BIG BANG THEORY: MORE FRIENDS THAN SEINFELD

Friends and Seinfeld were the most successful comedies on television because they appealed to wide audiences. That may seem tautological: The fact that Big Bang Theory has now surpassed them indicates a cultural shift in America. The widespread acceptance of Big Bang Theory derives not just from the writing and acting, but from a general interest and appreciation for science.

To some extent, this is a measure of pretense. More people claim to watch PBS and listen to NPR than actually do because it is expected as a sign of culture, learning, and social standing—at least among some people. The ratings for BBT are more reliable than that. It remains that very few of the millions who enjoy the humor freeze the frames to read the white boards. True fans know that the erasable boards contain physics equations that underscore passing elements of the dialog. Sometimes they frame the running narrative. The show is funny and the characters are compelling without it.

(For four seasons, the show was supported by a scientific website, Big Blog Theory written by their science advisor, UCLA’s David Saltzberg.  The final post, which footnoted “The Raiders Minimization” (Season Seven, in fact), was November 10, 2013, here. David Salzberg interviewed by NPR here.)

It raises a deeper question about the nature of comedy in particular, and fiction and literature more generally. Friends was inclusive. It had a large cast of ordinary people from several overlapping urban micro-cultures. Seinfeld was point-of-view, observational humor, with Jerry Seinfeld as our lens, even as we glanced aside to share with George, Elaine, and Kramer.

We can identify with the characters because we know them, perhaps all too well. When I first brought BBT home from the library in 2009, Laurel could not watch even the first episode. It was too embarrassing because it was too much like the people she worked with at the University of Michigan. Personally, I just thought that it was because she has so much in common with Sheldon. The fact is that even those millions who do not see themselves in the characters – as with Friends and Seinfeld – know people like them, again, as with Friends and Seinfeld. The difference between then and now can be attributed to a sociological “tech effect.”   

BBT is just one of many high-tech shows, such as the CSI franchise, N3MBERS, and Bones. Even NCIS is as much about Abbey, Duckie, and their labs, as it is about the marriages and marksmanship of Leroy Jethro Gibbs; and McGee graduated from MIT. The “tech effect” was the label given to the so-called “CSI Effect” in complaints from prosecutors that jurors were expecting sometimes ridiculous physical evidence, such as fingerprints lifted from grass. (See “The CSI Effect” earlier on this blog here  and “Junk Criminology as Pseudo-science” here.) Researchers Barak, Kim, and Shelton found that less educated jurors wanted "scientific" evidence. Educated people just trusted the prosecutor, worrisome as that is.

That nonetheless may reflect the wider “Flynn Effect” which posits that the general IQ is rising and that we are measurably smarter than we were 100 years ago. That being as it may, it is apparent to me that too many people still believe a lot of really stupid claims. It may be a slippery slope from speculation to mythology, from Star Trek to Star Wars, from Batman to Thor, from putting climate science and creation science in the same category.

A recent Pew Research poll on basic science may be disappointing because only 78% of 3278 randomly chosen Americans got 9 out of 12 right. You can take their quiz here. And read the analysis here.  However, as Wired writer Rhett Alain pointed out about a different quiz (here), these instant investigations ask not about scientific thinking but about the memorization of isolated facts. Alain was responding to a now-classic pop quiz given by Prof. Jon Miller of Michigan State University back in 2008 (see here and here ). One extension that Miller reported then was the fact that Americans tend to score slightly higher than Japanese or Europeans.

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The Unremarkable Origin of Species

The most surprising facts are (1) Darwin’s Origin of Species is still a lightning rod for religious fundamentalists and (2) in various locales those fanatics actually gain control of publicly-funded education. 

Unlike Galileo’s Two New Sciences and William Gilbert’s De Magnete (both reviewed on this blog), Darwin’s work stood on a generation of similar explorations and discoveries.  Darwin was only in the right place and time to earn 150 years of rebuke.  Moreover, The Origin of Species by Natural Selection, or: the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life took the uniformitarian side against catastrophism in what we now regard as a false dichotomy.  Nonetheless, his theory is surprisingly robust despite the fact that he had no way to know the actual mechanisms of inheritance. 

World's Largest Dinosaur.
Cleveland Museum of Natural History here.

Darwin acknowledged George Leclerc Comte de Buffon, George Cuvier, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Geoffrey Saint-Hillaire, and ten others, before concluding with Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russell Wallace, and (“Darwin’s bulldog”) Thomas Henry Huxley.  All of them asserted with various evidences and arguments that the species we know today did not always exist.  That roster began with Aristotle who pointed out that the forms of our teeth—incisors in front, molars in back—developed by adaptation.

Darwin apparently did not know the work of William Smith who mapped the geological strata of England.  Smith sought to predict the presence of coal deposits, in part, by noting that simpler forms of prehistoric animals never appear above more complex forms of the same type.  (On NecessaryFacts here.) 

In 649 pages (Modern Library paperback, 1998), Darwin laboriously details the small facts of variation, and the consequences of them for survival and reproduction.  Accepting Charles Lyell’s estimate that the Earth is more than 300 million years old, Darwin sought to demonstrate that over spans of geological time, many small changes accumulate into large and permanent differences among both plants and animals. It seems hard to argue against that.

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A Chronology of Recent Historical Periods

We like our history neat. The western Roman empire ended on September 4, 476, when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus and declared himself king, with direct allegiance to the emperor at Constantinople.  The Dark Ages ended on Christmas Day 800 AD when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor.  But life is not like that.  To the people of the time, not much had changed.

 The philosophes and encyclopédistes of the Enlightenment created a new understanding of how history was made – and could be made.   They decided that the Renaissance ended the Middle Ages.  The founders of the American republic were acutely aware that they were making history. The Great Seal of the United States announced a new order for the ages.  The French revolution brought a new calendar and a new system of “rational” weights and measures to complement their new social order. 

About New Year’s Day 1960, I heard a radio commentator speak of the Fabulous Fifites and Fortified Forties; and he wondered what we would call the Sixties.  As I completed 37 hours of undergraduate and graduate classes in history over the course of 40 years at half a dozen schools, the question stayed with me.  My answers may be arguable, but they are not arbitrary.

Age of Reason 1648 to 1775 (End of 30 Years War to Adam Smith and American Revolution)

Enlightenment 1726-1803  (Third Edition of Newton’s Principia to Napoleon’s Empire)

The Industrial Revolution: 

• Long Industrial Revolution: 1750-1950 (Watt improved the Newcomen Engine 1759; first computers during World War II).
• Short Industrial Revoltions 1759-1775  (Watt's improved engine; Watt and Boulton)
• Modal Industrial Revolution: 1775 -1837 (Watt went into business with Boulton making his engines commercially successful; the first practical electric telegraphs cap the era and announce the conception of the information age.)

19^th Century 1815 to 1914 (Fall of Napoleon to World War I)

These periods are imprecise because they affected painting, music, and literature differently. Even chess has classic, romantic, and neoclassic trends. Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 (1917) was self-consciously neoclassical.  Post-modernism was perceived as a historical trend by art critics about the same time as it was declared mandatory by philosophy professors.

Baroque  17th to early or mid 18th centuries
Rococo  Mid to late 17th century
Neo-Classical  1750-1803 (Goes with the Enlightenment)
Romantic 1820 to 1890 (The French Restoration and English Regency to the Gilded Age)
Impressionist  1880 to 1940
Expressionist  1920 to 1940
Modernist (1900 to 1960)
Post-Modernist (1970 to present)

Roaring Twenties – 1919 to 1933 (The Prohibition Era, with its easy prosperity and dramatic Depression)

Thifty Thirties – 1929 to 1940/41  (The Black Tuesday and Black Thursday of the stock market only suggested events to come, but the collapse was dramatic and well-perceived at the time.)

Fortified Forties – 1939 to 1952 (The shooting did not stop until the Korean War.)

The Cold War (1949-1989; from the Berlin Airlift to the Fall of the Berlin Wall.)

The Space Age: It is easy to see when it started.  We might still be in it, with the ISS in orbit, universal GPS, and a probe landing on a comet.  But I believe that something was lost, if not in the disasters, then perhaps in the successes. )

·       Space Age 1957 to 2011 (Sputnik to last Atlantis Flight)

·       Space Age 1957 to 2003 (Sputnik to Columbia disaster)

·       Space Age 1957 to 1986 (Sputnik to Challenger disaster)

·       Space Age 1957 to 1972 (Sputnik to last Apollo mission)

Fabulous Fifties – 1952 to 1963  (Eisenhower to Kennedy)

Psychedelic Sixties 1964 to 1972 (Beatles to Watergate) [Jimi Hendrix died Sept. 18, 1970; Janis Joplin died October 4, 1970; Jim Morrison died July 3, 1971]

Spaced Out Seventies 1972 to 1980 (Watergate to Reagan)

Spaced Out Seventies 1972 to 1984 (Watergate to Macintosh)

Yuppies 1984 to 1998 (Success of Reagan Revolution to Clinton Impeachment)

Computer Revolution 1974 to 1984 (Altair 8800 to Macintosh)

Information Age 1984 to Present

The New World Order 1989 to Present (Fall of Communism to Present)

Globalism Ascendant 1989 to 2001 (Fall of Communism to 9/11; "The End of History" prematurely announced.)

Islamic Reaction 2001 to Present (9/11/2001 to Present)

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De Magnete by William Gilbert

Apparently, no one had cut a magnet in half before.  Claims were made for the existence of gold magnets. Lodestone was a remedy for contrary medical symptoms.  Even the sailors who relied on lodestones wrongly called the poles of a magnet north and south for pointing north and south.  In 1600, while Galileo worked on mechanics in Padua, William Gilbert (or Gilberd) investigated magnetism in London. 

Galileo’s crime was questioning Aristotle.  Gilbert denounced Aristotle as a second-hander, a mere copyist for wives’ tales.  Galileo wrote in vernacular Italian. Gilbert wrote in Latin. Gilbert created new words for the new concepts he discovered: verticity for the tendency of an iron needle to point to a magnetic pole; versorium for an electroscope, i.e., a needle on a pivot to detect fields; coition for attraction because both bodies are mutually pulled to each other.  That last was a serious problem for the Victorian reader.  This Dover edition is a reprint of P. Fleury Mottelay’s 1889 translation. Mottelay nicely rendered this into an archaic kind of English, readable by moderns but spiced with older phrasings that perhaps more correctly delivered Gilbert’s own thinking.  Moreover, this edition is supported by copious footnotes from the author’s own research into the history of magnetics. 

  

You can find the original in Latin at the Lancaster University faculty projects archives here. Mottelay knows his science; and in translating, he does employ some modern terms, chief among them, "field."  In truth, Gilbert did not hypothesize fields. That thinking came later.

William Gilbert knew that the Earth is a magnet.  Earth’s magnetic field gives polarity to iron.  Heat a bar or needle of iron until it loses all attraction, then, place the bar aligned north and south and let it cool. It will acquire polarity. 

You can prove this for yourself, Gilbert enjoins you, by running the needle through a cork and floating it in a tub.  That is a simple apparatus; and he employed it over and over in different ways to tease out the facts about magnetism.

The beauty of this work is the intense and patient study behind it.  Gilbert was not publishing conjectures.  He was announcing empirical facts.  He called for experiments and observations in rejection of the compiling of authoritative citations from ancients.  In that, William Gilbert helped to nurture the Renaissance into the Age of Reason.   

He made some mistakes.  While clearly understanding that electricity is related to magnetism, he did not find evidence of electro-static repulsion.  He also claimed that magnetic variation is constant, though a generation later, it was measured as variable.  It is more important that he knew about variation, that the magnet aligns not quite true north-south, depending on the location on Earth.

Gilbert constructed models of the magnetic Earth, spheres of iron charged with polarity. He knew that bars and needles exhibit the phenomena better, but he had another point to make; and he did so repeatedly.  One of his spheres has a chunk missing. Another has a large protrusion. Thus, Gilbert demonstrated magnetic variation over the oceans and near mountains.

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Browne on Kuhn

Gregory M. Browne is the author of Necessary Factual Truth (University Press of America, 2001), the inspiration for the title of this blog.  He offers these comments on my recent reviews here and here of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Kuhn makes some good points, most of which are a reaction to the philosophy of science of the Logical Positivists.  But both the Logical Positivists and Kuhn share faulty assumptions that lead them to misunderstand what I call “Deep Kinds”. 

In short, they are unaware of the existence of Deep Kinds, or at least are unaware that some kinds have deep essences—that is, deep sets of necessary attributes, more than what one may be aware of any given time, more than what one learns when one learns the meaning of the term referring to them, more than what one may put in a short definition or concept.  Such are most kinds in chemistry and biology, such as gold and horses.   These have attributes that it took as much investigation to discover—the atomic structure of gold and the DNA of horses—which nonetheless were as necessary to the kinds as the known attributes we had put in our dictionary definitions.  Aristotle understood this, but this was forgotten in the reaction to Scholasticism and not rediscovered, by most philosophers, until the work of Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke in the 1970s.  Ayn Rand realized this truth independently, and, through Leonard Peikoff, influenced me to elaborate the idea and gives this type of kinds a name.

In the interlude, the doctrine that only defining attributes are necessary, and that definitions are just the short “Nominal Definitions” that we find in dictionaries, whose function is merely to express meaning and not summarize knowledge, prevailed by the early 20^th century reign of the Logical Positivists.  So “All triangles have 3 sides” was considered necessary (but non-factual, because it expressed a conventional definition), but “Gold has 79 protons” was not considered necessary (though admittedly factual).

But by the 1930s it was seen that this simple model was inadequate, even by many disciples of the Logical Positivists.   The Ordinary Language philosophers came up with “cluster concepts” and “family resemblance concepts”, and in general “open textured” concepts, W. V. Quine came up with a holistic view of knowledge, and others extended this to a holistic theory of meaning.  Meaning and knowledge came to be widely seen as relative to a conceptual scheme.  And Kuhn concluded that scientists with different conceptual schemes or different “paradigms” could sometimes not communicate, because what was said in one scheme or paradigm was incommensurable with what was said another, and that they were not talking about the same things, because the meanings and references of their terms differed.

However, the later Putnam and Kripke rejected this, as he said that the scientists in different paradigms were talking about the same things, that their terms had the same referents, the “natural kinds” (Deep Kinds) even though their definitions might differ.  So scientists from ancient Greece on down who talked of gold were talking of the same kind of thing, the same natural kind with the same essence.

 

And Rand avoided the mistakes too, since she did not consider that what was excluded from the definition was not necessary, and insisted that new discoveries need not invalidate old theories but rather can add to our knowledge.

Nonetheless, Kuhn deserves credit for exposing some of the weaknesses in Logical Positivist philosophy of science.

Dr. Browne and I met at Eastern Michigan University.  I was walking the halls waiting for a criminology class to begin and I saw “Ayn Rand” written on the blackboard at the end of a couple of columns of philosophers starting with Thales.  Over the semester, I stood outside and eventually took a seat to watch the lectures.  He now teaches online for Yorktown University in Denver.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“Everyone” knows this book, even those who have not read it.  “Paradigm shift” is an idea within our common culture. This month, I made the time to read it (third edition) cover-to-cover and make notes, both marginalia and on eight pages from a notepad.  The Wikipedia summary (here)  is accurate.  What I took away – and what you find – is necessarily different. 

In the Postscript answering his critics (and supporters), Kuhn points out that his thesis resonates with similar ideas from other fields, such as art and politics.  Those other fields informed his view of science.  That thesis may appear to have been assimilated broadly considering the common understanding of paradigms today. But having completed classes in sciences several times since I first read the book for a community college seminar in 1976, we still do not learn about science this way. 

Standard textbooks in physics – Sears and Zemansky (and the successors), Tipler, Halliday and Resnick – and the professors who lecture from them, do not admit to the existence of paradigm shifts. They deliver the intellectual development of electricity and other topics in the traditional mode.  In the freshman lab, we have the electroscope, but not as a Leyden jar to collect electric fluid.  Kuhn’s claim that Maxwell’s Equations and even Ohm’s Law were not accepted on their merits finds no voice in the typical college classroom. 

Kuhn cites "Resistance to Ohm's Law" by Morton L. Schagrin (American Journal of Physics, July 1963, Volume 31, Issue 7, pp. 536. ) The abstract at American Association of Physics Teachers here  says:

“It is argued that the usual account of the discovery and subsequent rejection, or criticism, of Ohm's law is both a misleading and an inadequate explanation. A close logical examination of Ohm's experimental work reveals a conceptual structure quite different from that of the electrical science of his time. As a result of this analysis, it is claimed that the conceptual shift in Ohm's experimental work was the basis for the reaction of his contemporaries.”

Kuhn also points out that while art evolved past representation, painters today still create realistic portraits, still lifes, and landscapes.  No physicist or chemist investigates phlogiston.  Kuhn also identifies the fact that debates in social science are rooted in incommensurable paradigms.  Here on Necessary Facts is a list of about 30 different theories of crime. 

Some can be reconciled to each other, especially in context.  Most cannot. Also here on Necessary Facts is Rom Harre's Great Scientific Experiments. Some reflect paradigm shifts; others reinforce Kuhn's suggestions about "normal science." Some of them - Robert Norman on the dip of the magnetic field; and Konrad Lorenz on imprinting - offer contrary evidence that does not decide between rival paradigms.

Those cannot invalidate the facts cited here.  Kuhn is clear about his commitment to objective reality.  He argues against interpreters who accuse (or praise) him for subjectivism and relativism.  We do perceive differently, but we do perceive something, not just anything.  Moreover, the supposed weakness in circularity and tautology, are only identifications: A is A, as another philosopher put it.  Kuhn is clear that not just anything can be an identification. Between the perceptions, he says, are gaps, or lacunae, or nothing: conceptual and perceptual voids against which or contrasted with which we perceive.

Last night coming home from work on the bus, I sat next to a man reading The Iliad.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book: if you have not read it (for some years passed) you deserve the opportunity.

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