Anecdotes from science

[Genady]

1 hour ago, studiot said:

I never noticed that discrepancy

I wouldn't know about it if not for this footnote in Zee, A., Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell:

Quote

∗ On the old one pound note, a portrait of Newton together with his orbits appears on the back. Amusingly, the artist felt compelled to put the sun at the center, rather than one of the foci, of the ellipse.

 

[TheVat]

10 hours ago, Genady said:

How is your Latin?

Anyway, the artist has added the background and in it, he placed the Sun exactly in the center of the ellipse, where the major and the minor axes intersect (the point C). This is where the Sun cannot be. By the Kepler's first law, and per Newton as well, the Sun is in one of the foci (the point S).

PS. In the earlier hint ("Hint: focus on the geometric drawing.") the word "focus" was the hint.

I got the hint.  Yes, barycenter (looking at a single orbit) means one of the foci of an elliptical orbit.   And the sun also orbits that barycenter, very tightly, so it is not right at the focus, either.  The cumulative effect of all the 8.5 planets also shifts the barycenter so that it would be pretty unlikely to find the sun at a focus of one single orbit.   

[Genady]

5 hours ago, studiot said:

Here is another quote from Ellenberg who has the ability to offer remarkably simple yet penetrating insights in his writings.

 

 

 

This is very good point. Unfortunately, most people (in my anecdotal experience) have this image of math thinking being 'algorithmic' / 'logical' / 'sequential' / 'linear' / etc. 

Regarding the trial and error, my math teacher had rules of working on math problems, such as:

- don't use notebooks, use loose sheets of paper instead, so you can spread them around on the desk or on the floor to see and to come back to your trials, errors, and partial or intermediate results;

- use only one side of a sheet of paper, so you can see all your work without turning a page;

- never erase what you tried; use a pen, not a pencil; ...

[studiot]

17 minutes ago, Genady said:

This is very good point. Unfortunately, most people (in my anecdotal experience) have this image of math thinking being 'algorithmic' / 'logical' / 'sequential' / 'linear' / etc. 

Regarding the trial and error, my math teacher had rules of working on math problems, such as:

- don't use notebooks, use loose sheets of paper instead, so you can spread them around on the desk or on the floor to see and to come back to your trials, errors, and partial or intermediate results;

- use only one side of a sheet of paper, so you can see all your work without turning a page;

- never erase what you tried; use a pen, not a pencil; ...

Thanks for the reply.

It is interesting to think back to when I was at school.

Some of my teachers issues two exercise books.  One was for rough working and the other was for fair finished copy/output.
This was actually a pretty decent system, although they were very hot on the 'fairness' of the copy.  (note I am using the english words fair and copy as presentab;le and output).
We were just coming out of post war, when paper was at a premoium. The previous generation had tales of writng first in pencil, then going over in pen with new stuff later and writing a block of text, then writing around the margins.

Interesting that you only had one maths teacher (you didn't really did you ?)

😀

[Genady]

1 hour ago, studiot said:

Interesting that you only had one maths teacher (you didn't really did you ?)

😀

Three. Years 1-4, 5-8, and 9-10. All three were good and different.

[Genady]

The physicist–philosopher Ernst Mach (1838–1916), who spoke of “the artificial hypothetical atoms of chemistry and physics,” never accepted their existence. As late as 1916, shortly before his death, he declared that “I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.” This goes to show that a scientist can maintain his own principles, bravely holding out against a wide consensus of the scientific establishment, and still be wrong. 

Weinberg, Steven. Foundations of Modern Physics (p. 58). 

[TheVat]

Reminds me of William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, who said in the 1890s that "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."

It sounds foolish now, but you have to recall that Kelvin had lived through a staggering wave of advances in the field that included Maxwell unifying electricity and magnetism and deriving the speed of light, then Hertz's experimental verifications, so there were many in science who were thinking that took care of all the forces.  And the luminiferous aether hadn't been tossed aside yet.  

 

Kind of funny that Michelson and Morley had done their first aether experiment in 1887.  But Kelvin et al didn't pay much attention.

Edited September 30, 2023 by TheVat
Morley not Morely

[Genady]

4 hours ago, TheVat said:

Reminds me of William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, who said in the 1890s that "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."

It sounds foolish now, but you have to recall that Kelvin had lived through a staggering wave of advances in the field that included Maxwell unifying electricity and magnetism and deriving the speed of light, then Hertz's experimental verifications, so there were many in science who were thinking that took care of all the forces.  And the luminiferous aether hadn't been tossed aside yet.  

 

Kind of funny that Michelson and Morley had done their first aether experiment in 1887.  But Kelvin et al didn't pay much attention.

Lord Kelvin - Wikipedia disagrees:

Quote

A statement falsely attributed to Kelvin is: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." This has been widely misattributed to Kelvin since the 1980s, either without citation or stating that it was made in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1900). There is no evidence that Kelvin said this, and the quote is instead a paraphrase of Albert A. Michelson, who in 1894 stated: "… it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established … An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." Similar statements were given earlier by others, such as Philipp von Jolly. The attribution to Kelvin in 1900 is presumably a confusion with his "Two clouds" speech, delivered to the Royal Institution in 1900 (see above), and which on the contrary pointed out areas that would subsequently see revolutions.

The "Two clouds" speech:

Quote

On 27 April 1900 he gave a widely reported lecture titled Nineteenth-Century Clouds over the Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light to the Royal Institution. The two "dark clouds" he was alluding to were confusion surrounding how matter moves through the aether (including the puzzling results of the Michelson–Morley experiment) and indications that the Law of Equipartition in statistical mechanics might break down. Two major physical theories were developed during the twentieth century starting from these issues: for the former, the theory of relativity; for the second, quantum mechanics.

 

[TheVat]

That is fascinating and astonishing.  What I mean is that I have heard that Kelvin quote over and over almost my entire adult life, from teachers and scientists I respected, from science writers of sterling reputation, and no one ever contested its accuracy!  I would say that this demonstrates the pernicious way many repetitions can make a wholly fictitious statement or attribution develop the ring of truth.

Really, I am quite happy to learn that Kelvin was in fact responsive to the results of the MM experiments and not so dogmatic.

And also startled that Michelson would say something like that.  I would assume he backed away pretty quickly from that a few years later.

Good job on debunking the quote, Genady.

[Genady]

7 minutes ago, TheVat said:

That is fascinating and astonishing.  What I mean is that I have heard that Kelvin quote over and over almost my entire adult life, from teachers and scientists I respected, from science writers of sterling reputation, and no one ever contested its accuracy!  I would say that this demonstrates the pernicious way many repetitions can make a wholly fictitious statement or attribution develop the ring of truth.

Really, I am quite happy to learn that Kelvin was in fact responsive to the results of the MM experiments and not so dogmatic.

And also startled that Michelson would say something like that.  I would assume he backed away pretty quickly from that a few years later.

Good job on debunking the quote, Genady.

Thus, in a roundabout way this story fits very well this thread.

Thank you.