In a previous post AT asked for a response to Hans’ piece. The gist dates from six years ago: besides the branding effort, the point behind these typologies is moot at best. Let’s be more specific.
First, it is not an article or a “communication,” but an infomercial paying lip service to various essays Hans wrote over the years. He caveats this indulgence by saying that the editors asked him. Fair enough, seniority ought to provide perks.
Second, Hans’ infomercial promotes the concept of Post-Normal Science, hereafter PoNo. The label stinks, for it presumes that its intended audience groks jargon from contested lands of epistemology. Even chat bots recognize the problem, see item 2:
Among its demerits, the concept of normal science misrepresents knowledge production. Scientists are no stamp collectors, and science never was a big box of jigsaw puzzles. As I take it, Thomas used it as an image to set up the next part of his story: scientific revolutions, where crises emerge, paradigms get shattered, and scientists turn into communards {1}. Any biography enthusiast should get that the Kuhnian model is a very crude approximation of real life.
The science-as-puzzle-solving caricature shines when Sylvio, one of PoNo’s curators, observes: facts that are taught from textbooks in institutions are still necessary, but are no longer sufficient. The idea does not float: facts never were sufficient to make decisions, and decisions always involved values. We organize reality with facts that speak to us and we make choices for ventures we care about everywhere, from total war to the deepest realms of physics.
The PoNo mistake rests on asking too much of science: it can only provide conditions for action. Contemporary science tells you that smoking may lead to lung cancer. It does not tell you what to do with that information. To savor one last nail coffin right before the gallows would do little harm. With kids who need your human capital for a while, to confer with one’s insurer appears wiser.
Same for dumping CO2 into the atmosphere like there’s no tomorrow. Climate may not determine outcomes, but it sure applies terms and conditions. Venusians don’t get to choose if they exist-they can’t. Their world is just too damn hot! By extension:
[PoNo Principle] Science worth discussing is post-normal all the way down.
The short of it is that I find nothing special about PoNo. A longer version follows from a series of assumptions, two about life in general, two about science, and two about scientists. They seem natural enough to me.
Life is more than unfair: it cannot be fair (unfairness). It offers more problems than solutions; resolving a question leads to more questions (unsatisfiability). An area of inquiry that becomes fully determined ends being one.
Empirical sciences cannot produce certainty; theories are never conclusively justified (fallibility). Only Nature herself never errs. Messy problems are impossible to define (undefinability). Whatever escapes analysis is thus wicked. Cricket is wicked.
In any dispute intensity will be inversely proportional to its importance (puerility). Time spent on a kerfuffle will be inversely proportional to its stakes (prodigality). Inter group differences are thus barely detectable to the external observer {2}.
* * *
In a nutshell, scientists always converge toward truth by competing on shaky grounds over issues that needed to be tackled yesterday. While we hope they abide by noble norms, incentives trump ethics. At best incentives and norms align, even if everything in this world is about power except politics, which is about sex.
To close our argument and to illustrate, The Curious Case of Johannes von Gumbach {3} reveals the PoNo principle in action. Here was a student of astronomy and mathematics who held astonishing stations from Guernsey to Peking, amidst trials and tribulations. An impostor, an embezzler, a prolific writer who contested that the Moon spun, who disputed the dimensions of the Earth, who thought comets were living beings. A life spent in quarrels over stakes that were raised every time.
Time to peel the romantic veneer off the good ol’ scientific days. To be “marred by a fantasy of the importance of his scientific pursuits, a dubious morality, and a highly litigious and argumentative nature,” as Le Conte says of Gumbach, is nothing new. Like we should embrace crappiness, we ought to embrace crankiness, including from senior researchers. After all, it’s just PoNo.
Notes
{1} Does it show that I am listening to the Revolutions podcast series and am about to finish the French one?
{2} A more formal way to express the idea would be: for any group G with a smallest denominator there exists a function that transforms each subgroup into one another (and vice versa) for an increasingly higher price (Geisel, 1961).
{3} H/T Binny. Who said there was nothing to learn at Roy’s?
...and Then There's Physics 
still tweeting
cool kids have moved on to
nostr.
Will look.
I am on Mastodon:
https://mastodon.world/@climateball
and on Post:
https://post.news/@climateball
Not sure for how long.
Reddit is fine too, but very different:
https://www.reddit.com/user/ClimateBall
I started using Damus last month. And I’m not at all a cool kid. Too old for that now.
Sabine’s video might deserve a shout out:
That should be enough to show that science is PoNo all the way down.
I like quite a lot of what Sabine does, but some does seem a little over-the-top. Maybe she really can see the “truth” that a huge number of particle physicists are missing, but maybe it is somewhat more nuanced that she suggests.
Sabine sure has a dog in that fight, AT.
At least she does not argue that particle physicists should embrace more uncertainty. A clash of values is involved – she argues against simplicity. Stakes are high in the sense that the experiments involved cost a lot.
So PoNo it is.
Sabine’s video might deserve a shout out:
came here after watching are you sniping my history
I started using Damus last month. And I’m not at all a cool kid. Too old for that now.
ya, watch this space
well,
i found Hans to be a grand dinner companion. fun to talk to because he had a smattering of philosophy
so im a bit peeved to see his interesting thesis trashed because he used the post word
his main point
“In modern times, when natural sciences instituted self-critical processes (repeatability, falsification) and norms (such as the Mertonian norms named CUDOS), the traditional host for climate issues, namely, geography, lost its grip, and physics took over. This “scientification” of climate science led to a more systematic, critical and rigorous approach of building and testing hypotheses and concepts. This gain in methodical rigor, however, went along with the loss of understanding that climate is hardly a key explanatory factor for societal differences and developments. Consequently, large segments of the field tacitly and unknowingly began reviving the abandoned concept of climatic determinism.
in short, when science colonized climate studies, large segments of the field revived
climate determinism– you know the racist stuff.
now, i suspect that Hans, like Ravitz is an old school leftist
If the rest of von Storch’s paper as as much a non-sequitur as that climate determinism extract (and as untrue – seriously, what percentage of non-geographer climatologists think that way – 1%? 0.1%? 0.000001%? – and of those, how many think it for reasons that have nothing to so with them using physics – 100%?), I’m glad I didn’t waste my time on it. What percentage even think about it at all? (It’s not racist to observe that Bangladesh and the Maldives are at higher risk of AGW-induced sea level rise than Switzerland, but I assume that’s not the determinism he has in mind.)
BTW physics took over in the early to mid 19th Century, which makes for a fairly elastic definition of modern times, and one which pushes them back to before science as practised today had emerged from natural philosophising.
Sounds to me like “Bwah, don’t like the answer those pesky physicists came up with”.
A re-post of one of mine from a few years ago of Hoffman’s GSL Fermor Lecture on Neoproterozoic glaciations.
It starts with a historical overview of the recognition of climate change by geologists and physicists. How each discipline got some things right, some wrong, some right for the wrong reasons, how religion played a hand. A useful piece of History of Science IMHO, by a top scientist. An example of Science in Action, showing the Scientific Method from the rich-philosopher era to the modern day. Normal Science IOW, and not a geographer on the list. Professor von Storch could learn from it I reckon.
Some soundbites:
J Leslie (physicist, 1804) Swiss moraines as indicators of glacial recession due to climate warming.
W (& C) Herschel (Astronomers, 1800) discovery of calorific (IR) radiation.
Fourier (physicist, 1824) “and the temperature rises until the heat that is dissipated shall be exactly equal to that flowing in”
Stefan-Boltzmann (I won’t even attempt to html the formula 😦 ).
Problems of the “drift” (glacial till): erratic boulders, ice-gouged surfaces. “Drift” because they thought it was caused by icebergs rafted onto land during The Flood.
J Smith (geologist and Biblical scholar, 1836) Arctic marine fauna above sea level in Western Scotland
J Smith (1839), E Forbes (1845) Arctic marine fauna succeeds freshwater sands with peat and plant roots; post-Drift, Arctic fauna migrate northward over time (cooling and sea level rise; you can see how The Flood would reconcile that contradiction by magicking more water into existence; actually the land was sinking due to glacial loading)
Agassiz (geologist) and Venetz (engineer), 1830s, supra-Alpine glaciation (not The Flood)
The Scottish Glacial Revival (Ramsay, Croll, Jamieson, Geikie x2,1860-74) Start of the modern (geological/glaciological) synthesis.
Four stages of glacial drift science: Neglect (to 1835); Hysteria (caused by Agassiz, peak around 1840); Rejection (until the 1860s); Acceptance (through today).
Tyndall (physicist, 1861) IR absorption by CO2.
Etc. (The rest will be familiar to the audience)
As far as I can see, climate determinism is just a variation on the theme of the linear model:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/the-linear-model-for-richies/
In one version of the post I discussed it and added the same note as in my previous post: “Oh, Junior, you silly you”. Instead I went for a note that concealed a Dr Seuss story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories
The PoNo brand should serve as a federative framework, not a divisive one. Just like Climateball does. Yet we all know that as soon as PoNo becomes mainstream there will be those who will say that they are not PoNo…
Humans might be stuck with that pattern of behaviour for a while.
I like quite a lot of what Sabine does, but some does seem a little over-the-top. Maybe she really can see the “truth” that a huge number of particle physicists are missing, but maybe it is somewhat more nuanced that she suggests.
yes,
YT recommendation engine will fill your feed with unzicker
if youre not careful
In fairness, Sabine’s stance on that goes a long way, e.g.:
https://cosmicreflections.skythisweek.info/2019/01/28/lost-in-math-a-book-review/
That book has been preceded with lots of blog posts, e.g.:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/search?q=+simplicity
We need to do something about particle physics.
Trillions are at stake.
ATTP “I like quite a lot of what Sabine does, but some does seem a little over-the-top. ” I agree, I think the problem is that particle physics is at a stage where we can’t currently do more than explore hypotheses. It is a bit like the joke about statisticians that, like artists, they have a tendency to fall in love with their models. I don’t think it is limited to just statisticians, but it is human nature for people to get a rather attached to their research agenda. However, I think there is a level at which they all retain the self-skepticism needed to make progress (except perhaps Max Tegmark ;o).
Steven Mosher
Except societal differences and developments are not part of climate science – it is social science, political science and economics. So again the problem is nothing to do with the science, just societies attitude towards the science that is the problem. So why bang on about the science being “post-normal” (other than it being a way of “forming a position”).
Isn’t a “theoretical physicist” defined as “a person who’s existence has been hypothesized to explain observations recorded in a physics notebook”???
But isn’t that the case for all of our knowledge (i.e. it is a combination of empirical data and consilience with theory – in Bayesian terms likelihood and prior)? Among all of the hypotheses that are consistent with the observations, it is still rational to have a greater degree of belief in some than others based on reason.
One thing for sure is that there is no better guarantee of a lack of success than giving up.
BTW I read Sabine’s (very good) book about the same time I read one by Max Tegmark (who is probably the polar opposite of Sabine). I’m more in the middle, but much closer to Sabine’s skepticism than Tegmark’s, err… “creativeness”.
Sabine Hossenfelder’s so-called “uglyverse” approach (the term, I believe, comes from here):
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731670-600-truth-before-beauty-our-universe-is-uglier-than-we-thought/
and is discussed at length in “Lost in Math,” where she summarily writes, “Why should the laws of nature care what I find beautiful? Such a connection between me and the universe seems very mystical.”
But I think this “uglyverse approach” is no less dangerous/difficult. Nature certainly may be as complicated, messy, and incomprehensible as she seems to want us to consider. But if we cannot rely upon structure and symmetries anymore and science instead abandons entirely any and all reliance on simplicity and aesthetic appeal, leaving comprehension behind in exchange for a process of seeking incomprehensible “fits” with experimental data produced by successors to AI’s such as GPT3 or GPT4, with computers finding sets of mathematical equations providing “better” descriptions of observations that are arbitrarily complex and bereft of any and all human comprehension…
Then does that leave us in any better situation?
I don’t know. But Nima Arkani-Hamed (Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton) lamented (at the physics colloquium at Columbia University on April 29, 2013) that we are probably at “dramatic bifurcatory moment in fundamental physics.”
That sets up the dilemma, I suppose. From there, there’s a lot to discuss (and many books coming out as we speak) and much turns on what one chooses as starting axioms. Different choices lead differently, even granting valid logic follows.
I’ve no working crystal ball and cannot say what the future will bring. It may be that the application of AIs to the problem is the final answer and leaves human comprehension completely out of the picture in out future. If so, welcome to the new world.
BTW physics took over in the early to mid 19th Century, which makes for a fairly elastic definition of modern times, and one which pushes them back to before science as practised today had emerged from natural philosophising.
well no one can accus geology dave of close reading
“In modern times, when natural sciences instituted self-critical processes (repeatability, falsification) and norms (such as the Mertonian norms named CUDOS), the traditional host for climate issues, namely, geography, lost its grip, and physics took over.
falsification would be ca 1934, repeatability hard to find a seminal document
but NLT 1984 ISO 5725
merton norms 1942e
so he puts the colonization of climat studies by physics
in the 1930s/40s
of course physicists could have visited climate before this, but he seems to argue
that colonization occurs post falsification (1934) and merton(1942)
what interests me is his assertion (its not an arguemnt) that this colonization
leads to a return of climate determinism, underground.
” We need to do something about particle physics. Trillions are at stake.”
W. may be the first to put the economic consequences of the Standard Model on a par with AGW.
It isn’t really Postnormal Science until string theorists start throwing soup at hadron colliders:
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2023/02/flung-food-is-fine-as-long-as-its-vegan.html
jon
“That sets up the dilemma, I suppose. From there, there’s a lot to discuss (and many books coming out as we speak) and much turns on what one chooses as starting axioms. Different choices lead differently, even granting valid logic follows.”
well one has to ask why do people appeal to things like beauty and simplicity.
was Keats right after all? is truth beauty and beauty truth
“The basic premise of Hossenfelder’s book is that when theoretical physicists and cosmologists lack empirical data to validate their theories, they have to rely on other approaches—”beauty”, “symmetry”, “simplicity”, “naturalness“, “elegance”—mathematics.
when theories conflict or fail to validate humans of course will cast about for pragmatic solutions and tools.
but what if we just sit still and accept the incompleteness and undecidability as a feature?
we dont have to know. dont have to prove, dont have to be reasonable or rational
it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Since I never saw any real effort to put a number or even a realistic ballpark on the consequences of AGW, Russell, I doubt I can claim the paternity you offer me. The PoNo principle applies without any of that. All is needed is that relative stakes increase when a group nerds out something, e.g.:
https://replicationindex.com/2019/01/15/ioannidis-2005-was-wrong-most-published-research-findings-are-not-false/
One might argue that Ionnadis’ contributions to the Contrarian Matrix is invaluable. I would argue that for Covidball they were worth a trillion or two.
You’ll have to ask them why, I suppose. But it’s my opinion that if you don’t already understand the answer to your own question, then there is no way I can explain it to you, here.
There are many things I’ve learned and acquired that I’d like to have been able to explain and pass on to my children and grandchildren. And I’ve certainly tried, only to have gotten “polite nods,” at first. Then a decade later, having them come back to me and telling me that they “finally got it.” When I ask them how else I might have handled talking with them earlier, they’ve consistently said that what I’d said was exactly right and that there was nothing different I could have done. They said they just needed to gain some experience before understanding could dawn.
When teaching a class at Tektronix for beginners, there was an important abstract topic I had to cover. I had spent three days out of my teaching schedule on just this one topic, because more than half the class was struggling and I knew it was important enough that I had to bridge it for as many students as possible. I finally decided that I’d have to move on after the 3rd day.
Here’s the odd thing. I was just letting the classroom leave on the 3rd day, feeling sad I hadn’t reached more of the students, when one of those who was struggling hard and had asked many questions earlier, came up to me.
He said, “I think I got it and I want you to test me to see, right now.”
So I did and he really did understand. Perfectly, in fact. I couldn’t give him an appropriate problem he couldn’t immediately solve.
So I asked, “Is there something I said today that helped you? Something I should have said or tried earlier?”
He said, “No. Everything you did was exactly right. It’s just that it suddenly dawned on me. Nothing particular. It’s just that some ‘barrier’ I had that prevented me from processing your lessons ‘suddenly broke’ and I could finally see.”
If you ever had the experience of suddenly realizing the power and breadth that comes from an insight in understanding how a simple concept can be applied in everything from solving an electronic network to analyzing the probability of reaching one city, starting from another, when choosing only randomly the outgoing roads from each town along the way, for example… you’d understand. The exact same underlying concept applied in the same way resolves very distinct problems.
When these insights of symmetry hit you, and you suddenly find yourself able to solve problems not in one sphere of work but now suddenly in dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, of seemingly unrelated areas then and only then will you will have the answer to your own question.
You will not need me to explain it. And you will realize you didn’t even need to ask the question. Before that? There’s no possible way to explain it. You have to experience it. Simple as that.
W:
I know what you mean.
The boys from Beijing just used some of my sea albedo stuff to frame an econometric model of what Arctic ice albedo loss might cost in terms of global GDP come 2100.
As they (surprise) used PCP 8.5 on the economic side, their bottom line was
“6.7 to 13.3 trillion USD” per annum
CF:
Remote Sensing
2023-02-10
DOI: 10.3390/rs15040970
Radiative Effects and Costing Assessment
of Arctic Sea Ice Albedo Changes
CONTRIBUTORS: Hairui Hao1; Bo Su2; Shiwei Liu; Wenqin Zhuo
1 State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China 2 Frontier Science Center for Deep Ocean Multispheres and Earth System and Physical Oceanography Laboratory, Qingdao
Well:
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/4/970
At least the authors are giving all the ballparks.
A discount rate of 2.3% is pretty aggressive too.
“well one has to ask why do people appeal to things like beauty and simplicity.”
Occam’s razor, while not a law of science, is often a good guideline. “Everything should be made as simple as possible – but no simpler”.
BTW Occam’s razor is very widely used in statistics (“regularisation”) as a means of avoiding overfitting. Simple models that make fewest assumptions give fewer “degrees of freedom” to overfit (which is normally caused by over-optimisation of the loss function). There is plenty of theory as to why it is effective as well as practice.
See also:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simplicity/
Whatever Elliott Sober writes usually rocks!
My favorite argument for simplicity is robustness. Less moving parts, less unintended consequences.
My argument for simplicity is “less stuff I have to memorize”. Science is not a “store and release” process. Developing theory involves reasoning and speculation. Applying theory involves retrieval of appropriate understanding.
“Derived from first principles” involves a minimum of assumptions. If I can derive something from some minimal set of “knowledge”, then I don’t need to remember that particular result. It may be convenient that I do remember it, when I need to apply it, but if I only remember the first principles then I can always derive that result again.
Let’s try this again
Willard’s rant soon turned to Sabine Hossenfelder’s Ode to Beauty which she sees as a pernicious disease of physicists
Sabine, if Eli may say, is very confused about what physicists want, which is not a beautiful theory, but a terse theory which can be used to understand most everything or at least the next bottom most layer of most everything.
The problem is that nature may not be susceptable to a terse understanding at the Planck level and even if it were people may not be able to understand that description.
Eli has always worked on the theory that quantum mechanics may not be harder than we think but may be harder than we can think, in which case one takes what one can get and has another carrot.
Shut up and calculate.
My point, Steve, was that that takeover happened a century before falsification (1934) and Merton (1942), so whatever drove it it was not those two.
Which climate determinism do you mean? The racist one (which I take it is that poor tropical countries were unable to develop like northern, white ones because of their climate or disease burden – which could actually be paired with “even though they’re just as smart” and be anti-racist); or the physics of the greenhouse effect and its tight relationship to atmospheric CO2 content and water feedback?
The first is sociology, psychology or politics not science, certainly not climate science. The second is normal science, as normal now as it was back in the 19th century. Either way, the thesis fails.
Good to see you back, Eli, more so when you release your PoNo energy.
While simplicity may be hard to pinpoint in science, it is is even worse in the sciences-with-an-S. How can we be sure that physicists or biologists or statisticians or (gasp!) sociologists use the same set of criteria to determine simplicity? While we may have an intuitive grasp of the ordeal (think pornography), to provide a general theory of simplicity still eludes us.
We could use the Akaike Information Criterion for that, assuming that theories are formalized in some invariant manner. But even then there would be no real decision procedure to fully determine our preference for one model over another. It remains a judgment call, call that is reinforced by social feedback. As I emphasized earlier, there is a trade off between choosing what would perfectly fit the data and choosing the terser model.
Speaking of which, the IEP entry mentions an example that is eerily relevant:
https://iep.utm.edu/simplici/#SSH4biv
I would be tempted to use that argument for, and not against Sabine’s position. She indeed could argue that physicists should abide by parsimony and stop searching for new particles. This leads us to a Batman vs Batman standoff, where both sides argue that simplicity is on their side!
Simplicity is far from being simple.
more Hans
a willard Hans dialog/podcast would be most insttructive.
yes, Im not suggesting W as the next joe rogan, but it might be interesting
Toned down quite a bit from the original … 😀
Some people appear to indeed be confused as to the modern history of neo-environmental determanism!
Climate determinism = environmental determinism = neo-environmental determanism …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism#Late-20th-century_growth_of_neo-environmental_determinism
“Environmental determinism was revived in the late-twentieth century as neo-environmental determinism, a new term coined by the social scientist and critic Andrew Sluyter.”
So a social scientist or social scientists brought back so-called climate determinism and not climate scientists (or should I say climate physicists since Hans is so-called talking about computer models of the Earth or some such interconnection between geography and modern day numerical climate science) per se!
Also on that page …
“The contemporary global warming crisis has also impacted environmental determinism scholarship. Jared Diamond draws similarities between the changing climate conditions that brought down the Easter Island civilization and modern global warming in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.[25] Alan Kolata, Charles Ortloff, and Gerald Huag similarly describe the Tiwanaku empire and Maya civilization collapses as caused by climate events such as drought.[26][27] Peter deMenocal, Just as the earthworks in the deserts of the west grew out of notions of landscape painting, the growth of public art stimulated artists to engage the urban landscape as another environment and also as a platform to engage ideas and concepts about the environment to a larger audience. A scientist at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, writes that societal collapse due to climate change is possible today.”
That is the only mention of modern day global warming on that webpage, maybe Hans should go there and update it with his thesis?
So I guess we should blame a single climate scientist, one not involved in the physics of global climate as embodied in numerical models, one Peter B. de Menocal for bringing back climate determinism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_B._de_Menocal
Oh what a tangled web Hans weaves when he first practices to deceive!
Speaking of numerical models are coastal engineers or Fleet Numerics also engaged in climate determinism because they run global ocean wave models? Where does geography stop and modern climate science begin? Did computers exist in the 15th century?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_simulation
NASA computers were originally Black!
https://www.space.com/35430-real-hidden-figures.html
Thanks, Everett, both for the quotes and the tone effort.
So that’s the D-word used as a loaded term. I was more addressing determinism as in Sylvio’s quote, i.e. as facts determining outcomes.
A similar denigration can be seen behind “positivism,” which connotes different things depending the department in which you use it.
***
You would have better chance to coax AT to start a podcast, Mosh. My lack of fluency in English and my editorial bent would make it too much effort. Speaking of which, it looks like the ontological status of womanhood is still problematic:
The transcript does not make the discourse any clearer.
A better podcast suggestion is If Books Could Kill’s review of The End of History:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-end-of-history/id1651876897?i=1000598827339
Is this so-called climate determinism?
Or is it just the modern day concept of computer simulation that just about every field of STEM is engaged with today? And how exactly is this connected in any way, shape or form with geography or racism, ancient or modern, one wonders.
Hans is indeed stretching the truth way beyond what most people would consider normal. It must be that PoNo is what those that are incapable of doing do instead.
shut up and calculate?
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”
— Immanuel Kant
QED is rotten to the core and Feynman is its father.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.10345
I should have known better than to hit the play button on the JP video, ugh!
Moshpit, Hans thesis is, you know, not even wrong. Both you and he need a history lesson or three. Seriously.
Oh and just because you personally know someone, does not make you special, except maybe in a short bus kind of way! 😀
More history lessons?
“But remember, Kant was a German philosopher. His books were written in German. Kant used complicated and difficult terminology and sentence structures. His ideas were hard to understand in their native language. The task of translating them into foreign languages—in this case, English—is not easy either. Different translators are liable to translate his thoughts in varying ways. Some people might translate them in ways that greatly abridge and condense the initial sentiment.”
W:, re :”The loss under the RCP8.5 scenario would be 565.3–1130.6 trillion USD.
“At least the authors are giving all the ballparks.”
Yes, but it’s hard to read about losing 1.13 quadrillion dollars without recalling Viktor Weisskopf’s account of what you could buy with a hundred billion billion Mark note at hyperinflation’s height in 1922:
Two pears.
> More history lessons?
Yes, please:
https://philarchive.org/archive/COHKOE-3
That kind of determinism is quite present in the history of science. Examples on demand. Also note that its antithesis is lomborgian technopoptimism. It does not matter if the planet warms, we’ll buy more A/C. I doubt scientists should root for that line of thinking.
This issue has little to do with PoNo, however.
It might be more prudent, as I suggest in the OP, to accept that science gives us conditions, but that these conditions do not determine in a mechanical way how we deal with problems.
I should add that while 10^24 electron volt cosmic rays do get detected , not many theoretical physicists are lobbying for trillion trillion EV colliders
Willard,
Somewhat of a strawman, but I think Kant is a sidetrack of sorts. That there was scientific racism, I would say, is rather well known …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
I don’t disagree with your last statement at all, and as far as I know, never have. Where I worked (USACE ERDC), we did studies, these were then handed over to policymakers for further analyses. We did not decide or dictate how the study results were to be used.
Everett,
I’m not sure where your disagreement with my claim is, as you simply restated what I said. Also, the point isn’t about racism, but about determinism, which is a concept that I did not want to deal with in the OP. It would have forced me to find Hans’ pieces in compendiums, some of which in German. Not an impossible task, just not worth it. Otherwise I’d have to rely on this very loose characterization:
The “mostly” in that quote does a lot of work.
***
I think your counterexamples of determinism are actually deterministic, but I can understand where you’re coming from:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2008.0059
Even if we accept that non-linear processes are not deterministic, one might still argue that climate offers conditions for societies to flourish. To give an example of what I have in mind, I could return to the weather of 1789 in France:
https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1977)0582.0.CO;2
Non-linearity does not feed mouths, and populations that starve tend to revolt.
“I’m not sure where your disagreement with my claim is, as you simply restated what I said.”
What so-called disagreement with what so-called claim? I said don’t disagree, a double negative.
Oh, and no kidding about deterministic models, something I have known for like 50 years even.
Climatic determinism is racist, always was and still is, just confusing modern climate science with racism, not so much, in my honest opinion. I could say much more on my thoughts on western culture (there is a word I would use, but nope, not now), which I do still consider mostly racist, but that I believe is another issue for another day.
You can be as argumentative with whatever you think I am thinking, but most people would recognize that as a strawperson.
Sabine, if Eli may say, is very confused about what physicists want, which is not a beautiful theory, but a terse theory which can be used to understand most everything or at least the next bottom most layer of most everything.
well terse is an intresting word.
succinct
low
entropy
unsuprising
especially if we view simplicity and complexity in algorithmic information theory terms
> I said don’t disagree, a double negative.
Sorry for misunderstanding, Everett, and glad we’re on the same side for a change. Scratching my own itch, I think I found what Hans is after:
https://archive.org/stream/civilizationand01huntgoog/civilizationand01huntgoog_djvu.txt
(Somehow I can only hear this awful paragraph with the Son of Lobster’s voice in my head.)
Hans’ concerns seem to be when scientists cloak their prejudices under a façade of objectivity and truth. But then, what does it have to do with anything else he says in that essay? The idea that climate impacts society does not lead to that kind of climate determinism at all!
So as I see it, Hans seems to suggest that the linear (or the deficit) model fosters racism. The juxtaposition in the text certainly facilitates the leap, and he clearly says: “in the following the different issues mentioned above are deepened a bit.” Some deepening indeed!
I would rather not deal with what Hans is suggesting until he clarifies his logic.
Willard: Terse is not simple
Eli,
Terse may have a formal meaning.
There are other kinds of terse, of course.
Willard’s demographic views may reflect the underdevelopment of Canada’s air conditioning sector: populations existentially threatened by heating energy embargoes ought to cut those disposed to migrate Up-isotherm a little slack given to the high energy demand ratio of heating to air conditioning:
Like photovoltaic energy storage, passive urbqn cooling technology is just getting warmed up.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, Russell, but heat pumps solve the two problems at the same time:
https://www.climateaction.org/news/carrier-to-begin-field-trials-of-breakthrough-cold-climate-heat-pump-challe
Not an investment advice.
Willard, Heat pumps have dominated the US home cooling market for over half a century, and are an enabling technology for sunbelt migration, in the sense that even with good insulation and high thermodynamic efficiency, power bills reflect the number of heating and cooling degree-days local climate dishes out as temperatures depart from a comfortable baseline– typically 65 F /18C
Heating generally costs more than cooling because winter temperatures can go farther from that mean than summers do, and the sunbelt is long on summer and short on winter- Here’s a calculator for all locales
https://portfoliomanager.energystar.gov/pm/degreeDaysCalculator
Russell,
The heating part matters more, of course, and the US of A market is far from its saturation:
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3584914-unsung-climate-hero-heat-pumps-can-cool-homes-and-lower-emissions/
It is energy efficient, it is cost efficient, and it is the way toward full electrification.
While gas was a transition fuel, it is now time to transition away from it. The alternative is to maintain (or worse invest in) two grids, which is exactly what the fossil fuel industry is fighting for in your country as we speak. This is what the gas stove culture war was all about.
This sure matters more than But RCPs.
Quite so. I invoked the climate of Canuckistan because your compatriots abound around the Caribbean & Gulf Coast this time of year spending money saved by not running heat pumps.
Wintering warmly in Calgary is roughly a 4500 degree-day C proposition, versus 200 degree-days of summer cooling
gas stoves ??
avoid bike shedding.
heat pumps are awesome had one in my home in Seoul, but then
korea is civilized. my dream of course is to own a traditional hannok
with radiant floor heating
https://asiasociety.org/korea/ondol-korean-traditional-heating-system
Willard – “it presumes that its intended audience groks jargon from contested lands of epistemology”
For the most part I am one who doesn’t – although I did get the grok reference. Epistemology not so much.
Whether correct or not I find myself interpreting PoNo as “finding conclusions to suit one’s prejudices” which becomes “not good enough to base important policy on”. That examples can be found where conclusions are indeed dependent on the author’s prejudices – and include poor scholarship – isn’t evidence of any universality; it isn’t the egregious fringes but the mainstream centre where any universality has to be found.
Yes, the societal need for sound advice on climate change is based on concerns that climate and climate change has human economic and socially significant consequences and that means climate science gets funding – and dislike of the advice incites calls to defund. But claims it is PoMo or PoNo (they seem much the same to me, but what do I know?) and not good enough seem much more popular amongst those who don’t want their lives and businesses impacted by having to take on responsibility and accountability that science based knowledge throws a spotlight on.
But governments commission science agencies to provide advice. From multiple independent sources the advice seems to converge – whilst not evidence in itself, that convergence suggests a circling in on what is true. And it is not for lack of wanting different answers in those asking that there is consilience.
Labelling climate science PoNo justifies holding to the doubt and denial – whether intended by the authors or not..
(Out of interest, what kind of tags – to add an image for example – work here? HTML tags with greater and lesser signs? Square bracket BB code?)
Ken,
To add an image, simply put a link to it on a single line. Make sure there is a filename extension at the end. WordPress will do the rest.
When you say that it isn’t the egregious fringes but the mainstream centre where any universality has to be found, I think you are expressing the intent behind the PoNo principle. There is nothing new or special about actual (climate) science. Science never was normal the way PoNo chaps dream it has been. It may never will.
One big difference for new generations of scientists is social media. It is easy for them to be in contact with an audience that extends beyond their peers. That may change the rules of how to advance one’s career, and thus change the skill set required to excel at the science game. But even then I have my doubts: Galileo himself was somewhat of a PR maverick, and Einstein knew how to work his image. There would be other things to say on what Ravetz called the “extended peer review” but I would rather keep that for another post.
Also, I think you are right to emphasize the effect the PoNo labeling can have. Being told one is not normal anymore is seldom cool. By normalizing PoNo, I am trying to neutralize the sting behind the label. Science always was PoNo, just like it was always political. We still are social animals who can make science work.
Willard nicely framed this assertion :
This misconception is being promulgated by Tim Palmer and others. The more often that they claim this, the fewer students entering research will question it. Fortunately, machine learning algorithms don’t care about myths and will eventually find the non-linear deterministic patterns buried in climate observations.
Palmer and co-author have a new paper out on the topic “On the interaction of stochastic forcing and regime dynamics”. I gave them a hint on how to proceed via community review https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/30/49/2023/npg-30-49-2023-discussion.html
Even if they aren’t actually there.
They might get bored before they do:
They are indeed there. I have found deterministic elements in climate and can envision how a symbolic regression tool could duplicate the results . Incidentally, yesterday I was alerted to a Chinese team studying winds that cross-checked my deterministic model of QBO. https://acp.copernicus.org/preprints/acp-2022-792/#CC1 : “Global zonal wind variations and responses to solar activity, and QBO, ENSO during 2002–2019”. The lead author was sincerely curious and I had several email exchanges with him walking through the math.
“I have found deterministic elements in climate and can envision how a symbolic regression tool could duplicate the results .”
A symbolic regression tool being able to duplicate the results does not mean that the deterministic elements are real. Optimisation is the root of all evil in statistics, if you optimise you introduce the risk of over-optimising (i.e. over-fitting) and I suspect symbolic regression tools are doing a *lot* of optimisation.
Of course we have gone over that many times before and you have disregarded my advice, even though this form of over-fitting is my main research interest. So I am not expecting you to pay any attention this time.
In other news:
https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing
Each item contains a link to the story.
On the other hand:
Re Bing – likely to be bad for spreading misinformation on some topics. I think this is the video I watched a while back, and there is a bit in the middle where they explain why ChatGPT has a tendency to BS if it “thinks” it can get away with it (caused by the way its rewards are set up).
Very difficult to get around until you have an AI that actually understand what it says, which is a *long* way off still.
Before we get too much into artificial weeds, I would like to address the following prescription:
I don’t think we can, and I don’t think we should.
The first part has been dealt with in the post: “In any dispute intensity will be inversely proportional to its importance (puerility). Time spent on a kerfuffle will be inversely proportional to its stakes (prodigality). Inter group differences are thus barely detectable to the external observer.” Technical issues are overspecialized to a point only a handful of people can really get them. This is where we are. It is just an ergonomics fact.
Geeks need to geek out stuff.
The second part rests on the idea that this is a feature more than a bug. Problems are getting more complex. We need more specialists to solve them. And this is a Good Thing:
https://inflationguy.blog/how-tips-work/
Search for “Assignat” to know how not to design a bond.
We need more geeks in charge. The Mad Men era ought to begone.
Although J Scott Armstrong does not have the best reputation in climate science, this old, old paper of his is a nice example of why you should avoid over-fitting data.
J. Scott Armstrong (1967) Derivation of Theory by Means of Factor Analysis or Tom Swift and His Electric Factor Analysis Machine, The American Statistician, 21:5, 17-21, DOI: 10.1080/00031305.1967.10479849
Paywalled journal source (DOI above gets you here):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.1967.10479849
Free copy (others also exist):
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/47256/derivationoftheo00arms.pdf?sequence=1
The deterministic QBO model is quite terse in it’s description. The QBO behavior is described by wavenumber=0, which is unique. By group symmetry arguments this requires that the rarely invoked nodal lunar cycle be used for judging what the QBO cycle must be. This calculates to 2.37 years and that is spot on with what is observed after 70 years of measurements. Overfitting has nothing to do with the agreement of the model to data. It’s up to others to contradict the physical mechanism, as it can’t be debunked via quantitative disagreement. The lead author of the paper under review will apparently include the following sentence to their final manuscript:
“Recently” is over 4 years ago, so on the scale of progress in earth sciences, that’s considered a fast response to a new idea (over 6 years if counting my initial presentation at the AGU). Physicists do love terse explanations and first-order (a la group symmetry) arguments.
Bob, a quick google suggests to me that J. Scott Armstrong is still alive (Wiki says: 85 now?) It would be interesting to hear his thoughts on the topic of GPT3 and GPT4 and the use of derivations of like for “advancing” science. (More specifically, such use to show gravity as emergent from decoherence.)
I also agree (having said so any number of times) that theory is prior. We cannot observe and are otherwise unaware.
By the way, I enjoyed reading both the MIT link (likely the original typed paper) and then also the published version that started on page 17 of The American Statistician, 21:5, 17-21. Luckily, a “spell checker” had been found before publication.
And thanks for the link. Short and enjoyed.
Yes, the Armstrong piece is illustrative of working in a vacuum — I didn’t see any visuals to support the factor analysis model he is working on so it looks like the typical PCA in exploratory mode, searching for correlations. Incidentally, the latest post at RC is on eigenvalues, EOFs, and PCAs, with Rasmus Benestad presenting how they are so useful.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/02/the-established-ground-and-new-ideas/
I added a comment there the other day:
> Incidentally
Please try to keep your peddling to one thread, Paul. Thanks.
Yes, Paul. I’ve seen the discussions over at RC, and thought about posting the link to the Armstrong paper over there, but commenting there seems rather dysfunctional these days.
I liked this podcast episode:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-quantum-field-theory-and-why-is-it-incomplete-20220810/
The idea that scientists are lousy communicators is getting less and less plausible.
The Joy of Why is well done.
Willard, that was a really nice audio listening event for me. It really makes me feel as though I need to spend a lot more time studying anything that David Tong was said or written. His mind is fast and although this was for a “semi-educated” audience of sorts, some glints of gems that I need to follow up on came through it.
One in particular is the idea of removing or modifying one of the underlying axioms of the Nielsen-Ninomiya theorem in order to permit and then find a valid chirality operator that works in odd dimensions.
Something else he mentioned that I’d not read elsewhere is that the cosmic background radiation (at the level of detail so far achieved) only shows Gaussian distributions — the Euler–Poisson integral. If improvements in satellite measurements continue to fail at finding anything non-Gaussian, then this says something just as significant as would finding something there that’s non-Gaussian.
The talk missed a topic I’d have loved to hear more about, while tantalizingly walking around it very very closely several different times. I was hoping at the possibility that Steven Strogatz might trigger on it, and ask. But he didn’t. This has to do with the web of initial mutual quantum entanglements at the moment and shortly after the big bang and the question about whether or not space-time itself (and gravity) can be shown as emergent. It’s a modern topic and I’d have liked to hear his thinking.
Regardless, I’ve some “fun” work ahead of me, now. Thanks!
posts about PoNo lead to the most wide ranging conversations and knight move thinking
“Moshpit, Hans thesis is, you know, not even wrong. Both you and he need a history lesson or three. Seriously.
Oh and just because you personally know someone, does not make you special, except maybe in a short bus kind of way! ”
i wouldnot and did not say i know Hans personally, I had dinner with him. he wasnt an idiot when it came to philosophy or history. thats it. now, i dont have to have lunch with willard to know he isnt an idiot. if he said birds dont exist, i wouldnt reject it out of hand
so I hesitate to reject his hans out of hand. without digging deeper,
im going to be charitable and assume what he says makes sense, not because im a nice person or special, but because i’ve talked to him and he was not crazy.
But remember, Kant was a German philosopher. His books were written in German. Kant used complicated and difficult terminology and sentence structures.
try hegel! try neitsche. or god forbid heidegger or husserl
i dont understand its all gavagai’ to me
Jon Kirwan mentioned:
Only a few researchers are applying advanced topological ideas to climate science. Chirality due to Coriolis cancels at the equator so that unexpected behaviors can arise involving phase changes in waves along what essentially amounts to a low-dimensional waveguide. Look up Marsden, Delplace, and Venaille.
Not sure why this is not getting more interest in climate circles. It may seem odd and non-intuitive to others, but having been involved with other topological behaviors such as the quantum Hall effect in nanotechnology since my grad school days, nothing should be off-limits. Brad Marston in particular has done many talks on finding equivalence and I have tried to watch them all to get as much insight as possible.
willard
joy of why
Strogatz (14:20): Earlier, I hinted that this is a very successful theory and mentioned something about 12 decimal places. Can you tell us about that? Because that is one of the great triumphs, I would say not just of quantum field theory, or even physics, but all of science.
but not true
https://physicsdetective.com/something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-qed/
Quantum electrodynamics (QED) is considered the most accurate theory in the history of science. However, this precision is based on a single experimental value: the
anomalous magnetic moment of the electron (g-factor). An examination of QED history
reveals that this value was obtained using illegitimate mathematical traps, manipulations and tricks. These traps included the fraud of Kroll & Karplus, who acknowledged
that they lied in their presentation of the most relevant calculation in QED history.
As we will demonstrate in this paper, the Kroll & Karplus scandal was not a unique
event. Instead, the scandal represented the fraudulent manner in which physics has been
conducted from the creation of QED through today.
Click to access 2002.0011v1.pdf
Oh, John.
Anyway. Listened to this yesterday:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-will-the-universe-end-20230222/
Katie Mack rocks, and I love that magazine!
Except they don’t demonstrate that Steven.
They demonstrate that the impugned authors admitted to an arithmetic error in their calculation, which was so well concealed from the physics community (/sarc) that it turned their famous paper into an infamous paper. Then, based on my quick skim of the ms., concoct a cocktail of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and conclude that the entire field knows it’s all bunkum but are keeping that fact quiet for self-serving reasons.
Hmm, reminds me of something in another field, can’t quite put my finger on it (more /sarc).
Still a self-published ms. I see, more than two decades on. What is wrong with these modern-day Galileos? No sense of urgency!
The physics is of course well above my pay grade, but as an editor I’d have rejected it because the unsubstantiated fraud allegations would have put the journal in legal jeopardy. Even if they’d been substantiated I’d have told the authors just to point out the scientific errors or inconsistencies they’d found. There are other avenues to pursue scientific misconduct allegations: employers, professional bodies, funding bodies…
I believe the field of quantum electrodynamics has spilled into technology via circuit QED, cavity QED, and quantum computing. There may be facets that are under debate but if working applications are devised that use Feynman diagrams and renormalization approaches, it essentially acts as validation. Controlled experiments and working devices are a wonderful thing that sadly climate science lacks to a great extent 😦
It may be that terminology gets redefined over time and QED gets splintered into fundamental particle theory realms and condensed matter physics, so there may be lots of other context missing. Some of this discussion involves quasi-particles which are the things that make low-T and reduced-dimension condensed matter systems show unusual properties. Fundamental particle physicists are not necessarily interested in that aspect and that’s perhaps where the frustration comes from. Condensed matter physics keeps plowing ahead while particle physics (and cosmology?) appears to be spinning its wheels.
There’s no question that QED and quantum field theory have proven themselves in practical applications. Mössbauer spectroscopy, too, for example.
I don’t know any theoretical condensed matter physicists but I do personally know such an experimentalist in the EU. Not sure he’d want me to admit here an association. 😉
As I see his writing to me, he applies subdomain tools but there’s little by way of an over-arching unifying theory which rigorously deduces into specific similar circumstances. (It’s been a discussion between us.) I believe he’d strongly agree that “plowing ahead” describes his work, though.
I think I’m seeing more arriving on physical cosmology and particle cosmology. Perhaps still awaiting one (or more) of their insights precipitate? I’m not sure the intended audience, but Heinrich Päs’s “The One” didn’t impress me much. (He’s a professor of theoretical physics at TU Dortmund University.)
I’m currently working through and may be enjoying Particle Physics in the LHC Era by Barr et. al. I cleared through Chapter 2 quickly and didn’t find U(n) or SU(n) a serious problem. (I had prior interest in group theory.) So I’ll keep plugging away. I actually think it was written with something similar to my background in mind. Nice pictures, too!
The outright science denial in your opening paragraph ought to be beneath you Steven.
If you’re genuinely ignorant enough to believe it, you should restrict your commenting to subjects about which you have more the tiniest iota of knowledge.
Maybe restrict your authorship to those areas too.
Oops, that should have been directed at Paul. Minus the authorship quip.
TBC, we can’t run a control (in the send of a gazillion tons of rock in orbit) model Earth. But neither can we run a model Solar System.
But that doesn’t make Newton or Einstein wrong. Because physics, and we can run physical experiments as well as numerical physics-based models.
Which matches reality better, the CO2-driven greenhouse effect, solar cycles, cosmic rays or Sky Fairies?
“TBC, we can’t run a control (in the send of a gazillion tons of rock in orbit) model Earth. But neither can we run a model Solar System”
Where is Magrathea when you need it? ;o)
We could perform a controlled experiment, we just need a test tube large enough to produce a suitable lapse rate. The reason we won’t get funding for that is that it won’t tell us anything we don’t already know and it won’t convince the contrarians as nothing can be proven beyond unreasonable doubt.
Jon Kirwan, I don’t have a keen interest in fundamental particle physics, but more in the quasi-particle physics which is usually taken to mean collective arrangements of electrons, photons such as holes, phonons, etc. That’s at the heart of understanding electronic structures in condensed matter physics. I maintain an interest in this because of the similarities in math to what may be applicable to earth sciences. For example, because the gravitational force is so weak, we can’t scale it a lab environment. But we can emulate a G-force as an electromagnetic force and invoke a similar inverse square law and potentially do experiments on that. Perhaps topological climate theories will benefit further from some experiments involving the Hall effect and quantum Hall effect.
Raising the phonon model vs particle physics draws my attention towards a clear natural demarcation. Nothing more need be said. I get it.
I understand the idea of (and difficulties) of applying dimensional analysis towards earth science experimental design. Especially given that time is one of the scaling dimensions. It’s not easy. Finding, for example, liquids with insane values of viscosity may be ‘difficult.’
I have a separate appreciation for topology on other matters.
I hadn’t considered applying them both here.
Do you have a segue in mind?
Jon Kirwan said:
I’ve mentioned this paper in the past “Topological Origin of Equatorial Waves” which is about applying low-dimensional condensed matter physics math such as the quantum Hall effect to improve understanding of climate variations. Of course there’s no quantization happening in the ocean but there are primary standing wave modes that are essentially locked in place. That’s kind of a spatial macr-quantization and so what’s needed is to unlock the temporal behavior.
Must have got out of bed the wrong side yesterday!
I owe Steven and Paul (for getting caught in the crossfire) an apology.
I assumed it was a partially disguised response along Popper+only-models-not-real-science+untestable lines, to my not-so-subtle allusion to another conspiracy theory. But even if it had been from Steven, that was uncharitable of me and I should have taken the comment at face value.
My other point remains valid. If we exclude areas of science from science on the basis that we can’t do lab experiments or bench tests or field-scale trials, that excludes huge areas of observational science like mine, our host’s, most of palaeontology and evolutionary biology, and arguably much of experimental particle physics (because inference from the experiment is often very indirect and based on very rare detections which might be a chance coincidence or have another explanation – yes, I know six sigma is a partial answer to the latter).
Those areas don’t get the flak climate science or evolution does because they don’t threaten people’s pocketbooks, politics or religion.
Jon Kirwan:
On the extremely viscous end, lots of experiments showing reversibility of flow, search YouTube for the “unmixing color machine” as an example of Taylor-Couette flow.
From the world of electromagnetic fields one can create emulations of behaviors that invoke gravity, since the inverse square law applies similarly between charged or magnetized objects. As an example I had published a geophysical model of the Earth’s Chandler wobble that involved the obvious forcing from the moon (whether it is strong enough is another question, as the torque is always there). The model itself invoked a nonlinear coupling of the annual cycle with the longitudinally-independent lunar monthly nodal cycle. This theoretically predicted a strong 0.843/year wobble frequency and weaker satellite peaks at 0.157/year and 1.843/year. These do indeed show up in the Fourier power spectrum of the Chandler wobble as observed peaks, in addition to the observed annual wobble. Yet there’s no controlled experiment that would help to validate this model, thus hampering its acceptance as the primary forcing mechanism. The current consensus is that the wobble is a resonant frequency stimulated by inertial motions within the Earth — which unfortunately also has no controlled experiment to draw from. However, an emulated controlled experiment is possible with the apparatus in the linked pic.
Given the cyclic forcing applied by the electromagnet, the rotating sphere will wobble at the same predicted frequencies as shown above. BTW, the sphere is one of those levitating globes that can be bought online. Haven’t published this yet but it may be a candidate for the American Journal of Physics, which specializes in this kind of experimental analysis. Would this help convince anyone? Don’t know.
The study of the various modes of standing spherical waves are “back when” (more decades than I want to remember) I was studying wave structures of matter. It seems almost like falling off a log to imagine looking for same in the earth system (and elsewhere, frankly.) I just assumed that this was all “old hat.” Are you saying it’s not?
>blockquote>Given the cyclic forcing applied by the electromagnet, the rotating sphere will wobble at the same predicted frequencies as shown above. BTW, the sphere is one of those levitating globes that can be bought online. Haven’t published this yet but it may be a candidate for the American Journal of Physics, which specializes in this kind of experimental analysis. Would this help convince anyone? Don’t know.
You’ve built this? And have shown how to rigorously derive existing theory into the specifics of your experimental setup to quantitatively explain your experimental results? I’m impressed and I’d like to see the details of the setup and math, if possible.
“TBC, we can’t run a control (in the send of a gazillion tons of rock in orbit) model Earth.”
Welcome to the test tube. Using models to predict and project, even with their limitations, seems like a sensible alternative to let’s wait and see. Not that the real world outcomes aren’t still disputed.
I had projected/guessed that the difficulties involved in trying to go through the dimensional analysis required (given earlier experience playing with the idea for things as relatively simple by comparison as scaling the physics of a 600′ waterfall down to a table-top model) would be insurmountable for the Earth. Given the desire for short time scales and the difficulties of finding materials, I can definitely understand why Puͣkiͧte̍ would move away from direct scaling and a search for insane materials and instead towards any other option — such as substituting electromagnetic fields, charged particles, etc. But I need to see the dimensional analysis and why the substitutions would work to produce an equivalent model that would work on time scales many orders of magnitude smaller.
I’m not inclined (yet, because I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel) to squander what little time I’ve left in the world on someone else’s idea. Besides, since Puͣkiͧte̍ has apparently invested life-blood into this, I’d rather just look over a shoulder and learn. At least I can do some basic sanity checks.
And yeah… if such novel modeling design survives scrutiny from others, it may be worth more than just discussion. A project should get funded to see if there were unknown unknowns that no one saw, and to initially explore and lock down the known unknowns. Then if that plays out well, more funding for a real project, I’d say.
But I’m still at the back of the bus looking where someone is pointing and not seeing it. Need a better view.
By the way, I’m not complaining to Puͣkiͧte̍ or anyone else about these kinds of discussions here. Digging into details like this are what cause me to learn to see the world better, even if there’s no pay-dirt per se, as it causes me to go off and study more. (I’ve just spent the day today refreshing myself on Coxeter–Dynkin diagrams. And I am enjoying it, once again.)
There’s a recent discussion involving climate scientists Pierrehumbert and Schmidt on Twitter questioning James Hansen signing up for solar/geoengineering of the atmosphere as an option. These are essentially experiments on the earth where no one really knows all the side effects. The wobble experiment I’m playing with is very subtle — on Earth the axis wobble is measured in meters of pole motion, and in the scaled lab experiment it really doesn’t take much to measure it differentially. Also should mention that any forced response measurement suffers from the possibility of a signal bleeding through. In any case, there was at one time a fear — however remote — that the Earth could go into a larger wobble and actually flip over, following the Dzhanibekov Effect. I remember watching this video a while ago describing the possibility
The Earth flipping over due to mankind changing the Earth’s moment of inertia would certainly classify as Murphy’s Law
Murphy’s Law, or as I suggested in the post one of seniority’s perks.
Speaking of test tubes, all is not so rosy in controlled settings:
Contrarians will always have the double bind:
(B1) Ah! You don’t have real-life evidence!
(B2) You don’t have controlled experiments. Ha ha!
Jon Kirwan asked:
The equatorial region has the topological properties of appearing as a low-dimensional waveguide as opposed to dispersed spherical waves. It’s perhaps old-hat to condensed matter scientists who observed similar math and designed opto-electronics based on emergent properties of analagous 1D structures, but little wonder that climate scientists didn’t know what to make of it. The names I mentioned above such as Brad Marston are physicists that are applying the “older” ideas in solid state theory to climate.
Bob, thanks for the injection of the short paper on factor analysis. It presented a very simple but also very important reminder that I’d long since forgotten. I needed that kick to center myself better when reading papers. PCA (principal component analysis) and its various modifications are widely used in climate. And for those who don’t know, the enjoyable and short paper you injected here on factor analysis is directly related, as for example products like SPSS Statistics use PCA as its default algorithm for factor analysis. (Other algorithms offered for factor analysis provide some subtle differences between the two.) I sometimes get lost in the weeds and, looking back, I needed the kick to get up, stand back, and recall larger issues. Appreciated.
Puͣkiͧte̍ , this discussion here still hasn’t precipitated for me. But I like it, just the same. It has me thinking in still different ways! I had assumed (falsely?) that some of our better physicists had long since invaded and cross-pollinated their more significant mental concepts into climate science, subjecting them to the kinds of heated debates at the chalkboard that I remember so fondly. Your thoughts and Bob’s addition are broadly orthogonal. But together they make me wonder if there is yet low hanging fruit to be picked from a sufficiently comprehensive, highly unified physics view. (There’s a long story of personal experiences that I don’t feel would be appropriately added here.)
Thanks. These both hint towards the deeper discussions I wish I could engage on a more regular basis.