and
| reading level. If the meaning is constantly lost for you
| when reading science or economics, it's not because the
| writers are bad, but because your reading level and general
| knowledge level are not high enough to read those articles.
|
| Human language has syntax, semantics and pragmatics. HN
| comment section has disproportionate number terminology
| nitpickers and misunderstanders who somehow have problems
| with semantics and pragmatics. They represent a small
| minority of HN users. I suspect many of them are teens or
| young adults and improve over time.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Not in any very important sense no. The existing big bang
| theory made a big headline prediction and that prediction
| turned out to be correct, the theory is confirmed in this
| respect.
|
| Later experiments might see some details in the measured
| result the theory didn't get right, but this doesn't
| invalidate the theory at the coarse level because at that
| precision the new measurements still agree with the old
| predictions: the theory is still confirmed in the sense
| that its predictions roughly match measurements.
|
| Occasionally it happens that a new measurement of some
| detail comes up with a result that the existing theory
| cannot be easily modified to accommodate: only this
| represents a true challenge in the sense that if some
| competing theory easily explains the new result along with
| all the old ones that will then become the "correct" one.
|
| Without this other competitor, a theory found to not
| accommodate the latest experimental results will be kept on
| indefinitely as the correct and confirmed one, but only
| used within clearly delimited context.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| "Confirmed" is often just used as "found significant
| supporting evidence for", since there's no actual "true"
| confirmation of any theory.
| seoulbigchris wrote:
| I went to one of his lectures in Atlanta in the early 1980s. I
| wasn't sure what to expect, but he was very interesting and
| approachable. Wonderful stories and explanation of his research,
| and afterwards he just sat on the stage and a bunch of us Ga Tech
| geeks surrounded him and we had an impromptu Q&A session. Very
| memorable experience.
| Jemm wrote:
| "settled a debate over the origin and evolution of the universe."
|
| Really?
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Yeah... it's a eulogy given to the general public. Sometimes
| they say nice things even if they aren't 100% accurate.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Yes, until that discovery the consensus was pretty much that it
| could be either big bang or steady state. Penzias' discovery
| was a smoking gun that put all but the most stubborn critics
| (Fred Hoyle was arguably the most prominent) of the big bang
| theory to rest. These days there is not a single professional
| cosmologist that doubts the big bang theory as far as I am
| aware. (Note that by "big bang theory" we mean the theory of
| the evolution of the universe a fraction of a second after the
| singularity event.)
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I do think there is recently a model that the CMB is _not_
| the echo of thd big bang (without necessarily disclaiming the
| big bang itself). Cosmology will have to answer that one in
| the next decade.
|
| https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018MNRAS.478..283V/abstra.
| ...
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Oh yeah, a assuming a universe that is cyclically expanding
| and contracting is so much better than the one time
| expansion of the big bang:
|
| > Obviously, the idea of the universe oscillating within a
| given range of redshifts is a mere hypothesis full of open
| questions. The primary question is: which forces drive the
| oscillations. Without proposing any solution, we can just
| speculate that [gravitational collapse] might play a
| central role in this model [p 16, ibid]
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| That's kind of irrelevant though. You could still have a
| big bang, just without the CMB as it's signature. In any
| case the fact that modeling cosmic dust backwards through
| time produces a redshifted black body radiation that more
| or less looks like the CMB is something you can't just
| dismiss. Or else you're not being scientific, you're just
| being religious.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| It's very much not: "modeling cosmic dust backwards
| through time" necessarily means you have assumed a
| cosmology, and in particular this result of the BB
| spectra from just dust absolutely _needs_ that the
| cosmology is cyclic because that 's the only way to get
| the constant densities that starts the entire derivation.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| No, modeling cosmic dust backwards in time is just
| rolling back the expansion parameters that are well
| accepted and based on observation.
| srid wrote:
| I find it interesting that comments questioning the validity of
| Big Bang are not popular here. Quoting Sabrine,
|
| "The Big Bang is the simplest explanation to the universe that
| we know, and it's probably wrong"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAVUvq6BE1E
| tekla wrote:
| Replace Big Bang with almost every theory ever and the
| statement is still true.
|
| Why does anyone give a damn about Youtubers.
| bedhead wrote:
| Hasn't the big bang basically been disproven as a theory?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/blinking-white-guy
|
| You'll have to provide more context for why you say that.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Hasn't the big bang basically been disproven as a theory?
|
| No. That isn't to say that there aren't issues with it. Notably
| that it explains many of the observable qualities of the
| universe today with high accuracy, with our current
| instruments.
|
| Due to some inconsistencies with what is observed across great
| distance (and time) and the need to violate a number of
| principles (thermodynamics and speed of light) during the
| inflation, there are other theories[1]. It is recognized that
| the BB theory has serious problems that cannot be empirically
| tested.
|
| Therefore, the theory holds as long as it continues to be
| useful in describing our local space.
|
| [1] I prefer the idea of a localized small bang as opposed to a
| universal big bang
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| Do you information on localized small bang theory? I thought
| that the way the Big Bang avoids being a black hole is by
| having gravity pull in all directions (isotropy). Wouldn't a
| local bang just be a black hole?
| cryptonector wrote:
| The original Big Bang theory is considered incorrect. The
| addition of "inflation" makes it compatible with current
| evidence, and we still colloquially call that theory the "Big
| Bang" theory, so... no, it's not been disproven.
| ErikAugust wrote:
| Read in plaintext: https://trimread.org/articles/209/text
| vages wrote:
| Cool page, but would like the header to remain in the article.
| acyou wrote:
| Though the title is copied from the article, the title is
| needlessly inflammatory. Given the replication, practical
| application and self-admitted quantum physics vs. standard model
| crisis/failures of modern particle physics, astronomy, and cosmic
| theory, declaring victory around the Big Bang Theory is, and may
| always be premature, despite the surrounding dogma.
|
| Would anyone who knew him personally agree that he claimed to
| have "confirmed the big bang theory", and that he would want to
| be remembered in that way?
| cryptonector wrote:
| > Would anyone who knew him personally agree that he claimed to
| have "confirmed the big bang theory", and that he would want to
| be remembered in that way?
|
| Almost certainly not, at least not the _scientists_ who knew
| him. The scientific method does not involve proving (or
| "confirming") theories; it only involves falsifiable theories
| and attempts to falsify them.
| throwaway_ls wrote:
| > it *only* involves falsifiable theories and attempts to
| falsify them.
|
| Your view is needlessly narrow. Coming up with new theories,
| collecting new data, verifying how theories fit that data is
| also part of the process even if it doesn't falsify them. To
| quote wikipedia it's on going process:
|
| "The process in the scientific method involves making
| conjectures (hypothetical explanations), deriving predictions
| from the hypotheses as logical consequences, and then
| carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on
| those predictions."
| cryptonector wrote:
| The scientific process _only_ involves _falsifiable_
| theories. The process does allow refining theories to fit
| new evidence, for sure, but a refined theory is a new
| theory, with the old one disproven, but this only works
| when theories are falsifiable. Therefore we never speak of
| "proven" or "confirmed" theories.
| throwaway_ls wrote:
| > The scientific process only involves falsifiable
| theories.
|
| What is your source? Wikipedia disagrees with you.
| ioblomov wrote:
| Think some context here would help. Karl Popper
| established the limits of "truth" as much as Godel and
| his incompleteness theorems did...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
|
| TL;DR: If a theory _isn't_ falsifiable--if it doesn't
| make any predictions which can be proved or disproved--
| then it's more philosophy than science. By this standard,
| string theory fails.
| eigenket wrote:
| > The scientific process only involves falsifiable
| theories
|
| This is definitely not true. One obvious example is that
| important scientific work is done turning unfalsifiable
| theories into falsifiable ones. After gravitational waves
| were predicted by general relativity there was some
| argument about whether they were a real observable thing
| or just an artifact of the maths. Those guys were
| undoubtedly doing "real science" while discussing
| something that some of them thought was undetectable (and
| therefore unfalsifiable).
|
| Another example is that a lot of science is exploratory
| without any particular theory you're trying to falsify.
|
| Science is more interesting and broad than your dogma
| about what it should be.
| dekhn wrote:
| scientists only speak this formally in rare occasionally,
| like when they are trying to discredit a competitor.
|
| The vast majority of the time, when a working scientists
| says "proved" they understand the epistemic limitations
| of the terminology.
| roywiggins wrote:
| What theory were the people observing the 1769 transit of
| Venus trying to falsify? If they weren't doing science, what
| were they doing?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1769_transit_of_Venus_observed.
| ..
| dbspin wrote:
| They were collecting data. The theory had already been
| worked out at that point, but it required data to be put to
| use. I think this does broadly fit within the framework of
| Popperian falsification that OP is describing. But I'd also
| agree that classification and data gathering, as well as
| hypthothesis generation are of course all vital parts of
| the scientific process. It is worth noting though that a
| surprisingly large number of scientists have issues
| grokking or putting into action the concept of 'falsifying
| the null hypothesis'.
| tekla wrote:
| While "confirmed" is a very strong term, CMBR is an obscenely
| good piece of evidence that something that is pretty much 99%+
| similar to modern theories of the big bang, and it ruled out
| most other theories.
| burkaman wrote:
| In a 2005 autobiography, he described some of his work as
| having "provided strong support for the "Big Bang"
| interpretation of our earlier discovery". -
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1978/penzias/biogr...
|
| Strong support is obviously not the same as confirmation, so I
| think you're right that he might have disagreed with this word
| choice.
| the_doctah wrote:
| How do you confirm a theory?
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| We cannot confirm Big Bang theory until we figure out inflation
| more.
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