MERRY NEWTONMAS 2025

Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642. Following the Gregorian calendar, Newtonmas would be on January 4. One advantage to keeping the traditional date is that this coincides the year of Galileo's with the year of Newton's birth. Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, many of my friends were Ukrainians and others whose churches kept the old Julian calendar, giving some of the kids two dates for presents. (It also explains Tom Clancy’s Red October, even though the Bolshevik phase of the 1917 Revolution began on November 7.)

THE LEGEND OF THE MARTIANS 

György Marx (Eötvös University Department of Atomic Physics)

There is a rumor in America that there are two intelligent races on Earth: humans and Hungarians. (Isaac Asimov)

The story is here from Page 116 forward.
Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1994, 1997, 2001

- Enrico Fermi was an outstanding talent who was interested in many things besides nuclear physics. He was also known for asking famous questions. Fermi questions have a long introductory text, for example: - "The Universe is vast, with billions of stars, many of them similar to our Sun. Planets may also orbit many stars. A significant proportion of these planets may have liquid water and a gaseous atmosphere on their surfaces. The light from the star may have triggered the synthesis of organic compounds on them, turning the ocean into a thin, warm soup. The carbon compounds linked together to create self-reproducing structures. The simplest living things reproduce, develop through natural selection, become increasingly complex, and eventually develop into active thinking beings. Civilization, science, and technology develop. Longing for new and fresh worlds, they travel to neighboring planets, later to planets of nearby stars, and thus spread throughout the Galaxy. Such highly developed, talented peoples can hardly ignore this beautiful planet, Earth. - And then Fermi he came to his essential question:  - If all this is true, then where are they?

Szilárd Leó had a good sense of humor, and he answered Fermi's rhetoric this way:

- They are here among us, but they call themselves Hungarians.

Online in Hungarian at the HUNGARIAN ELECTRONIC LIBRARY / MAGYAR ELEKTRONIKUS KÖNYVTÁR

https://mek.oszk.hu/03200/03286/html/tudos1/marsl.html 

I cut and pasted it into Google Translate to provide the text above. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Still Riding the Gray Planet 

Star Trek Discovery and the Conflict of Values 

Monsters from the Id

A Numismatic History of Hungary 

To Explain the World by Steven Weinberg

Write about what you know. Write from your experience. Those two mandates are easily given to anyone who wants to write for a living. They apply to fiction and non-fiction. The rules were too easily ignored by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg 

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg (HarperCollins, 2015) presents—and I believe, proves—the thesis that science was not invented, but exists independent of the observer. In my words, not his, science is as objective as helium or an elephant: it is what it is for any observer. Although science is a very human pursuit, it would be the same for a practitioner in another galaxy. Dr. Weinberg asserts that modern science had to be discovered. It was not practiced in Ancient Greece, the Islamic Middle East, China, or Medieval Europe. The essence of modern science is the controlled (and therefore “unnatural”) experiment. 

To Explain the World is Dr. Weinberg’s personal review of Western intellectual history. I had several classes in it at university and it remained a pursuit integral to my own lifestyles. So, I had a firm foundation from which to take issue with many of his assertions. However, someone who comes to this book without prior learning will be given some clichés, now abandoned by historians at his level. Some claims are just plain false, though they come well-attributed by second-hand sources. For one thing, Steven Weinberg admits to not reading Greek, though he seems to know Latin well. So, the review of the natural philosophy of the ancient Greeks is based on the usual English translations. 

 

Weinberg knows science. His Nobel prize attests to that, though his degrees and research seem to be enough. Where he is weak is in history. This is his view, his interpretation. I accept the thesis. I am forced to reject some of the evidence. Also, oddly enough, he is less than perfectly clear on just what science is. Very much like a university textbook, he just assumes that you know the scientific method, though he never defines it and certainly does not investigate how its procedures were integrated into the modern practice we know. (My overview of "The Scientific Method" is here.)

  

In science, we might accept authority, but we never take anything on faith, and Prof. Weinberg is a teacher. So, this book delivers a special value in the Technical Notes at the end. There, you will find proofs and elaborations of the mathematics, astronomy, and physics supporting the narratives.

Where he goes astray is in the history. The book is replete with small errors of fact. “If Archimedes by his measurement of specific gravity had identified a gilded lead crown as being made of solid gold, he would have become unpopular in Syracuse.” (page 41) The crown was not gilded. If that were the suspicion, just cutting into it would have revealed the lead core. We know hundreds if not thousands of just such false coins from the ancient world. No, the crown was an alloy of silver and gold. The jeweler removed some gold and replaced it with silver. Visibly, the crown looked like pure gold. Only the test of specific gravity betrayed the culprit. It seemed to me to be the salient point, not to be missed or confused by a practicing physicist. Moreover, the book was read through by several others, including historian of astronomy, Owen Gingerich. Someone should have caught it.

Weinberg accepts the common narrative that the ancient Greeks, especially the Athenians, did not value labor and therefore did not perform experiments. Weinberg quotes Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Hard-handed men, who work now in Athens, and never yet labor’d with their minds.” (page 34) He could have looked closer to the source. “Now I observe that when we are met together in the assembly, and the matter in hand relates to building, the builders are summoned as advisers; when the question is one of shipbuilding, then the ship-wrights; and the like of other arts which they think capable of being taught and learned. And if some person offers to give them advice who is not supposed by them to have any skill in the art, even though he be good-looking, and rich, and noble, they will not listen to him, but laugh and hoot at him, until either he is clamoured down and retires of himself; or if he persist, he is dragged away or put out by the constables at the command of the prytanes." -- Plato's Dialogues, "Protagoras," translated by Benjamin Jowett.

Weinberg notes that more investigations that we recognize as science were carried out in the Hellenistic era, than in the classical. That is true. Supporting his claim he offers the work of Philo of Byzantium (280-220 BCE), Mechanike Syntaxis, in which an experiment in hydrostatics demonstrates that air is a substance. However, readers or viewers of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos learned that in the classical era Empedocles of Akragas explained the action of a kitchen tool, the water-thief (clepsydra), 200 years earlier. 

Taking common easy claims in lieu of research into ancient history, Weinberg says that the Greeks named the planets Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares, Zeus, and Cronos. (page 77) .They did not. Very many sources, including the works of Otto Neugebauer, correctly identify the ancient Greek names Stilbon, Eosphoros/Hesperos, Pyroeis, Phaetho, and Phainon: Sparkler, Dawn-bringer/Evening, Fiery, Shining, and Blazing. Giving them names analogous to the Roman gods happened much later. Note, also, relevant to ancient astronomy, that the morning star and evening star were only correctly identified much later (by the time of Claudius Ptolemy) and properly identified with the planets Venus and Mercury depending on their relative positions. 

Similar errors mar the history of science in the European Middle Ages. At the start of Chapter 10 Medieval Europe, the seven liberal arts are listed as “grammar, logic, rhetoric, geography, arithmetic, astronomy, and music.” (page 124). Later, geometry is correctly placed among them to replace geography. Even as Weinberg probably made the mistake in his manuscript—an easy enough mistake if you are writing off the top of your head—someone should have caught it. 

 

This was a library book. A previous patron penciled very neat corrections to the errors in Greek and Latin. Among the half dozen or so, Philo's work was rendered as Mechanice syntaxism.

 

Weinberg refers to “… Newton’s own commitment to Unitarian Christianity…” (page 245) In point of fact, Unitarianism was anathema to the Anglican Church, and Newton perjured himself to get and keep his job at Cambridge when he swore to the Anglican confession and Trinitarianism. It is not a moot point. Also, though he cites it as a primary source, Weinberg seems to know Newton’s Principia only second hand. He cites Richard S. Westfall’s Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge 1980) and Chandrasekhar’s Common Reader edition of the Principia. Granted, it is difficult because we do not know geometry at the depth and breadth of Newton's time. We replaced it all with algebra and calculus. (Weinberg makes that point, also.) Even Richard Feynman failed to be able to independently recreate Newton's proof of Kepler's Third Law. (On the blog here.)

 

At worst, Weinberg’s narratives are as bad as Neil de Grasse Tyson’s. For example, telling of how Galileo rolled marbles off a table to record their path in freefall, Weinberg claims that “… the trajectory is a parabola.” (page 194) It is not. It is an ellipse. We allow college freshmen to assume that the Earth is flat and that gravity vectors point down parallel to each other and perpendicular to the ground. The math is easier and the approximation is close enough. 

The Wonders of Physics: an Introduction to the Physical World 
by Irving Adler  ( Illus. by Cornelius De Witt);
New York: Golden Press [1966].

However, as Weinberg says later: “Halley asked Newton what would be the actual shape of the orbit of a body moving under the influence of a force that decreases with the inverse square of the distance. Newton answered that the orbit would be an ellipse, and promised to send a proof.” (231) Again, this is not exactly true. The path is a conic section—circle, ellipse, parabola, hyperbola, line—depending on the tangential velocity of the object relative to the central force of the ponderable body at the focus. That eccentricity defines the shape of the curve. When you toss a baseball, the path is the same as it would be if you were 13,000 km from an extremely small object with the same mass as the Earth. Throw it faster and faster again and the path becomes a parabola, and then a hyperbola. Impel it extremely fast along any vector except directly at the center of mass and it will zoom off in a straight line, never to return.

 
Basically, Weinberg’s personal views aside, his editors at HarperCollins failed him. That being so, the thesis stands proved as asserted. However insightful were Democritus or Walter de Merton in teasing out the truths of motion in particular and the physical world in general, their work was not science. Science was a modern discovery. Consequential to that discovery was understanding the distinction between description and explanation. Unfortunately, Weinberg does not say more on that point, even though it is in the title of the book.

 

It is a whole lot easier to criticize than to create. In Fahrenheit 451, in explaining why he is attracted to reading, the fireman Montag says that inside each book is a man. This book was interesting and informative not because of the traps hidden by the putative histories, but for the opportunity to spend time with Steven Weinberg and to understand his view of his practice of his science.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Copernicus on the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies 

De Magnete by William Gilbert 

Feynman’s Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow 

Harriman’s Logical Leap Almost Makes It 

 

 

Merry Newtonmas 2019

Born on December 25 (OS), 1642, Sir Issac Newton was more than the most brilliant man of his time. He was the first modern scientist. He discovered the physics and the mathematics that made possible the industrial age and the electronic age. He invented a new kind of telescope, based on his research into optics. He was an accomplished lawyer, both a prosecutor for the state, and later an effective political scientist. His achievements in theology are unappreciated today. He was a skilled chemist. He served in Parliament as the representative of Cambridge College. He was president of the Royal Society. In addition, he served as Warden and Master of the Royal Mint for 30 years, rescuing the economy from imminent disaster. Had Sir Isaac Newton done any one of these, his place in history would have been assured. He did all of them. 

Newton's famous “three laws of motion” were only introductory propositions to his Principia Mathematica. The purpose of the Principia was to demonstrate that the force which at once moves the planets and holds them in their orbits is the same force that pulls apples from their trees. He achieved this proof by creating a new kind of mathematics, called the calculus. 

Newtonian Reflector
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/telescopes/en/

Many consider Newton to have been the first modern scientist. John Maynard Keynes dubbed him “the last sorcerer.” We commonly believe that alchemy is a superstition or a fraud, like witchcraft or theater magic. To Newton, alchemy was science. We see two magnets drawn together or repulsed. We play with static electricity. We do not doubt that the Sun attracts the planets. Newton believed these things as well specifically because of his understanding of alchemical principles. To Newton, the world operated according to basic principles of natural law that were the same everywhere for everyone. 

 

Feynman's Lecture on Newton's Proof of Kepler's Laws 
https://upload.wikimedia.org/ from energy dot gov

Few people have read the Principia Mathematica in its entirety. The very popular Nobel laureate physicist, Richard P. Feynman, attempted to delight a class with a demonstration of Newton's proof of Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion. He could not produce the mathematics as Newton had done it and was forced to present his own geometric proof.

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Reminders of Newtonmas Past

Newton Versus the Counterfeiter

The Big Whimper of Modern Philosophy

Physics for Astronomers: The Works of Steven Weinberg

Physics for Astronomers: The Works of Steven Weinberg

The telescope is a wonderful instrument, but if you do not know what you are looking at, you have not gained much. The stars are pretty at any magnification. 

[This article originally appeared in the October 2019 issue of Sidereal Times of the Austin Astronomical Society.] 

Understanding the views requires learning astrophysics; and that is hard work. Think of it like basketball. One of my physics professors was answering homework questions at the blackboard. “I don’t understand number 3. …. How do you do number 5?... What equation do you use for number 1?...” He was going along and then he stopped. “You people would go out in the backyard and shoot hoops for 45 minutes and not make a single shot and still say you had a good time. How long did you spend on number 4? How many ways did you try to solve it?” It was a valid argument. On the other hand, you could have Michael Jordan or LeBron James come to your backyard and be your coach, but the honest fact is that you will not ever be good enough to play in the NBA. Still, you can improve your skills and your appreciation of the masters and their game. And so, too, with astrophysics, if you want to “show good game” (whether or not you turn professional), let the greats be your coaches. 

This past July, our guest speaker was Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg. His topic was “Gravitational Wave Astronomy.” Dr. Weinberg delivered a layman’s overview of the development of the field and its current state. Having done my homework before the lecture, I was impressed by his clear, concise, and cogent explanations. So, I went to the UT libraries and checked out four of his books.

They had nine copies of Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1972). Two are missing. One is in the Life Sciences Library Hall of Noble Words. One is at Perry-Castañeda Library. The rest are in the Kuehne Physics Mathematics Astronomy Library. The great body of mathematical discussions are beyond my skill level – like having to play guard against LeBron James: the moves are easy to explain, but doing them is a workout. However, Weinberg’s narratives are understandable and compelling. He takes the reader where no one has gone before. He has his own framework for presentation, different from the traditional teachings.

Weinberg maintains that Einstein’s preference for Riemann geometry and our respect for Einstein have limited the ways that we choose to approach these problems. Instead, Weinberg begins with the equivalence of gravity and inertia. That, he says, allows us to understand quantum events in ways that the geometric approach cannot.  

Over the course of 633 pages, Gravitation and Cosmology ties the historical development with the modern discoveries. The histories of the theory of gravity, non-Euclidean geometry, and the principle of relativity open the book. Part One closes with a detailed examination of the special theory of relativity from Lorentz transformations through the discovery of antiparticles. 

Part Two covers the General Theory of Relativity with a treatment of the equivalence principle that is so important to Weinberg’s framework. He also provides mere outlines of mathematics including tensor analysis, covariant differentiation, and div-grad-curl. These are only to make the text complete. Other books are better at explaining the subjects. And, just to note, Einstein went back to the books to learn tensors; and it is recorded elsewhere that Einstein’s wife at least checked his math if she did not actually do his homework for him. 

Part Three explains General Relativity, including Post-Newtonian Mechanics and Post-Newtonian Hydrodynamics. (The physics of moving water allows us to approach the problems involving huge bodies of discrete particles.) Part Three Section 10 Chapter 8 addresses the Quantum Theory of Gravitation which was the topic of Dr. Weinberg’s lecture to us on July 12. In the book, it is marked with asterisk meaning that you can skip it. Back then, it was just theory. Gravitation waves were predicted by relativity and quantum mechanics, but would not be detected for another thirty years.

Weinberg by David Levine for NYRB.
This drawing appeared in
"Nature’s Biggest Secret,"
October 21, 1993.
Framed prints are for sale from
The New York Review of Books.

The last third of the book, Part Five, is dedicated to Cosmology. The greater mass of that consists of the so-called “Standard Model” what we in the backyard call the Big Bang Theory. Weinberg takes you from “the first three minutes” to the synthesis of helium and to the formation of galaxies. The book closes with considerations of other models. 

Dr. Steven Weinberg is tireless in taking physics to the public. He summarized the Standard Model in The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (Basic Books, 1977). If you go to the website of The New York Review of Books and put his name in the search box you will find that he is quite popular. (Use quotes and the full name “Steven Weinberg” to narrow the results.) He wrote seven major essays for them, six on physics, one on politics.

Weinberg is quite outspoken on social issues, especially as they impact science. Among his other books is Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (Harvard University Press, 2001). He does defend against religion and creationism, but most of the book is a defense of science against post-modernism. To Weinberg, the philosophy of science is worth studying, and defending it matters. 

Weinberg’s The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (Scientific American Library, 1983) creates a bridge between a physics textbook and a popularization. His narrative history from the Greeks through the electron of the 19^th century and up to the hadron of our day is easy to read. In the text, he presents the standard equations as verbal statements. “Electric force on a body = Electric charge of the body on which the force acts X Electric field.” However, the Appendix delivers all of the equations in their standard forms. In the Appendix, Weinberg starts with Newton’s Second Law and ends with particle collisions. 

You can find pithy sayings by Dr. Weinberg in Wikiquote. Most of them are about subatomic physics. Interesting as they are to ponder, they will not make good bumperstickers. 

Five hundred years before Galileo the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (known in the Latin West as Azophi) catalogued the Andromeda Galaxy. He knew that it was a cloud among the fixed stars but did not know what it was. By the time Edwin Hubble settled the question in 1925, astronomers had been informed by Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell’s Equations, Planck’s quanta, and Einstein’s General Relativity. Physics is hard work. The pay-off is understanding what you are looking at—and why the looking is important. Dr. Steven Weinberg explains it all. 

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Steven Weinberg on Gravity Waves

Feynman’s Rainbow 

Astronomical Symbols on Ancient and Medieval Coins 

Genius 

Science in the Middle Ages 

Is Physics a Science? 

STEVEN WEINBERG ON GRAVITY WAVES

On Friday night, July 12, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg was the guest speaker at the monthly Austin Astronomy Club meeting. His topic was gravitational waves. 

(The grammar can be important. A “gravity wave” is actually a weather event here on Earth. Waves on the ocean are gravity waves. But we call gravitation waves “gravity waves” just as we sometimes are careless with “speed” and “velocity”.)

Dr. Steven Weinberg
(UT Austin)

Dr. Weinberg said that the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) apparatus was an advance in the technology of perception as significant as Galileo’s use of the telescope. According to the LIGO website, gravitation waves are as different from electro-magnetic radiation (“light waves “) as light is from sound. 

Dr. Weinberg credited A. A. Michelson with the development of the kind of interferometer used for these investigations. (The Michelson-Morely Experiment of 1887 failed to find the "ether" in which light travels.) Reading websites before the lecture, it was apparent to me that these arrangements are extensions of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Long paths of light set at right angles and placed far apart (Hanford, Washington; Livingston, Louisiana; and Pisa, Tuscany), are superimposed so that the smallest variation is revealed by an interference pattern. 

Entropy is real. The Moon will collide with the Earth – eventually. When neutron stars and black holes orbit each other, the losses of energy are (what else?) astronomically immense, and collisions and collapses are recorded as “chirps” of about a half a second. 

 

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/ligo-gw-interferometer

It is also true that as they rotate on their individual axes, massive bodies produce gravitation waves.* Any acceleration does, even when you turn the corner on your bike or in your car. But gravity is extremely weak. At shoulder height, place a golf ball next to a bowling ball and let go of the golf ball. They don’t stick. Now, try it with magnets. I was once told that machine shop gauge blocks are finished so fine that if they touch they cannot be separated because the molecular forces are insuperable: the two blocks become one. Gravity is not like that. 

So, even though gravitation waves were argued by Newton, Leibniz, Kant, and Berkeley, it was 300 years before they were first detected on 14 September 2015. Dr. Weinberg also praised the intellectual honesty of the previous attempts by Joseph Weber and others which meticulously ruled out false positives until nothing was left.

*The gravitation waves produced by a massive superdense rotating body are caused by minor variations within or on the surface of the body. A vibrating perfect sphere produces no gravitation waves.

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The Perfect Machine

Genius 

Feynman’s Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow 

Contradictions in the Patentability of Numbers 

Asteroid Hunters by Carrie Nugent

This is an inspired little book with a lot of problems. I pulled it from the stacks at my city library neighborhood branch because I wanted something casual to read and because I wanted to find a book to review for my local astronomy club newsletter. Asteroid hunting is one of the activities of amateur astronomers that intersects the work of professionals. Comet hunting is another. I was pleasantly surprised by Dr. Nugent’s easy explanation of why, contrary to our common assumptions, asteroids and comets are often the same. That was one of several interesting facts in a flawed presentation. 

With a lot of hope, I expected to read about amateur and professional astronomers, including photographs of the instruments used by my unpaid colleagues who work for the love of it. Instead, I soon met the first of over 20 errors of fact. It started with the vernacular American style which includes jarring grammatical lapses and sentence fragments.

• “When I tell people I’m a space scientist studying asteroids, they sometimes assume I’m a super-smart math whiz. The kind of person who skipped a bunch of grades and went to college when they were sixteen.” (page 2)
• “There wasn’t going to be any surprises.” (page 15)
• “Soy latte, check e-mail, wait for the caffeine to kick in.” (page 29)
• “… there’s a few…” (page 73)

Nugent writes, “… sometimes artifacts of the telescope can masquerade as an asteroid moving across the sky. These artifacts can be a series of cosmic rays, or the edge of a flare from a bright star.” (page 29).That is not what an “artifact” is in a viewing instrument. When you see your eyelashes in a microscope because of internal reflections in the lens system, that is an artifact. 

Asteroid Hunters by Carrie Nugent, 

TED Books Simon & Schuster, 2017, 

108 pages, $16.99.

https://www.crnugent.com

Nugent wrongly claims that astronomers in 1800 thought that the planets orbit in circles. “Existing methods of the time [1800-1802] used the assumption that the planets traveled around the Sun in circular paths, when in reality they traveled on a specific geometric path called an ellipse.” (page 43) But it was Kepler who first fit the orbits of the planets into elliptical paths about 1605.

At that point, Nugent already referenced Kepler, though she never mentions Newton. Kepler showed that the planets travel in ellipses and then that was proved as mathematically necessary by Newton. Newton’s calculus demonstrated that objects moving under the influence of a central force do so in paths that are conic sections. It is called a “necessary fact” something that is both required by logic and observed in experience. The shape of the orbit (line, hyperbola, parabola, ellipse, circle) depends on the velocity of the object. 

An underlying theme of this book is that getting money to search for near-Earth asteroids has been difficult because the political agencies that fund such research consider the possibility of catastrophe to be remote. The kind of asteroid that could end life as we know it comes only every 65 million years. However, two asteroids dramatically became meteorites in recent times: the Sudan 2008 TC3; and Siberia 2012DA14 (Chelyabinsk). The Sudan fall was predicted a few hours ahead of impact. Siberia was a complete surprise.

Nugent explains the difficulties in spotting asteroids. For one thing, the Sun blocks our view. But she also explains the work-arounds of observation and orbit plotting. At least, she says that such tools exist.  In fact, Nugent presents orbit plotting as extremely complex, difficult mathematics that only a genius could master. If not for Carl Gauss, we would be working in the dark, so to speak. But it only takes three points, three observations, to define a conic section. 

That being so, what makes orbit plotting and asteroid hunting a challenge is the many perturbations that change the neat conic sections into wobbly, wonky drunk walks. Nonetheless, celestial bodies travel in very predictable, mathematically definable paths. Even the perturbations are knowable and predictable. That being so, it remains that even now, 300 years after Newton’s Principia, for the most exacting predictions, we depend on tables of previous observations, rather than applying undergraduate calculus to three observations.

Nugent says that “Space is cold.” (page 64 para 6). It is not cold if you are in direct sunlight. Then, it is hot. Whether space is hot or cold depends on the definitions. Statistical mechanics defines temperature by the number of particles with a significant velocity. If you have one or two traveling at the speed of light,  you have “cold.” If you have thousands going 10 mph, it is hot: just rub your hands together as fast as you can. (Don’t burn yourself.) 

Nugent discusses the important statistical method of her team without naming it. Writing about p-values, (page 76) she calls it “debiasing” (pgs-75-77). “They also knew the time and location in the sky of every image NEOWISE had ever taken. The computer simulation exactly modeled how NEOWISE observed the sky and what it would be able to see. Then, they simulated hundreds of thousands of ‘synthetic’ asteroids and ran them through the simulation to see how many asteroids NEOWISE would have seen. The result was compared to what NEOWISE actually saw.” Nugent then gives an example using 10, 12, and 18 samples.  “Of course, the actual implementation is more complicated than that, and many more asteroids are simulated so that the results have statistical significance. But you get the idea. With this method, we know what we don’t know.” (page 77).  

Dr. Nugent delivered her TED Talk in February 2016. This book came out in 2017. But p-values and “statistical significance” were being questioned for the very misuse and abuse of statistical methods by scientists such as Dr. Nugent. 

• “Why Most Published Research Findings are False,” John P. A. Ioannidis, PLoS Medicine, August 2005. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
• “How to Use p-Values Correctly,” Kerry Grens, March 9, 2016,The Scientist. https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/how-to-use-p-values-correctly-33910
• “The ASA’s statement on p-values: context, process, and purpose,” by Ronald L. Wasserman, and Nicole A. Lazar, The American Statistician, March 9, 2016. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108

It is a serious fact that keeping up with all of the sciences not related to your own is a challenge. However, this controversy was first opened for discussion in 2005 and just as Dr. Nugent was approaching TED Talks, it burst out. The ASA Statement can be found on many websites for university undergraduate classes in statistics. She should have known. They all should have, rather than surging forward with their millions of computer-simulated asteroids.

And yet, there is much here, even though the details may not motivate anyone else. I always accepted the easy statement that a thousand Earths could fit inside Jupiter. The giant planet’s diameter is about ten times our own’s. Ten cubed is a thousand. (In fact, it works out to Jupiter’s volume being about 1381 times that of Earth.) In a footnote, Dr. Nugent explains that packing spheres leaves space between them. Only about 800 Terras could be fit into Jove. I learned something that I should have figured out on my own. So, I am appreciative.

Jupiter is discussed in the context of asteroid Shoemaker-Levy 9 striking Jupiter. “Unfortunately, the impact was going to hit the side of Jupiter that was facing away from Earth, so astronomers with telescopes wouldn’t have a direct view. … A fleet of spacecraft was trained on Jupiter, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the ROSAT X-ray satellite, and …” (page 81) Neither of those was in any position to see the far side of Jupiter. Both Hubble and ROSAT orbited Earth. In fact, Hubble did send images from after the impact. 

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of Jupiter's cloudtops was taken at 5:32 EDT on July 16, 1994, shortly after the impact of the first fragment (A) of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. A violet (410 nanometer) filter of the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 was used to make the image 1.5 hours after the impact.  http://hubblesite.org/image/170

And it was not a single event but a series of impacts. The comet had broken up two years earlier in a previous pass-by in July 1992. The fragment stream impacted the planet over six days, July 16-22, 1994. As Jupiter rotates on its axis with a period of about 10 hours (9 hr 55 min 30 sec), the effects of the fall could still be detected. In fact, “ripples” on Jupiter out to its thin ring were recorded as late as 2002.  (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker–Levy_9) and see https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/comet-shoemaker-levy-9-20-years-later-07162014/). So, the actual moments of these impacts may have been missed by all, but being in Earth orbit would not have made any difference.

When you watch Prof. Carrie Nugent’s TED Talk here, it is obvious that she is excited about her work and the opportunity to share it with an audience that will care. Those six minutes are fine as far as they go. The difference is that print captures everything except (perhaps) exuberance. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Questions about A Brief History of Time 

Backyard Astronomy 

Turn Left at Orion 

Harriman’s Logical Leap Almost Makes It

Simply Dirac by Helge Kragh

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac predicted the existence of the positron and the magnetic monopole. He received a Nobel Prize in 1933. Born in 1902, the consensus is that Dirac did his best work between 1927 and 1937, which is typical for physics and mathematics. He devoted his very long later years to chasing philosophical questions, though, like other physicists, he denied the value of philosophy.

Simply Dirac by Helge Kragh
New York: Simply Charly (2016)

I read elsewhere that each equation costs 100,000 readers. So, popular books about science tend not to have them. This monograph has several, but none of them is the eponymous Dirac Equation. The author, Helge Kragh, was a professor at the Niels Bohr Institute. He wrote Dirac: A Scientific Biography as well as textbooks on physics. On that basis, Kragh brings Dirac to life for the general reader. To achieve that, Kragh also explains how quantum mechanics developed in the early 20^thcentury as the accepted  theory of atomic physics. 

As a general reader, I believe that no “grand unified theory” ties QM to relativity. However, according to Kragh, among Dirac’s accomplishments was just that, at least for the electron. 

“Having no faith in the Klein-Gordon equation, at the end of 1927 Dirac decided to find a better solution for a wave equation in accordance with the theory of relativity. Based on the relativity requirements and the general requirements of quantum mechanics, he was convinced that the equation he looked for must be linear, not only in the general Schrödinger equation, but also in momentum.” (page 23) 

Dirac’s struggle with metaphysics was inherent in his work. How he viewed those problems is not clear from this biography. Dirac kept to himself. But this thin book quietly opens a very large and cumbersome door. Dirac was attracted to challenges from pure mathematics. If an equation is simple and beautiful, then it must have some physical reality, be of some empirical value, as both description and prediction. 

Dirac Equation From the BBC

The author apparently sides with the positivists who insist that the perception of truth begins with tangible experience. Moreover, strict positivists segregate truths: what is true in chemistry may not be true in zoology or aesthetics. That being as it may, Kragh admits: “Nonetheless, in the summer of 1926 Schrödinger published the relativistic version of his wave equation and so did half a dozen other physicists. Pauli called it “the equation with many fathers.”  Because two of the fathers were Oskar Klein and Walter Gordon a Swedish and German physicist respectively, it became known as the Klein-Gordon equation. It was a nice but apparently useless formula. The problem with relativity was not exclusive to wave mechanics for it also appeared in matrix mechanics and Dirac’s q-number algebra. After all, the three formulations were just different versions of the same theory, quantum mechanics.” (page 22)

Necessary facts are undeniable truths, not isolated chocolate-versus-vanilla preferences. Therefore, it is not surprising, but expected that many derivations exist for QM. Over 300 proofs are known for the Pythagorean Theorem.

University of California at San Diego

Dirac’s work explained electron spin. He began by not assuming it, working without the required spin in a simplified mathematical model. But as Dirac developed the equations, spin appeared as needed. Moreover, Dirac’s theory explained the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum, an important empirical validation. Firmly established in sensible reality, Dirac’s 4x4 matrix coefficients also admitted of seemingly impossible alternatives. Some particles exist beyond the speed of light and the more energy they obtain, the slower they move. George Gamow called them “donkey electrons.” (The more you beat it, the less it moves.) Kragh makes no mention of tachyons which (it seems) come into our awareness only as they decelerate below the speed of light.  

Through his mature years, and to the end of his life, Dirac rejected the renormalized quantum electrodynamics advanced by Richard Feynman (among others). To Dirac QED was inelegant. Kragh defends Dirac by citing Einstein. Question: “What would you say if the experiment did not prove your theory?” Answer: “I would tell them to run the experiment again.” 

Wikipedia

The false divide between reason and reality has been the grave error of modern philosophy. The British empiricists and the continental rationalists argued chickens and eggs. And it continues today. Electricity carried messages and powered railroad locomotives before nuclear power heated water to light up our cities. James Watt and Mathew Boulton literally made money by making money at the Soho Mint a lifetime before statistical mechanics explained thermodynamics. Those theoretical explanations must be internally consistent because contradictions cannot exist. 

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac discovered and pursued necessary factual truths. Experimental physics and applied engineering are the tools that extend our senses to perceive to the beauty in truth.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Imaginary Numbers are Real 

U.S. Patent Law Does not Add Up 

Elisha S. Loomis and the Pythagorean Proposition 

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers 

Feynman’s Rainbow 

Genius 

Science in the Middle Ages 

David Harriman’s Logical Leap 

Problems with Pop Sci from Sky & Telescope (Part 2)

Similar to my critique of Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, the source of the many problems may be that the editors at Sky & Telescope are trying to condense complicated truths into a few lines of common English.

February 22: “Small meteorites aren’t hot when they hit the ground. Earth’s atmosphere heats and removes a very thing surface layer, but the rest of the meteorite is still ice-cold from its time in space.”

and

August 13: “Occasionally, meteor-watchers hear a hiss or crackle accompany particularly bright fireballs. Astronomers still debate the source of the sound.”

Those two resulted in an interesting search: “are meteorites hot or cold when they hit earth?” Apparently the answer may be “yes.” The consensus is that they are cold. They quickly lose their outer layers by ablation, the same phenomenon used to protect spacecraft: the outer layers burn away carrying the heat. That said, accounts of meteorites being at least warm are not totally discounted. At the same time, also accepted are reports of newly-fallen objects being covered with frost. That meteorites are hot when they fall was commonly accepted until recently even by educated people. An article in Popular Astronomy for February 1934 took the Smithsonian to task for perpetuating the error. (See Astrophysics Data Site archive of Harvard online here.) 

December 27: “In 50 million years or so, Phobos will spiral into Mars, crashing on its surface or breaking up in pieces. In the meantime, though, the little moon has quite a view: Mars fills much of its sky because of the close orbit.”  The spiral is not a possible orbit. That was a teaching point from a Heinlein juvenile novel. Living in a spacefaring culture, our young hero takes an aptitude test to be trained as a pilot. “What would you do if you suddenly found that you were spiraling in to a planet?” It is a trick question because the spiral is not a possible orbit. Considering the problem again, the easiest general statement is that successive elliptical orbits decay by atmospheric drag. 

Logarithmic Spiral

Wolfram Mathworld

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LogarithmicSpiral.html

Archimedean spiral

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedean_spiral

Seashell Spirals 

Mathematical Association of America

https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/images/upload_library/23/picado/seashells/espiraleng.html

Re-entry of Orbital Debris

NASA JSC

https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/reentry/

Video Tutorials on Mechanics and Orbital Motion

Physics Department at the University of New South Wales

Brief Discussion

https://forums.phys.unsw.edu.au/viewtopic.php?t=2876

Animations

http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/mechanics/chapter11_gravity.html#11.8

As for what will happen to Phobos, the Wikipedia article rests in part on a NASA Web Archive. As stated above: it could break up or hit the surface. We will just have to wait and see.

October 31: “As it sails beyond the solar system, Voyager I hears the lonely radio whistles of plasma waves passing through interstellar space. Listen here: https://is.gd/voyagerwhistles. This was interesting, but it is a transduction. Note that the video (YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIAZWb9_si4) also presents color blobs representing those waves. We can make them sounds in any octave, lines or shapes in any color, depending on our choices of coordinates.  And, as we all know, you really cannot hear radio waves traveling through interstellar space.

December 5: “You can cry in space, but your tears won’t fall—due to water tension (and a lack of gravity) they form a floating, liquid sphere.” “There is no gravity in space” is one of those many easy sayings spoken by people who watch television shows about science, but who never take a formal class in astronomy or physics. If you lived in a spacefaring culture you might be told that if you were trapped in a gravity well, your tears would be pulled away from your face as the tremendous inertial acceleration overpowers the molecular adhesion that holds them to your face. If you were “in space” as a passenger of an accelerating vehicle, you would experience an inertial force indistinguishable from “gravity.”  

Einstein's Imaginary Elevator
From The Boy Scientist by John Llewellen, Simon and Schuster, 1955.

(Some tests could reveal the larger context of your condition. You might be on a rocket accelerating; you might be in a spinning torus like the classic space station; you might be on a large body such as a moon or planet in space. But within the reach of a human—a fathom—it would be difficult to find any differences. The differences were explained to me by a friend of mine from high school who went to MIT. I am not smart: I learn well.)

March 28: “Thanks to its solar wind, the Sun is losing roughly an Earth’s worth of mass every 150 million years.”

And

March 29: “Because the Sun is (slowly) losing mass, Earth’s orbit gets about an inch bigger every other year.”

And

April 15: “The Moon is drifting away from Earth at a rate of 1.5 inches per year.”

And

July 7: The expansion of space means that the solar system is expanding, too, but only at an infinitesimal amount: one part in septillion over its lifespan. 

1.     A so-called “solar wind” is an essential characteristic of every star. The phrase is just a way that we conveniently think of the energy of the star. The loss of mass is integral to the nature of the star and we know how stars age. 

2.    What is interesting is that Earth is losing mass, also. That must mean that all of the planets and, in fact, all other material bodies do so as well. Net loss to Earth is 50,000 tonnes per year (BBC News Magazine online here). That is the difference between the meteoric dust which falls in and the hydrogen and helium gasses which escape into space. Other effects come from the core’s heat being lost, volcanoes and other relatively minor events. (See this homework problem from Weber State University.)

3.    Finally, as for the expansion of “space” (or space-time, or the stuff “in” it or “in” which space-time exists), while not quite lying with statistics, casually tossing out large numbers obfuscates the question. If the universe is 13.8 billion years old and expanding one part in a septillion over 10 billion years, the numbers just do not explain the facts we believe from observation and measurement – unless the expansion rate is highly variable, greatly slowing down or expected to greatly increase. Deceleration seems to be the accepted theory of the day. But it is more complicated than can be explained in five lines of a calendar page.

·              Universe's Expansion Rate Is Different Depending on Where You Look By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor July 13, 2018 04:03 pm ET

https://www.space.com/41163-universe-expansion-rate-changes-near-far.html

·              The Expanding Universe: From Slowdown to Speed Up; Distant supernovae are revealing the crucial time when the expansion of the universe changed from decelerating to accelerating By Adam G. Riess, Michael S. Turner on September 23, 2008

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/expanding-universe-slows-then-speeds/

4.    Just to note about the actual age of our planet and its sisters: “The inner edge of the Sun’s habitable zone is moving outwards at a rate of about 1 metre per year. The latest model predicts a total habitable zone lifetime for Earth of 6.3 billion–7.8 billion years, suggesting that life on the planet is already about 70% of the way through its run. Other planets — especially those that form near the outer boundary of a star’s habitable zone or orbit long-lived, low-mass stars — may have habitable-zone lifetimes of 42 billion years or longer.” (Daily news blurb from Nature online here.) 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Philosophical Breakfast Club

The Scientific Method 

Is Philosophy a Science? 

Is Physics a Science?

The Science of Liberty 

The Big Whimper of Modern Philosophy