Archive for the ‘deep thoughts’ Category
A Lot More Doors
Tonight I watched one of the random Nova episodes that TiVo catches for me from time to time. This one was titled “The Ghost Particle”.
I’m no physicist, but Nova has a way of bringing even the most esoteric of scientific studies within the reach of normal folks and making them interesting. This episode was all about the neutrino. I found especially interesting the “drama” surrounding this particle over the years. It’s known as the solar neutrino problem, and it surrounded two scientists, Ray Davis and John Bahcall. To shorten things a bit, Bahcall helped develop a model which predicted the number of neutrinos which should be emitted by the sun (and thus how many we should be able to detect here on earth). Davis and Bahcall headed a huge experiment to measure these neutrinos. The problem was that the measurements were showing only about a third of the predicted number of neutrinos.
For years, many people assumed that either the experiment or the predictive model was wrong. Davis kept refining the measurements, but the experiment ran for decades with basically the same results. Bahcall insisted that his model was accurate.
To shorten this up, a definitive experiment was finally run which had the potential to resolve the conflict. It turned out that they were both right. The problem was an assumption in the Standard Model that neutrinos have no mass.
In other words, a scientific theory which had been perhaps surprisingly predictive for many years contained an assumption which had just been proven wrong by experimental result.
I LOVE the following quote. It’s by an experimental physicist and Columbia University professor named Janet Conrad who specializes in neutrinos:
Scientists have searched for so long—my whole scientific career—to find a problem with the Standard Model, and it has been very resilient. And that is why it is so exciting to suddenly come up with this new information that neutrinos have mass, because that doesn’t fit within our theory. And so, it’s like opening a door, and of course when you open a door, behind that, you find a lot more doors.
(from the episode transcript)
To me, this perfectly exemplifies what true science is. Conrad is excited that a longstanding theory has been (partially) proven wrong by real, hard, experimental result. Why? Because it reveals information. It points out new questions that need to be asked. Real science looks for things that are wrong with the current theory. It expects change, and it does not seek to find “truth” so that the “right answer” can be known once and for all. However, it also does not allow established theories to be toppled by just any old hypothesis.
People who back a certain hypothesis which I will not name are fond of pointing out that a theory is not a fact. I wholeheartedly agree. Theory is so much more powerful than fact because of its ability to predict future observations (AKA facts). And don’t you know that John Bahcall was thrilled when he learned that the theory that he helped create was able to predict the results of experiments performed decades later.
A lot more doors, indeed.
Six (?) questions (?)
As requested by Geof, here are my responses to a set of questions/challenges that mostly resemble the ones he got from his friend. I say mostly, because I decided to mess with a couple of them and downright refused to answer one or two. *shrug* It’s my site. 
I’ll tentatively tag Amy, with the understanding that her brain is totally involved in organizing PHE right now.
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What is beauty?
I don’t often post links here without a fair amount of commentary, but this one really doesn’t need anything added. I stole this one from a friend’s LJ post.
Jobs & Weblogs
I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. The story behind it is a bit old now, but I’m just now feeling motivated enough to actually write it up.
Here’s the fundamental question behind this post: why are people surprised when they are fired for bad-mouthing their employer and co-workers on their web sites?
“Dooced” is a pretty common term in the blogosphere these days. For anyone who doesn’t know its meaning and/or etymology, the Wikipedia entry gives a pretty good high-level summary. Last month, the media latched onto another case of a woman getting fired for roughly the same reason.
So, here’s how I view this. My employer as an entity has absolutely no good reason to concern itself with my life outside of work, and that includes this web log. However, part of the reason for that is that this web log has absolutely no reason to concern itself with the details of my experiences as an employee. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I’ve considered that it might be okay to share specifics of my work in this weblog, regardless of whether or not I name my employer or the people in those accounts.
To me, what it boils down to is this: whatever my “typical” readership is, this web log amounts to public media. Google indexes this site quite thoroughly. Anyone who publishes a web site and doesn’t know about the Wayback Machine at archive.org REALLY needs to go there and search for their own URL. Look up URLs for sites that are years-dead. Go try it. Look up “http://www.eng.ua.edu/~jmcclure/”. Scary.
My point… I don’t care how crafty I think I am, the web is a public medium, and there’s enough information out there to connect the dots between me, my job, and any comments I make about my job on my site. Given that, how can I expect my employer not to protect itself in that situation, and unless there was clear discrimination (based on the legal definition, which doesn’t include the right to bad-mouth my employer) how can I expect to have any recourse or right to complain?
engineering rock stars
Amy is gradually getting better. With that, life begins to get back to the normal routine. We watched a bit of TV Saturday night, and the anniversary of the Challenger disaster meant that the History Channel was running a lot of space-related programming. We watched part of a program we had both seen before about the Russian space program. I set up TiVo to record the next program, which was repeat of one I had somehow managed to miss. It was a 2-hour special based on Gene Kranz’s book Failure Is Not An Option. The special is all about Mission Control at NASA from the beginning of the space program all the way through the Apollo missions. I was riveted.
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