There’s a couple of quotes from Ernest Rutherford that I’ve kept in my head. Today seems like a good day to take them out of my head and put them to the WUWT readership. I’ll refer back to these at some point in the future I’m sure.
An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid. – As quoted in Einstein: The Man and His Achievement (1973) by G. J. Whitrow, p. 42
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” – As quoted in many Internet sources.
With thanks to Evan.
Dr. Kevin Trenberth is also a New Zealander, but there’s light years separating him and Rutherford when it comes to how they view science and statistics. One was a model scientist, and the other is a scientist who models.
UPDATE: here is another –
“In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.” – Samuel Clemens
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Roger Bacon got there earlier. Around 800 years earlier. He fought the Scholastic thinkers of the 11th Century, insisting that it wasn’t enough to have a good argument – they must also show their findings were true by reference to actual data and experiment. This was in direct contradiction to the view of the academics of the day, who believed that knowledge proceeded from revelation out of sacred scriptures, and so he was locked up in the March of Ancona for 13 years. Forgotten now, he proposed and predated our technological world by some 500 years…
“The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.”
“Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.”
“Argument is conclusive, but it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment.”
Yup. All the “science”-based problems afflicting the world today rely on statistics to do their evil work.
Not just the Carbon Cult, but quantum “physics”, economics, education, “diversity” powered by sociology, and political campaigns. All are based on transparent nonsense; all would immediately collapse if required to use plain facts; all use stats to confuse the masses, enrich the rich, and empower the powerful.
In 1995 the National Academy of Sciences and others produced an essay entitled ON BEING A SCIENTIST RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT IN RESEARCH, in which they wrote:
“… picking out reliable data from a mass of confusing and sometimes contradictory observations can be extremely difficult….If someone is not forthcoming about the procedures used to derive a new result, the validation of that result by others will be hampered.”
James Maxwell Clerk described barmaids as laymen:
“Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but, we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations into their minds. ”
WUWT is exceptional at explaining complex issues of climate and weather with us ‘barmaids’ :o}
Matt in Houston says:
April 8, 2012 at 6:21 pm
Feynman, my idol. Such a brilliant lecturer and scientist. A lot of what he had to say about NASA got lost by the media. Quite what he would say today about NASA heaven only knows.
The sad thing is that there is not one single scientist of his ilk left on the planet.
pwl says:
April 9, 2012 at 3:36 am
“No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.” – Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York
This is the guy that works for the BBC frequently. He is a supporter of AGW even though he repeatedly says the phrase above. Hypocrite ? Forgetful? Misunderstood ? I don’t know but maybe the money is useful.
“John F. Hultquist says:April 8, 2012 at 8:56 pm”
Watching that video, I started to wonder – is Bill in Kill Bill based on Feynman?
I like most of Heinlein’s quotes, but here’s a gem:
I never learned from a man who agreed with me.
Robert A. Heinlein
One more Feynman quote: “The scientist does not try to avoid showing the theory is wrong; there is excitement and progress in the exact opposite. The scientist tries to prove himself wrong as quickly as possible.”
Did anyone else notice that Hanson made his first statement before Congress in June of 1988, just four months AFTER Feynman’s death? We really needed Feynman to live another decade…sigh.
Myrrh,
You are correct:
‘If you can’t explain your research to the cleaning lady, it’s not worth doing.’
It’s one of my favourite quotations – as both a New Zealander by birth and a practising social science scientist who thinks Andrewski was onto something with his Social Science as Sorcery. I also liked his paper where he showed that Nbam was inversely related to K (where Nbam was the need to bamboozle and K was knowledge).
Nature certainly hypes up this paper by Shakum et al in its news with a promo headed “How Carbon Dioxide Melted the world”
http://www.nature.com/news/how-carbon-dioxide-melted-the-world-1.10393
I used to read Nature back when i was in education and I can’t remember such Red Top approach to science. I probably have my copies from the 1970s somewhere but I am afraid the comparison between then and now will leave my crying in my beer.
I wonder how much longer a journal like this can sruvive on its past reputation when it is being so greatly damaged by its present failure to peer review effectively and by its adoption of emotive Red Top tactics.
Actually, come to think of it Richard Feynman did hang out at a lot of bars. Just to have models to draw you know. Quite the good artist too… I am an avid reader of his book “Feynman on Physiques”.
Myrrh says:
April 9, 2012 at 3:50 am
The two comments immediately following it are useful:
I can’t answer why c is constant (in a vacuum).
As for the time dilation stuff, the best analogy I’ve seen is to preten you’re in a spaceship with a clock that keeps a photon bouncing between two mirrors, oriented so the photon is perpendicular to the direction the spaceship is moving. Inside the spaceship, you “see” the photon moving at speed c and it always takes the same amount of time for each bounce.
Someone traveling outside the spaceship with the same velocity would see the same timing, but if the velocity were different, he’d see (or compute) that the photon is moving in a ziz-zag fashion and hence traveling further each bounce, therefore he’d observe the clock is running slower.
The Southern Hemisphere temperatures lead the CO2 numbers by 1,400 years in this paper.
http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/6038/shnhco2shakun2012.png
The lag versus lead issue was always based on Antarctic ice core temperatures leading the Antarctic ice core CO2 numbers by 800 to 2,000 years in almost all cases going back through the entire 800,000 year Antarctic record.
In this case, the same Antarctic ice core temperatures and what Shakun 2012 describes as the Southern Hemisphere stack (average) is still leading the CO2 rise out of the last ice age by 1,400 years.
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”
So much for quantum mechanics!
“As quoted in many Internet sources.”
I guess quantum mechanics is safe after all. That was close though.
@ur momisugly Follow the Money
Thanks for linking this. Your take on it is spot on: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/484005a.html
The Nature editorial is embarrassing. This is supposed to be a respected journal, and yet they have no idea how science works. Very few studies that are published are irrefutable, and even fewer are so compelling that they are worthy of immediately being accepted as definitive works. Shakur’s recent paper was certainly not in that category. Even if it bears up under scrutiny, and it seems doubtful that it will, it should at least be confirmed by others independently before it’s given any weight at all. This is especially true because it cannot be verified experimentally, and no matter which side of the AGW argument a scientist finds plausible, it should be obvious that proxies are not always interpreted correctly.
Nature apparently understands none of that. In speaking of Shakur’s conclusions they state ” So let there be no confusion now…”. Think about the hubris of the author of that sentence. Not only does he/she believe that there is a clear, unambiguous truth that has been revealed, but they further ascribe any doubt to the reader’s “confusion”. Nature may believe that I am befuddled, and perhaps I am, but I still know that science is a process by which ideas are presented and, over time, they may be confirmed, refined or rejected. Anything less than that isn’t science, it’s sales.
@polistra says:April 9, 2012 at 3:56 am : Durn, you and the Geezer take all the fun out of it./sarc. I’m out to measure a couple of pole dancers.
My favorite Feynman story is his ability to open what were presumably secure safes. He would figger out the combinations by a combination of observation and deduction. He was so good that he was summoned to open a recalcitrant safe when a locksmith was not readily available.
And while a Feynman diagram may not mean much to a barmaid, it is a simple illustration that is understandable to anyone with a passing interest in particle physics.
BTW, I think it is “James Clerk Maxwell”. And why they pronounce it “Clark” is beyond me.
Many more barmaids now have a college degree than in Einstein’s time. Unfortunately, they have less of an education than a high school graduate in Einstein’s time.
There is a difference between explained to and understood by…
After all, I can explain fog to my four year as either a lazy cloud or atmospheric conditions.
Any guess as to which she understands?
English mathematician and philosopher A.N. Whitehead said something very appropriate to the climate models;
“There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.”
That actually reminds me of the Ronald Reagan administration. When Reagan was running in 1976 and failed to get the Republican nomination, the “conservatives” around me were saying they didn’t need some Hollywood movie star from California who ran the commie actors, union to be our President (these were people on the East coast). Even during the second run in 1980, many “conservatives” were very skeptical of Reagan and were quick to cast derision on “Reaganomics”.
In 1980 people weren’t so much voting FOR Reagan as they were voting AGAINST Carter. To give an example for people who may not remember or may not have been born yet. George W. Bush’s average approval rating during his first term was 62.2% while Ronald Reagan’s was only 50.3%. George H.W. Bush had better approval ratings in his only term than Reagan did in his first term. Regan’s highest approval rating of his first term never reached that of Jimmy Carter’s highest approval rating. Reagan’s lowest approval rating was in January of 1983, after a year in office, at only 35%.
It never ceases to amaze me how people who absolutely hated Reagan when he was President now wrap themselves in his mantle and claim to have supported him all along when those of us who were politically aware at the time remember well that this was not the case. Well into his second term, “Conservatives” had nothing good to say about his economic policies and about his willingness to find compromises with Tip O’Neil in Congress. Carter’s approval rating was nearly 60% as late as February 1980.
Yes, it is very easy to be a Reagan supporter NOW. It wasn’t so easy then. During his second term, everyone jumped on the bandwagon as the economy turned around and people started going back to work. Reagan’s college major was economics in which he held a bachelors degree. I believe we have a very similar situation today in that we have a candidate running that a lot of people don’t like for a lot of reasons but has the ability to turn things around. He would get very low approval ratings until he actually turns things around and people jump on board saying they “knew it all along”. He’s certainly the brightest candidate we may have ever seen run for the job and might be the best President since Coolidge, in my opinion.
Listening to the “patriots” *after* the fact is best done with some grains of salt handy.
And people were quick to jump off the Reagan bandwagon when the Iran-Contra affair broke. He went from nearly 70% approval rating in mid-1986 to about 45% approval in early 1997. Don’t pay much attention to after-the-fact supporters.
ozspeaksup says:
April 9, 2012 at 3:42 am (Edit)
John F. Hultquist says:
April 8, 2012 at 8:56 pm
Richard Feynman could NOT explain magnets to . . . any normal human.
Look and listen:===========
ta for the clip.
and sorry but he could IF? the person asking had even the most basic science education..
which that reporter to his shame..obviously had NOT!
—————————————————————————–
Well Feynman told the interviewer he was ignorant in such a way as the interviewer gained unexpected knowledge.
Forever my hero.
Ric Werme says:
April 9, 2012 at 6:07 am
As for the time dilation stuff, the best analogy I’ve seen is to preten you’re in a spaceship with a clock that keeps a photon bouncing between two mirrors, oriented so the photon is perpendicular to the direction the spaceship is moving. Inside the spaceship, you “see” the photon moving at speed c and it always takes the same amount of time for each bounce.
Someone traveling outside the spaceship with the same velocity would see the same timing, but if the velocity were different, he’d see (or compute) that the photon is moving in a ziz-zag fashion and hence traveling further each bounce, therefore he’d observe the clock is running slower.
But, and thanks for engaging with this, that’s the problem I have – I don’t see any joined up logic to show that movement along the x axis is pulling down the time on the y axis, and then all that comes after that, the explanations of what it means, don’t make sense either.
For example, sticking with the train. The train standing at the station and not moving is going to get to tomorrow at exactly the same time as the train that is speeding from one end of the country to the other, the flow of time is a ‘constant’ – standstill or movement anywhere along the x axis is not altering that, any more than, say, someone on a speeding train rushing down the corridor is going to get to the destination any faster than someone sitting quite still. All the movement along the x axis is happening up the y axis, whatever one is doing, however fast or slow one is doing it, is all travelling into the future at the same rate.
Which is what I mean, there’s no joined up logic to make travel along the x axis alter the speed of travel along the y.
I think he begins describing this hypothesis really well, so it is easy to follow the steps, but he comes to that point of logic jump without connection and just carries on as if it is logical, but it isn’t.
I think it isn’t difficult to understand because it is so ‘off the wall’ and one has to be ‘really bright’ to understand it, I say it’s difficult to understand because it is a failure of logic. If one could run down the corridor of a fast moving train at its speed, one simply travels at that speed, it doesn’t slow or speed up the journey, if one goes faster one shoots out the front of the driver’s cabin..
If time is a constant speed, then it doesn’t matter what direction one is going or at what speed one is going in this direction, one is still travelling in the direction time is going.
I think RobotRollCall has described this so well, the best description I’ve come across, that it is actually possible to see this ‘jump without joined up logic’, without confusion, if you stop where I did you see there’s no joined up logic, it’s a jump which doesn’t make sense because it’s not what happens..
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fjwkh/why_exactly_can_nothing_go_faster_than_the_speed/c1gh4x7?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=10%20Things%20In%20Tech%20You%20Need%20To%20Know&utm_campaign=10ThingsTech_NL_022211
“So far, I think this has all been pretty easy to visualize. A little challenging maybe; it might not be intuitive to think of time as a direction and yourself as moving through it. But I don’t think any of this has been too difficult so far.
Well, that’s about to change. Because I’m going to have to ask you to exercise your imagination a bit from this point on.
Imagine you’re driving in your car when something terrible happens: the brakes fail. By a bizarre coincidence, at the exact same moment your throttle and gearshift lever both get stuck. You can neither speed up nor slow down. The only thing that works is the steering wheel. You can turn, changing your direction, but you can’t change your speed at all.
Of course, the first thing you do is turn toward the softest thing you can see in an effort to stop the car. But let’s ignore that right now. Let’s just focus on the peculiar characteristics of your malfunctioning car. You can change your direction, but you cannot change your speed.
That’s how it is to move through our universe. You’ve got a steering wheel, but no throttle. When you sit there at apparent rest, you’re really careening toward the future at top speed. But when you get up to put the kettle on, you change your direction of motion through spacetime, but not your speed of motion through spacetime. So as you move through space a bit more quickly, you find yourself moving through time a bit more slowly.”
No you don’t! It doesn’t matter how fast you get up to put on the kettle, you’re not having any effect on how quickly you’re getting to tomorrow. You can be rushing around like mad, tomorrow will still come ’24 hours later’, because everything is travelling at that speed, whatever your individual speed within that. You’re not altering the speed of the train getting to the next station by being more energetic and moving about than someone sitting reading a book.
I can’t see any ‘logic fail’ in my take on this – can you?
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”
That’s foolish. You use the data, and statistical analysis, from the last experiment to design the next experiment.