“Imagine we land a space probe on one of Jupiters’ moons, take up a sample of material, and find it is full of organic molecules. How can we tell whether those molecules are just randomly assembled goo or the outcome of some evolutionary process taking place on the planet?”
And this brings us to the money figure from the Nature paper, reproduced below. At the left of the figure we see a world like world 1 above. At right, a world like world 2.
Gros fil aoûtien en forme de fiche de lecture du livre "Qu'est-ce que la science ?", d'Alan F. Chalmers.
Pourquoi ce fil ? Parce que ce livre éclaire certaines critiques faites à une partie des milieux sceptiques / rationalistes / zététiques, qu'on appelle quelquefois "les zets" regroupée principalement autour de vulgarisateurs et de debunkers sur YouTube.
L'objectif des YoutoubeuurZet de 2015 n'est PAS de faire une synthèse complète et exhaustive de toute la philosophie des science, en détaillant les avancées recentes.
La plupart du temps, l'objectif est juste de faire un tout petit peu toucher du doigt les toutes premières notions à son tonton complotiste ou a sa voisine naturopathe. Introduire des notions de base pour faite découvrir un domaine totalement inconnu, pour susciter la curiosité d'en savoir plus.
La zététique c'est juste des citoyens amateurs qui essayent de nouer un dialogue constructif avec les zozos du paranormal-spirito-quantique qui sont au niveau zéro de l'épistémologie.
I’m fascinated by the role that metaphors play in scientific discovery. Like Darwin’s “tree” of life. When we shift how we think about what we’re working on, sometimes it inspires us to see it in a whole new way that clicks.
Know any good accounts of metaphors in science - others or your own?
‘They experimented with bristles of different diameters. Nothing seemed to help. Then someone observed, "You know, a paintbrush is a kind of pump!" He pointed out that when a paintbrush is pressed against a surface, paint is forced through the spaces between bristles onto the surface. The paint is made to flow through the "channels" formed by the bristles when the channels are deformed by the bending of the brush.‘ https://humuscreativity.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/schon-generative-metaphor-a-perspective-on-problem-setting-in-social-policy.pdf
Evolution doesn’t look how it’s depicted in pop culture. We often picture the famous “March of Progress” illustration where a series of apes stand in line leading to a modern human.
But evolution is not linear. It branches & divides without an intended direction or endpoint through natural selection.
Es gibt laut Youtube erst 1300 Zugriffe auf das Video, in dem @rahmstorf die Wahrscheinlichkeit des Zusammenbruchs des Golfstroms (genauer: der AMOC) bespricht.
Lasst uns das ändern.
Das Video ist verständlich und liefert tiefgehendes Verständnis. Es ist die Zeit wert.
"Properly designed solar installations can increase food #harvests, reduce the need for #irrigation, revive dying lakes, rescue #pollinators, restore #soils + cool overheated humans—all while producing more power than conventional solar arrays."
"In 1982, researchers @ the #FraunhoferInstitute for Solar Energy (ISE) in Germany proposed a... solution..."
The solution to our current #drought problems in many areas might have been with us for 2,300 years at least, probably first developed by the #Tiahuanaco culture of the #Andean...
About 109 billion people have lived & died. Each grain of sand represents 10 million.
This stunning data visualization of human life by Max Roser was published in 2022.
Today there would be 805 green grains representing 8.05 billion people living on Earth. #science#art
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has announced this year’s regional Emmy nominations & Serving up Science, the quirky PBS series I write & host, has received two - including one for host ☺️
You really never know where a career in #science will lead. It’s an honor to be nominated & I’m incredibly grateful to work with such a wonderful team at WKAR!
Not sure what those who advocate for the use of ChatGPT in scientific writing have in mind. It is the very act of writing that helps us think about the connections and implications of our results, identify gaps, and devise further experiments and controls.
Any science project that can be written up by a bot from tables of results and associated literature isn’t the kind of science that I’d want to do to begin with.
Can’t imagine completing a manuscript not knowing what comes next, because the writing was done automatically instead of me putting extensive thought into it.
And why would anyone bother to read it if the authors couldn’t be bothered to write it. Might as well put up the tables and figures into an archive online, stamp a DOI on it, and move on.
@SKV@Sheril
This is not correct. The Earth has been known to be round since Classical times, and this has always been accepted by mainstream Christianity.
@SKV@Sheril
No need to apologise, it is a very common misconception. It is used by Flat Earthers to erroneously claim that the Catholic Church once supported Flat Earth.
Today’s reminder that we are still very far from knowing everything: I have just found an odd gap in the scientific literature: the specific mechanisms of generating root pressure in trees and how this relates to the force that tree roots can exert on their surroundings (eg pavements/sidewalks), and what those forces actually are. As far as I can see, having done an extensive literature search, nothing has been done on this since the 1970s. Zilch. Not a sausage. Frustrating! #science#trees
@helenczerski Philip Acton Barker was a researcher in the US Forest Service. Some of his research focused on tree root interactions with hardscape. He published in various journals. Can try queries in the Treesearch database of the USFS.
I am gradually writing an explainer of the great error they are making in the #quantum#physics community, by believing that John Bell’s arguments are logically sound. The arguments are thoroughly fallacious.
@pfpoitras It's actually obvious to me now that there is no possible Bell-test like problem that cannot be solved by probability theory alone, without QM. It is a signal processing problem. And also it is clear there is no possible argument remotely similar to a Bell one that is sound. There is simply no such thing as non-locality.
@chemoelectric If you disavow Bell-like experiments, consider the GHZ papers, which show a quantum state impossible to generate under local realism.
That one is straightforward, but people ignore it because it wasn't the first.
Also, local physics aren't disproven by any of these experiments. Only local realism is. Local non-realism, where everything is just waves all the time, and you need to interact with the state to do a measurement, that's still entirely valid.
In terms of PhD-ing, this is kind of like the pregame. I passed my comprehensive exams last year & will officially defend my dissertation & finish this Fall. So here goes...
@Sheril@elisegravel Very cool. Also, scientists will never tell you "This [whatever] is absolute truth" but rather "From what we know thus far..." such and such. Science is in continuous evolution the same way we never stop learning (if we try). No wonder fanatics hate it.
Born in 1906, computer scientist Grace Hopper invented the first compiler for computer programming language & was among the first programmers of the Harvard Mk1 computer.
Physicist Lise Meitner’s brilliance led to the discovery of nuclear fission. But her long time collaborator Otto Hahn, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry without her in 1944, even though she had given the first theoretical explanation.
@Sheril Meitner's Nobel snub was terrible on so many levels.
For everyone who doesn't pay attention to the periodic table, she did get an element named after her (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitnerium), though only after her death.
That word theory gets thrown around a lot. Some of my colleagues hold it to a really high bar whereas others use it pretty interchangably with hypothesis testing.
There’s an early phase of research that I’m not sure how to label. It’s not so much about levels, but something else. Here’s an example: what would you call the contribution of Copernicus to planetary motion? Ptolomy had these elaborate descriptions of everything revolving around the earth as cycles and epicycles to make up for wonky trajectories, and Copernicus came along and demonstrated that it all becomes a lot simpler if it’s all revolving around the sun. “Theories” of why the planets revolve as they do (Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s bending space time) came later.
Was Copernicus’s contribution a theory, replotting the data in a more sensible way, or something in between? Whatever it was, it was important, and it led to all that followed. But what do we call it (aka how do we regard it)?
@NicoleCRust I would actually call these all theories, in that they play (or played) the defining role of theories: conceptual tools developed by a research community to improve the problem-solving efficacy of its body of knowledge.
This is partly from a feeling that if we try to get in the business of line drawing “theory” vs “not theory”, when we really mean to make an assessment of a theory’s various qualities, we quickly run into trouble.
A relevant snapshot from a current manuscript in prep:
@NicoleCRust To me, Ptolemy’s and Copernicus’s accounts of planetary motion are theories. A theory is a compression algorithm: a simpler representation of a mass of empirical data. An effective compression algorithm relies on discovering patterns amid the data, and so does a good theory.
If you say a shorter algorithm is a “better” theory than a longer one, you are saying something like Occam’s razor.
But to restrict depiction of #MolecularStructure (including Bader et al.’s #MolecularGraph ⬇️) to two-dimensions would take #science back 150 years, when chemists were ridiculed for believing molecules had a three-dimensional structure! #MolViz#SciComm#DataViz
Just googled where sesame seeds come from (it never occurred to me to ask before) and found that they grow in pods that are hung upside down to ripen until they burst open and release their seeds. The treasure is revealed.
@helenczerski super interesting. I never knew where they came from either and now all I can think about is how many pods are needed to provide the volumes of seeds that are sold and do they all burst open at the same time or in some type of orchestral performance. I need to do some searches on the tubes for this I think.
The alternate theory is that "sesame" was a bastardized form of the Talmud, šem-šāmayīm, or "in the name of heaven".
But what I find most intriguing is the likelihood that the phrase was a play on words referring to both. Oil has been seen as godly since time immemorial, sesame is the oldest oil crop to humanity. It's why sesame was seen as treasure at all. Even the word anoint just means to mark with oil, and think of how we use that word.
