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I am SO SICK of Internet Anti-Science... example JWST
Yet again otherwise considered valid "news" websites and especially YouTube videos are, for just one example, screaming JWST has yet again "jut broken Cosmology" and scientists are running in terror. WTAF? The is EXACTLY what JWST is designed to do, to test our models, to falsify any miscalculations with actual, objectively repeatable observed data. This is how a body of reliable knowledge is created, by testing.
This most recent example is the 6 (so far) early galaxies seen that are larger, more complex and more dense than our current understanding can explain. This isn't a break!. This is literally Discovery. Finding out wrong paths is just as important as finding good ones because how else can we know what IS a good one? I urge you. if you aren't already, to be wary of over-the-top clickbait links that scream "Secret!", "Don't want you to know!", "Hidden!", "Terrifying!", "Back to the drawing board!" etc designed to do nothing more than get views for absolute junk. I'm not saying never view them, just know they play on our senses in the same way that auto accidents can make us rubberneck when we should be paying attention to our driving. |
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I call scare it scare news, used for selling purposes mostly. One of my co-workers is all into scare-news and you can't tell them no different.
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I urge you to drop u-tube...
May I recommend a digital subscription to Sky & Telescope? It's ridiculous cheap, you support a good cause and the info is top-notch! https://skyandtelescope.org/subscriber-services/ |
These types of stories are typical of what a reporter produces when they report on something that they do not understand and probably cannot be understood by most of their audience. A classic example is the way that the press and Albert Einstein interacted. A reporter would ask Einstein to explain the Theory of Relativity in terms that the layman could understand. Einstein made a few attempts to do so but his simplified explanations make no sense even to people who understand advanced physics. Einstein was a sympathetic soul and he didn't want to disappoint reporters. So Einstein began clowning for the reporters who interviewed him and they wrote entertaining stories about Einstein the eccentric genius.
Suppose that the JWST observes something that supports Stephen Hawkins' theories of quantum effects at a black hole event horizon. A reporter will probably report the story as quantum tunneling makes it possible for space aliens in other universes to tunnel into our universe through a black hole. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to make up your own screaming headline to announce this "discovery". |
To me, anyone who has lost his or her sense of wonder is no longer a scientist. If you can only look at something if you see what you expected to see, and so are put off-guard when you think you don't, then you're not a true scientist.
We are all, always, "looking through a glass darkly." A lot of science is actually speculative. We build up theories and hypotheses based on what we think we see. But, do not then fall in love with them, because at any instant they could be apparently-contradicted. The real world is like that. Be prepared. The words, "we know," are very rarely rightly said. From these observations we also build up conjectures, in the discipline known as "Scientific Philosophy" or "The Philosophy of Science." No matter what, these are always "educated guesses" that might one day prove to be dead-wrong. Don't fall in love with these things, either. If you are not willing to "boldly go wherever the evidence seems to take you, and say what you think you saw," and then endure the official critics who will try their best to blast holes in what you think you saw, then you should become a trash collector. You're just not cut out to be a scientist. :) But, if you are, you might one day win the Nobel Prize in something. |
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But, I subscribe to one magazine, and astronomy magazine. When I see headlines like that I skip the click and wait for the next issue. |
Lunaticks
My grandfather was a member of a Lunar Society in Darlaston a few miles East of Birmingham UK. I was mystified as to how he had access to telescopes as he was very poor (before and after WW1) I think he was allowed as a member for his obvious intelligence as most members, who cheerfully referred to themselves as "lunaticks", a pun on lunatics – were from the upper classes of society. My grandfathers were engineers so perhaps skipping a generation I too became an engineer with the same inquisitive mind.
My grandfather’s Lunar Society held their gathering at the local doctor’s house (before the advent of our NHS) which may explain the expensive telescopes etc. He was the first to build a Cat’s Whisker radio to receive the first radio transmissions from Birmingham UK. He also used to help local people and recharge their Leclanché Cell batteries..! When I came along in 1950 and then started school I was given a Cat’s Whisker crystal set – the Cat’s Whisker being replaced with a crystal or early diode. Could never say that I understood how you could tune-in to the world with a length of wire strung down the garden and another wire connected to a lead rod buried in the soil – no battery..! - just a coil, diode, variable capacitor and very sensitive headphones. I then built a two valve short wave radio followed by the first kit form ten transistor radio. Still never understood just how they worked…? The Lunar Society of Birmingham was a British dinner club and informal learned society of prominent figures in the Midlands Enlightenment, including industrialists, natural philosophers and intellectuals, who met regularly between 1765 and 1813 in Birmingham. At first called the Lunar Circle, "Lunar Society" became the formal name by 1775. The name arose because the society would meet during the full moon, as the extra light made the journey home easier and safer in the absence of street lighting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_..._of_Birmingham However - far more activity and communication took place outside the meetings themselves – members local to Birmingham were in almost daily contact, more distant ones in correspondence at least weekly. A more loosely defined group has therefore been identified over a wider geographical area and longer time period, who attended meetings occasionally and who corresponded or co-operated regularly with multiple other members on group activities. Perhaps you disgruntled tubers should form your own exclusive society…? Here on LQ General…? (I briefly joined the Black Country Inventors club – at one time 80% of world patents emanated from this midland region of England. Lectures from invited patent lawyers were the best part of being a member.) |
Just FTR I do subscribe to dedicated Science sites as well like JPL News, Physicsforums, and hardcore electronics and computing sites, but I thin k it is important "to keep ones fingers on the pulse" of what passes for popular science and general news, too
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I m however quite relieved that you do not subscribe to the FUD level clickbait so prevalent these days even from what passes for Journalism in 2023. It's not only shameful, it's become dangerous when supposedly serious journalist are found to actual know they were perpetuating lies and did it anyway. At least you aren't bamboozled by some of that. |
FWIW I subscribe to 63 YouTube Channels and over half of them are hard Science. More than half of the remaining 30 are Music and Music Electronics related, so not involved in clickbait either. The remaining 10-12 are Message Boards like this one and 2 or 3 superfluous entertainment, so I think I'm pretty careful.
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There's a reason I refer to the internet as the disinformation superhighway.
Anyone can put anything up and find some fool(s) who will believe it without any fact-checking at all just because they see it on a computer screen. |
While I'm certain that is true, frankbell, after all TV was like that when "As Advertised on TV" was actually a selling point but just as back then there are those that DISbelieve without any fact-checking just because it's on a computer screen, too. I figure Internet is at least some b etter than pre-programmed TV because people can comment. That is a huge amount of information at the very least of what people think are hot topics. Although web access hasn't worked out the way we naive geeks imagined back at the beginning, that it would be the Great Sifter and Equalizer bringing about a New Unity, that is happening in degrees, too. That we meet peoples' minds with no physical cues like skin color, gender, age, etc does add up over time. When we discover those attributes including Politics and Religion some may reflex action revert to hard old lines but that they actually conversed for a time, matters.
I'm hoping so at least, and also hoping that speaking out against Anti-Science AND promoting the concept that Science is not an Oracle. It just chips away at the truth fully expecting course corrections, getting a bit better all the time exactly because of not being as rigid as Dogma or The Party Line.. |
I think the root of the problem is that science has lost contact with the general educated population. During the golden age of science, from about the late 17th century to the middle of the 19th, just about any educated person could be a scientist. No special training was required. You could set aside a room for your experiments and get whatever apparatus you needed made by the local glazier and the local blacksmith. The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London were widely read and there were the Lunar Societies that Andy described, not just in Birmingham but in other big towns too.
Basically early science was just common sense. Anyone who read up an experiment conducted by someone else could see how it worked and why it proved what it was claimed to prove (or didn't as the case might be). A lot of the impetus behind this, especially in England, was religious. Men like Faraday and Maxwell saw their scientific work as a form of practical meditation on the works of God and a way of revealing His wisdom and power to the less educated. But some time around the end of the 19th century, science got professionalised. There was no longer room for the gifted amateur. Scientists increasingly required special training and talked in a language that ordinary people no longer understood. It's even worse today. I have two degrees in chemistry but I have several times had the experience of trying to read a paper found online about some interesting biochemical topic, and finding that I can barely understand a word of it. So what hope is there for laypeople? For a while, people put up with not understanding science any more because there were so many marvellous goodies that dropped from the scientists' table. But now our environment is ugly and polluted, our climate is wrecked and most of the good, well-paid jobs have gone, so we can't afford to buy the goodies any more. No wonder growing numbers of people are angry with scientists and predisposed to believe in conspiracy theories. That's what happens when you promise people the earth and then deliver a load of s**t. sunflowersvcs often talks like an early 19th century natural philosopher. Yes, he believes some daft things but I like his overall attitude. If more scientists thought like him (but without the conspiracy theories), science and society might be in a healthier state. |
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Hello again hazel,
Naturally since I mentioned Michael Faraday, whom I greatly admire, I am aware that even he would never have been able to contribute so much had it not been for patronage. In fact, I am personally aware of such issues but we needn't deal with that - bygones. However it isn't entirely true that Science is cutoff from gifted amateurs. Not only do amateur astronomers regularly contribute to the body of serious discovery (remember Shoemaker-Levy? as an example) but any field in our macro world is available to most. These days a tunneling microscope that can image atoms can be built for around $100, son even the very micro world is available. It's just that we have nailed down so much of the sensory world, it's hard to see any new room. The greatest discoveries are now being made at the extremes requiring extreme funding. There certainly are individual scientists who enjoy their elevated status and like to keep it a sort of exclusive Men's Club, but they are not the majority as most real scientists are people who never lost their childhood wonder, many who grew up enthralled by hard Sci Fi like Star Trek, and who enjoy spreading the news. Unfortunately, there is a "dog biting it's tail" phenomenon when 21st Century people still clamor that "the Earth is Flat!" and actually mean it. It's hard to deal with people so divorced from critical thinking often driven by mystical agendas but many scientists do still try. I don't understand why there is so much fundamental division these days unless Tofler is in to something with "Future Shock", "Third Wave" and other tomes, but the only way for it to be reduced is "grab the bull by the horns", no? |
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