Nuclear Power
…I am reverting to my .. evangelism for nuclear power: because if there is an answer to global warming, then nukes must be part of the mix, and because we cannot afford to be dependent on foreign gas, and also, finally, because it would help to reinforce the crumbling science base of this country
That is why the nuclear power programme – if and when it arrives – seems to offer hope.
It is not just that nuclear energy is environmentally friendly in itself: it offers a cheap way of producing the energy necessary to produce hydrogen, and therefore to produce hydrogen fuel cells
We need nuclear power and a new generation of boffins
It’s enough to make you weep. Here we are, a nation that once led the world in scientific discovery. Who proposed the theory of gravity? A Briton. Who discovered the circulation of the blood? We did. Where did Faraday hang out, when he came up with the theory of electromagnetism? Right here in Britain.
We are responsible for just about every ground-breaking scientific advance, from the television to the computer to the hovercraft and the trouser press. We worked out DNA and we came up with antibiotics. There was a time when the upper reaches of the British Establishment were populated by scientists: J B S Haldane, C P Snow, you name it.
Before she became a politician, it was Mrs Thatcher’s proudest claim that she had revolutionised the composition of Mr Whippy ice cream, so that it contained more cold air bubbles per quart of vegetable fats. Above all, we were the nation that ushered in the dawn of the atomic age.
That was the subject of the first major essay I ever wrote, and I am happy to confess now, at a safe distance, that I plagiarised it entirely from a Ladybird book. It was called “Atomic Power”, I produced it at the age of nine, and in a spirit of unabashed and exuberant technological optimism I hymned the wonderful things that followed the fission of an atom of uranium-235.
I expect that there were thousands of children like me, who were amazed and enthralled by the pictures of Cockroft and Walton in their Cambridge labs, and the eerie radioactive glow from their tubes and alembics, their hair slicked back, their faces rapt with the concentration of genius.
And who can forget the great Rutherford himself – I can see the illustration even now – and how he worked out that heavier isotopes must be more unstable by looking at a pile of falling books? This is the nation that split the atom and yet now, my friends, how fallen, how changed we are from that position of global eminence.
There is now a growing agreement that for the first time in a quarter of a century we must build nuclear reactors; there can be argument about how many, but they must be a part of the solution to our increasing energy problems.
But here is an awful truth, confided in me the other day by a deputation of engineers and scientists. “If the Government decided to build a nuclear reactor today, there are only half a dozen people who have the experience to do it in this country, and they have all retired.” That’s it, my friends: the birthplace of Newton, and Boyle, and J J Thomson – and we can’t even build our own nukes any more!
The Government is desperately trying to remedy the problem with a £6.3 million nuclear science programme, aimed at keeping nuclear studies going for the next four years in seven universities, but in the short term it will make little difference. If we want a clean, green, nuclear source of energy, we will have to get the French, or the Japanese, or even the South Africans to equip us with the necessary technology.
Unless, of course, students and potential students see what a huge opportunity there is in this field, and start turning back to the subjects – in physics and engineering – that they have been spurning over the past 20 years. I hope I will not be seen as a boss-eyed, propeller-headed nukophile when I say that I hope they do, for all sorts of reasons. As I said on this page recently, I am far too terrified to dissent from the growing world creed of global warming.
But even if it turns out that the worry has been overdone (by the way, jolly nippy today, eh?), then there still seem to be overwhelming arguments for going nuclear. Look at the size of your gas bill; look at the extraordinary growth in the proportion of our energy needs that are now satisfied by gas. It was about five per cent in 1970, and it is about 45 per cent now.
It is terrifying to think that Mr Putin, or any less amenable successor, could have his thumbs on our gas feed-pipe; and it is terrifying to think that we could be perpetually vulnerable to the vagaries of some European gas cartel. We need an alternative, and one that doesn’t just involve crucifying our landscape with wind farms which, even when they are in motion, would barely pull the skin off a rice pudding.
That is why I am reverting to my nine-year-old self’s evangelism for nuclear power: because if there is an answer to global warming, then nukes must be part of the mix, and because we cannot afford to be dependent on foreign gas, and also, finally, because it would help to reinforce the crumbling science base of this country.
We are good at pharmaceuticals, and there are some of the spookier areas – such as the human genome and animal experimentation – where we are world leaders. But we have long since lost our lead in physics and engineering, and if what the engineers tell me is true, the problem begins at school.
We have too few physics graduates teaching physics; we have too few mathematicians teaching maths. The result is that far too much of the first year of university is spent on remedial mathematics, and the result is that it is quite hard to find people who want to be lecturers or tutors in the physical sciences – especially when they can earn double in the private sector.
That’s why science departments have been closing – 30 per cent of physics departments gone in the past 15 years – and without science graduates you can’t get good teachers, and the vicious circle continues. That is why the nuclear power programme – if and when it arrives – seems to offer hope.
It is not just that nuclear energy is environmentally friendly in itself: it offers a cheap way of producing the energy necessary to produce hydrogen, and therefore to produce hydrogen fuel cells, and heaven knows what else. It also offers the hope that we can restore British activity and prestige in the physical sciences, not just as an end in itself, but because if we have to rely endlessly on the Russians for our gas, and on the Arabs for our oil, then no nukes will be bad nukes.
247 Comments
PWP: Nothing personally intended Paul.
Never apologise for what you truly believe. You obviously have a deep interest in the nuclear subject, not everyone has the same interest however.
I too, am an ex submariner,( diesel- electric ), from a time when submariners were little better that tube dwelling, smelly troglodytes, washing whenever we hit base; which might have been long past the time when the lack of personal hygiene gave negative olfactory messages to the rest of the crew, because, when everyone is in the same boat , in every sense , the pong is the norm.
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“It’s enough to make you weep. Here we are, a nation that once led the world in scientific discovery. Who proposed the theory of gravity? A Briton. Who discovered the circulation of the blood? We did. Where did Faraday hang out, when he came up with the theory of electromagnetism? Right here in Britain.
I read in the Independent a few days ago that in the 13th century, [a] Muslim medic named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years before William Harvey discovered it. No big surprise, their medicine was streets ahead back then.
And Faraday was an experimenter of genius, but it was Oersted who first discovered elctromagnetism, and Maxwell who came up with a mathematical theory of electromagnetism based on the experimental work of Faraday and Ampere.
We should simply be glad that these people, whatever their nationality, came up with ideas that have helped the whole of humanity – and leave nationalist conceit out of it.
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Idlex,
I agree with your statement: “We should simply be glad that these people, whatever their nationality, came up with ideas that have helped the whole of humanity.”
However, citizens of the UK should be proud of their heritage and of the many brilliant people to whom it has given birth and who have done much to enlighten and lead the world. There is no shame in being proud of one’s country, and Boris is correct in pointing out that we are resting on the laurels of the past (i.e., the work of these great men and women) without continuing their example of excellence in science, engineering and technology.
The same is apparently true of Muslim people given that (as you pointed out) a “Muslim medic named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years before William Harvey discovered it”.
The point is that we are all members of the human species and it is the prosperity of each individual in our species which matters most. The UK has done more than its fair share to ensure that common prosperity, but now (like the US) is resting on its laurels (or as my Dad would say, its hind end).
It’s time for UK and US citizens to poop or get off the pot. Boris is absolutely correct in pointing that out.
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I see no harm in a gentle patriotism. It would be as remiss to forget one’s own country as it would be, say, to forget one’s own parents.
But at some point, and I’m not sure where, benign patriotism intensifies to become malignant tribalism.
It seems to involve flags. The more flags, the greater the tribalism.
(Did Rome possess a flag?)
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I would add that perhaps one of the greatest scientists that humanity has ever flowered is your very own Stephen Hawking.
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This probably isn’t the time to bring this up but (sod it) has anyone here read Richard Milton’s book: “Alternative Science”?
Now, before I get a damn good (and possibly well deserved) thrashing from any orthodox scientists reading this (makes it sound like a religion doesn’t it?) let me qualify my position. Milton’s book, in my view, doesn’t claim the offbeat scientific hypotheses he examines are true, so much as it asks why certain lines of scientific exploration are so ruthlessly castigated by members of the scientific community; although, allegedly, the editors of Nature magazine wield about 95% of the vote on these matters.
It seems that if physics, Newtonian, relativistic or quantum, predicts that something is impossible, anyone examining such a miraculous phenomenon is immediately ostracised; has their tenure or funding cancelled and becomes an object of ridicule. At least they don’t get burnt at the stake as was the habit of previous dogmatic regimes; I suppose I should be thankful for small mercies
Our planet and its orbit have been described by a number of geometric theorems and only recently settled down into its current, relatively comfortable, configuration. My point here is that just about every invention, discovery or hypothesis was considered wrong, impossible or stupid until some bright spark did a bit of legwork and said: “Hey, look at this!”
What I am alluding to is that our research has become jaded. We no longer seem to attempt the exploration of new territory. There is an increasing tendency for researchers to look at refinement of understanding rather than exploratory physics. I don’t believe we will ever see earthbound hot fusion systems but, because it’s theoretically possible (exhibit a: the Sun), we’ll probably lob a number of billions more into this (in my opinion) blind alley.
Whether or not you believe the Fleischmann-Pons cell was fusion (cold or otherwise) there is ample evidence to suggest that some weird reaction was going on which seemed to liberate energy out of deuterium using a couple of palladium electrodes. Stanley Pons reckoned any kid could do it in the bathroom! but my question is: Who gives a rat’s ass if it’s fusion or not? It appears to be cheap energy if it works. The controversy regarding this issue seems to stem more from the fact that billions have been spent on hot fusion and Martin Fleischmann & Stanley Pons built a test bed more or less on their tea and biscuit budget.
You may also be familiar with some rather odd science called an ‘over-unity’ engine. Semantically, this means you get more energy out than you put in. I don’t accept this as true because the energy must be there to begin with even if it is tightly locked up. If this latter statement were not true then nuclear power stations and internal combustion engines would also be over-unity engines. However, what we are really talking about are devices or mechanisms which liberate energy from sources which are not usually nett energy emitters. Ordinary water is often the fuel in these devices.
A simple, and demonstrable it seems, example of this involves sending ultrasonic pulses through water (of the correct frequency) whilst it’s being heated. This, allegedly, causes the water to boil using thirty percent less energy than would be scientifically calculated calorifically. The details are here: Over Unity.
But, let’s face it, water is weird stuff. As I believe I’ve made abundantly (and possibly boorishly) clear, I am am extremely antipathetic to all manifestations of the Abrahamic religions. However, if there was any evidence of God, I would say it’s not the Babel fish it’s hydrogen bonds! I’ve always suspected that we’re on Earth release v1.01 (revision b – Hydrogen bonds) to stop the oceans from freezing. The thing about hydrogen bonds is that when water freezes it gets bigger!?! There aren’t too many materials that do that. I have no doubt, that like any bug fix, it’s possible to exploit the side effects of this phenomenon as any hacker/cracker (or Matrix fan) will tell you. Perhaps the Pons-Fleishmann cell is a manifestation of that.
Another fascinating book about ‘forbidden science’ is “the Memory of Water” (Michael Schiff) about the ignominious vilification and character assassination of biochemist Jacques Benveniste because of his temerity to demonstrate that water seemed to be able to remember what had been in it after it had been diluted 10^40 times! I won’t go into the gory details of this metaphorical disembowelling but the upshot of the whole thing was that poor old Jacques had to go through his experimental technique with a stage magician (James Randi) who promptly explained that the whole thing was a fake largely because, when he (Randi) attempted it, it didn’t work. Hell, anyone who’s ever tried to cook a soufflé understands that even simple experiments require good technique!
Anyone, that’s the end of my diatribe. If science remains introspective as it presently appears to be, we might as well get used to coal, gas and solid fuel rockets.
Maybe we need another big war. That tends to get the more inventive components of our society off their ring-pieces and often equips them with the budget to manifest some more pearls for the swine in government.
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Funny you should mention this, Joe.
I woke up this morning thinking about Eric Laithwaite. He designed a magnetic levitation high speed train, and was a renowned scientist. But then he got interested in the strange behaviour of some gyroscopes:
He decided to make this the subject of his prestigious Faraday Lecture at the Royal Institution in 1973. He brought with him an array of gyroscopes, including one weighing 50lb that he spun up and raised effortlessly above his head with one hand, claiming it had lost weight and so contravened Newton’s third law. The world of science was scandalised. For the first time in its history, the Royal Institution failed to publish the Faraday Lecture and Laithwaite’s nomination for a Fellowship of the Royal Society was cancelled. BBC
I actually saw the BBC broadcast of this Faraday lecture, and he had 5-year-old girls raising gyroscopes that were as big as they were. It remains lodged in memory: what on earth was happening?
As to your wider point, I think there’s a sort of law of the development of any science, which is roughly that they start with a few crazy daredevils ( Kepler, Newton, even Faraday), and then their work becomes formalised and institutionalised and professionalised, and has all the crazy daring knocked out of it. It becomes a new dogmatic certainty, a matter of rote learning, which replaces the old dogmatic certainty that the original trail-blazers subverted.
I’ve got no comment to make on cold fusion or over-unity engines, but one thing is for sure: we don’t really know very much at all about the wonderfully mysterious universe in which we live.
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I always thought false modesty (rather than violence) was the refuge of the incompetent.
Most likely though it’s: “Incompetence is the refuge of the incompetent” or Pres Dubyabush wouldn’t have been re-elected.
Incidentally, I just heard an advert on the radio wherein Simon Cowell was extremely rude to some carol singers or similar. This came on just after, what sounded like, a plug for some variant of “The Weakest Link”.
Why, pray, does 21st century Britain appear to be making a virtue out of rudeness? If anyone even thought of speaking to me like that I’d have the pistols or sabres out before they could say “Anne Robinson”!
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I met Eric Laithwaite (more years ago than I care to remember!) He was a really nice guy!
This was just after he had (allegedly) sent a 20Kg steel sphere rotating at 30,000 RPM though three lecture rooms. Apparently he turned it on, left it to accelerate on some maglev type field and then realised the only way to stop it was to turn off the power. The story may be apocryphal; he certainly didn’t mention it.
Seemed an extremely down to earth chap though; I really can’t see him making stuff up for self aggrandisement.
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This also reminds me of a controversy in which I became very marginally involved.
About a year ago I was half-watching a TV documentary called “The Girl with X-ray Eyes”, about a Russian teenager who was highly regarded in her native Russia for her apparent ability to diagnose illness by simply talking to people for a few minutes. She had been flown over to the US to be scientifically studied by some outfit (one with which James Randi is associated).
Her task, in lab conditions, presented with 7 different individuals with 7 different symptoms, was to guess who had which symptoms. As I idly watched, I thought that if it was me doing the test, I’d probably be lucky to even guess one right. But she got 4 out of 7 right – and was promptly declared to have failed the test, because the pass mark was getting 5 out of 7 right.
I thought she’d done really well, and wondered what the chance of her getting that number right actually was. I wrote a computer program to work it out. It turned out to be less than one chance in 50.
I then found an online discussion of the program, where I discovered that the probabilities being used by the experimenters, as calculated by three professors, one of them a Nobel laureate, were different from mine (and from a few other people). It gradually emerged that they’d simply got the probabilities wrong. Not much wrong, but wrong all the same.
I was appalled at this elementary error, and said as much. But, for my pains, I was dismissed as “an obsessive-compulsive mathematician”. Working out the right numbers is, apparently, “obsessive-compulsive”.
I’ve no idea whether the girl had any unusual abilities. But I ended up thinking that if the experimenters couldn’t even bother to work out the probabilities right, the entire experiment was probably really just designed to discredit her – which, of course, it succeeded in doing.
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What’s most absurd is that even if she’d gotten all seven right it wouldn’t prove anything either way.
My brother always proposes that if there was any truth whatsoever in parapsychology or magic we would be using it in wars and there would be a professor of thaumaturgy at Cambridge.
You could probably say the same thing about fusion.
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Joe Mental…
Your brother should be aware that both the Russians and americans had/have a “psi corps”, experimenting with such odd concepts as Remote Viewing, Telepathy, Telekinesis, Etc.
To some degree, therefore, they ARE used in war…
(adjusts tinfoil hat, retires under desk within a faraday cage!)
;o)
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Randi is a pretty good debunker, but he can be faulted on being a little too willing to de- rather than bunk.
The history of science is nothing more or less than the history of explaining the hithertofor inexplicable. I am sure that the founders of the scientific method would approve of its being applied to various non-traditional ideas. In the beginning, ALL ideas were non-traditional. And the true strength of the scientific method is that it holds up, no matter what you apply it to.
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Whilst I accept your point raincoaster and agree that the predictive requirement of the scientific method strengthens it’s claim to impartiality, my problem is with the upper echelons of the R&D community immediately damning a line of research because the hypothesis expressed is contrary to their/our current understanding of mechanism.
When I hear dismissals like: “If this were true we’d have to rewrite all of physics!” It reminds me of people quoting Matthew 19:18, i.e. it’s dogma rather than science.
Prior to the Renaissance, European artists were pretty much precluded from painting anything except highly stylised representations of JC and the apostles (“’cause it’s written, that’s why!”) and it seems to me that scientific research is travelling down this path in that researchers only get grants for doing research that the top dogs think is legit and valid.
Did you know that, five years after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, the Scientific American was still reporting that heavier than air flight was impossible? That’s the level of stupidity I’m talking about.
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I don’t know what’s bothering you, Joe. We are all of us always in the grip of dogmatic convictions of one sort or other – although we are usually more aware of the dogmatic convictions of others rather than our own. Why should scientists be any better?
Indeed, it might be argued that this is how it ought to be: that there ought to be institutional inertia. Because without that inertia there wouldn’t be an established consensus opinion. If we all kept completely open minds the whole time, we’d all believe six impossible things before breakfast. It’s only because of this inertia, this unwillingness to change our minds, that we have any consistent opinions at all.
In short, we need institutional inertia,. We need an unwillingness to change our minds, just as much as we need people who can shrug off some tiny fraction of their received conventional wisdom, and take a new look, now and then.
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>PaulD said:
March 12, 2006 11:34 PM | permalink
Macnificent!
——————–
Yes, true about Mac!
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Sorry idlex, I think you’re missing my point.
Boris started this thread off with:
“…Here we are, a nation that once led the world in scientific discovery. Who proposed the theory of gravity?…”
My issue is that it seems institutional inertia, as you put it, is putting the brakes on exploratory science such that the achievements praised by Boris, in his opening paragraph, no longer occur.
I am not suggesting for a nanosecond that people should be allowed to investigate sentience in earthworms or lunatic theories about electricity being alive or even fifth forces (without a damn good reason or a load of evidence anyway). What I do criticise is when promising lines of investigation are arbitrarily curtailed on the recommendation of a very small number of people in the rarefied heights of academia and publishing who have a great deal of vested interest in the status quo.
I mentioned Jacques Benveniste in an earlier posting, examples like this outrage me! His research was completely legitimate yet it was torpedoed by a bunch of self-righteous cretins (CSICOP) for no better reason than his findings sound impossible not are impossible.
The problem is that there are certain theories or fields which researchers are not even allowed to look at! Check out Wilhelm Reich, Velikovsky etc. etc. etc. I am not suggesting the hypotheses these people presented were correct (they may have been complete nutcases), but I do not understand the vehemence and loathing their work has been subjected to by a, theoretically, objective group of scientists! If someone is suggesting something stupid, it’s normally fairly easy to disprove it; the, so called, scientific method is (theoretically) entirely based on this approach. Remember, we are talking about predictive theories here not biblical didactic hearsay.
There are even, astoundingly, sacred cow theories (like neo-Darwinistic evolution) that have become unassailable. The latter is, in my opinion, largely because of the Gospel of St. Richard Dawkins. I’m not suggesting evolutionary theory is wrong, simply that there are some pretty big holes in it (which the monotheists constantly exploit) and these need to be explained rather than swept under the carpet and ignored. If any theory can’t be examined critically there is, again, something wrong. I would further propose that this kind of critical examination may well result in reinforcing many sacrosanct hypotheses because the examination is performed from such a different angle.
I’m sorry idlex, it’s starting to sound (to me) like anything postulated in theoretical physics prior to 1925 is set in tablets of stone and anything proposed subsequently, which is contradictory to historical dogma, is ipso facto wrong. Further, I firmly believe that this, more than anything else is the factor causing fewer people to go into the primary sciences: “It’s all been done, we know how everything works, you’ll just be filling in the gaps.”
That’s just crap!
Institutional inertia is important to stop silly faddish theories becoming pre-eminent; it should not, however, be instrumental in forbidding exploration of alternate theories. Certainly not to the extent that it does today.
I am dogmatic. (Gospel according to Richard Milton)
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According to science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, there are four stages in the acceptance of any new idea.
The four stages are:-
“It’s nonsense.”
“It may be real but it’s not important”
“I always said it was important”
“I thought of it first!”
“Stones cannot fall from the sky, because there are no stones in the sky,” Antoine Lavoisier, Academie des Sciences c1790.
Lewis Wolpert, chairman of the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science, was asked by a reporter if scientists shouldn’t be more open minded? “An open mind, is an empty mind,” Wolpert told him.
Distinguished medical doctor and director Jonathan Miller candidly admitted on TV, “Even if you showed me the evidence for homeopathy, I still wouldn’t believe in it.”
What chance is there for scientific development outside existing parameters given this level of stubbornness?
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Boris started this thread off with: “…Here we are, a nation that once led the world in scientific discovery. Who proposed the theory of gravity?…” My issue is that it seems institutional inertia, as you put it, is putting the brakes on exploratory science such that the achievements praised by Boris, in his opening paragraph, no longer occur. (Joe M)
Well, it was Isaac Newton who first proposed the theory of gravity – so let’s talk about Newton a bit.
Did Newton get an SRC scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge to study gravity and optics? Was he funded by BioAccelerate Holdings to study the effects of passive smoking on Cambridge undergraduates? How many A-levels did he have?
It’s been a while since I read a biography of Newton, but, from memory, he was accepted into Cambridge on the bottom rung, more or less as a servant to more senior scholars. His mother wouldn’t even help out with his living expenses. Newton gradually rose within the university, until he was appointed Lucasian professor. And hardly anybody attended his lectures. He had, by this time, only a few modest duties to carry out, and spent the bulk of his time pursuing his own multifarious interests, which ranged from alchemy and biblical interpretation (he thought the end of the world would come in about 1860, from his studies of Daniel) through to optics and mechanics. Newton was, pretty much, absolutely free to pursue any avenue of enquiry he felt like. There were no requirement upon him to do any research into anything by some funding authority. All he had to do, to not lose his post, was to keep his heretical views to himself: he was an heretical disbeliever in the trinity, which would have cost him his job. Alone in his room, in a sea of papers strewn all over the place, Newton invented his method of fluxions, studied optics, constructed his own telescope, etc, etc.
What modern postgraduate has such freedom? Most research is funded by government or business with a view to getting results fairly pronto. Researchers are meshed in a web of peer reviews, deadlines, examinations, etc. Nobody gives anyone a sack of dosh and says: “Here, live off this, and think about whatever you like.” But that was pretty much Newton’s circumstance.
If Boris, or anybody else, wants a few more Newtons, they should provide the circumstances in which Newton flourished: a guaranteed modest income, oodles of free time, and more or less complete freedom to study anything. And this is the only way anybody comes up with new ideas.
After all, nobody asked Copernicus to come up with a new explanation of the motion of planets. Nobody asked Kepler to figure out the shape of planetary orbits. And nobody asked Newton to sort out optics, mechanics, and calculus. All these people posed themselves these questions. In the case of Newton, somebody (Halley probably) asked him if he’d ever looked at a gravitational inverse square law, and Newton replied that he had – some 10 years earlier -, and he said he’d see if he could dig it out from under his heap of papers.
And it was only when all this stuff started coming out that Newton was catapulted to fame. Before that, he’d just been secretively scrawling equations in his room, peering at prismatic light, his lectures unattended, almost entirely left to himself.
Which would all be utterly intolerable in modern universities, whose principal role is now to serve the aims of industry, and produce marketable results fast. A daydreamer and slacker like Isaac Newton would be out on his ear in next to no time.
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Well, it was much the same with Einstein, wasn’t it? He did all his really important work as a young man working as a clerk. History is made by obsessives and subversives, which only reinforces the institutional resistance to them. If Hawking hadn’t been as much a genius at leveraging his own publicity as he is at mathematics, he’d be toiling in obscurity right now.
Your point about the military-industrial complex funding research now is exactly right. I had a long discussion with a friend of mine who is a professor of philosophy, and he says the only way he can hang on to his job is to slant his grant applications so they appear to have military or corporate applications (ie marketing or groupthink). Try twisting your mind around that: “Dear Whatever.com Inc, I would like ten thousand dollars to study the concept of the Platonic Ideal and, um, how it applies to modern, uh, purchasing decisions?”
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Yes idlex and raincoaster, I understand your points. Universities today have become institutionalised, production line R&D centres which must be treated as profit (not cost) centres by administrators. Sure, no question about it. But, if they are anything like my company, at least ten percent of our R&D time/effort goes into blue sky, let’s look at something different/stupid, type investigation.
No-one’s inventive all the time anyway so it seems pointless to put in 100% effort on mad ideas. Notwithstanding this, providing one has the equipment and resources, the odd utterly daft idea can be tried out at a fairly modest cost and some (rarely I admit) reap massive benefits which more than pay for all the ones which failed.
The difference between what I am suggesting and your observations is that neither Newton’s or Einstein’s research lines were angrily terminated because some University administrator or magazine publisher was unsympathetic to the theorems they postulated. It’s this sort of censorship which I find offensive and deeply suspicious. When Einstein opined that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, Niels Bohr et al didn’t get ejected from the building and told not to come back! Einstein simply disagreed with them; what’s wrong with that? It’s only through the synthesis of different ideas and concepts that we truly gain a greater knowledge of the universe.
Science, contrary to opinion, isn’t democratic either. It doesn’t matter how many people believe a certain thing or how fervently, it doesn’t make it correct or true or we should still be talking about phlogiston instead of oxygen. (ref. J B Priestly)
All I’m saying is that the influence of these ‘paradigm police’ needs to be curtailed or we’ll be looking at another five thousand years of advanced (highly sophisticated and accurate) rock throwing.
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We do seem to be in a cynical mood at the moment , don’t we? But , without the doubters of this world , there would have been no spur to help the profound thinkers overcome the hurdles placed in their way by their critics. All of the greats in science were seen, at some time in their life , as being slightly cracked. Long may there be such crackpots, of whatever race and creed.
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Sorry Mac,
That isn’t what I’m talking about.
Doubt is natural, reasonable and essential to progress. Without doubt, everything would probably remain pretty much the same because there is no dynamic for change.
My bile here stems from the fact that there is a world of difference between someone saying: “I don’t believe you. That’s complete nonsense; you’re talking rubbish!” and saying: “Not only do we think your work is nonsensical, we’re are also going to prevent you from publishing your findings and further, we will do everything in our power to make sure your funding is cut by threatening your establishment/institution with dire consequences if they won’t comply!”
I’m not in the least bit cynical, I’m angry!
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I think that one interesting example of institutional inertia, which involves – quite literally – blue sky thinking, and Newton and Arthur C. Clarke, concerns the Space Elevator concept.
A space elevator is essentially a geosynchronous satellite attached to the equator by a tether. Space vehicles would be launched from them by hauling themselves up the tether, and releasing themselves into free orbit once they reach the tethered satellite. It’s all a bit of simple Newtonian physics, championed by Arthur C. Clarke. It currently costs something like 10,000 dollars to put one kilogram payload into space using conventional rockets – in part because the rockets need to reach escape velocity of 11 km/sec. The estimated costs of doing the same with payloads climbing a space elevator at 200 metres/sec is estimated to be something of the order of 100th of the conventional cost. There are engineering problems, of course, in that we currently don’t have materials strong enough to use as tethers.
You’d think that there would be a whole raft of studies exploring ways to get this working. But there aren’t. Virtually all the big money goes into conventional rocket technology. The space elevator concept is largely kept alive by a band of unpaid enthusiasts. And they are regarded with something approaching complete contempt by orthodox rocket scientists.
This a wonderful contemporary example of institutional inertia. For a whole bunch of people, it is taken as a fact of life that the way to get stuff into space is with giant flaming rockets. Entire industries and careers are built around rocket technology. When rocket scientists look at space elevators, they are looking at their own impending redundancy. No wonder they scoff. The stage coach and mule train drivers who first explored the American west probably scoffed at the railroad pioneers with their improbably long railway tracks.
But apart from this, rocket science is intimately linked with the military, from Nazi V2s to Polaris missiles. Space exploration has been a by-product of military technological innovation, which is all part and parcel of the past five thousand years of advanced (highly sophisticated and accurate) rock throwing (hat tip to JM). Space elevators may offer a far cheaper way of getting matter into space, but they don’t offer us a better way of throwing rocks at enemies, and they won’t get any funding until somebody figures out some way to use them to throw those rocks. And nuclear power essentially gets big bucks because it offers some very highly explosive rocks to throw.
Never mind the religious dogmas of the kind that Copernicus and Galileo had to contend with. The greatest of our dogmas, and one that is far older than Christianity or any other new-fangled idea, is the notion that if we want to get rich, we must steal it from other people by force.
Which is why, incidentally, we are in Iraq.
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While it’s true that space elevator research isn’t being “angrily terminated” by unsympathetic administrators,it’s perhaps because such research isn’t funded in the first place.
And while Jerome Pearson, one of the space elevators principal advocates, hasn’t been arrested and imprisoned, it took him 10 years to find a publisher for his seminal paper.
Ignoring, ridiculing, and not funding new ideas is simply the first phase of outright suppression.
New ideas are always inherently subversive of the existing order, whatever it happens to be, and steps are always taken to preserve the existing order – if nothing else because a lot of people’s jobs depend upon it. Copernicus’ heliocentrism subverted the geocentric orthodoxy of his time, and called fundamental religious beliefs into question. Space elevators threaten to subvert the established orthodoxy of rocket science. It is the same, I suggest, for almost any and every new idea.
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Absolutely idlex! That’s precisely what I’m getting at. The problem with new (particularly working) ideas is they tend to make proponents of the old regime look a bit dim!
I can understand why space elevator research (sensible though it is) may be put on the back burner though, it’s bleedin’ expensive! I can’t argue about budgetary rejection, that’s just a fact of academic life. Much as I would like one, I can’t afford a Lear jet and it doesn’t matter how many motivations I put together it is unlikely that possessing one will ever make financial sense. I suspect the space elevator is going to have to wait until someone hits the profit motive button. i.e. there is something in space which would be worth a TON of money on Earth but conventional rocket systems will eat the profit.
Darwin’s theory of evolution was, more or less, a scientific curiosity until Gregor Mendel’s genetic research provided a mechanism for trait inheritance between generations. My gripe is about research in, for example, bioenergetic fields. A number of people have done experimentation in this subject and any resultant data has been comprehensively stomped on!
Take this experiment:
1) Put healthy yeast in one (hermetically sealed) glass test-tube and some yeast (infected with something) in another test tube next to it.
Result: Nothing, the healthy yeast stays healthy
2) Put a quartz lens in both test tubes (transparent to ultra-violet electro-magnetic spectrum, glass is opaque)
Result: healthy yeast becomes infected.
All things being equal (i.e. the quartz isn’t porous and the test-tubes are sealed correctly) the only conclusion is that somehow this infection is transmitted by an ultra-violet frequency of electromagnetic radiation. Now, I haven’t performed this experiment (although I intend to when I get some time) so this is complete hearsay but, if true, has some rather interesting implications. I readily concede that is sounds bizarre and implausible but then so does relativity when you first hear about it. I haven’t performed the Michelson-Macaulay experiment either.
This sort of research seems to crop up every 25 – 50 years or so when it is, once again, mugged and buried by the paradigm police and the James Randi’s of the world.
“He had a test-tube up his sleeve, your honour!”
“Did you find it?”
“No… but that’s the only way it could have worked.”
Is one of Randi’s favourite ploys
My pet example of this type of intrusive control is Benveniste’s story. The wheels really came of his research when he, almost apologetically, made the statement that the qualities he’d found in high dilutions of certain materials, appeared to be transmittable electro-magnetically. Then they shut him down really fast! You see, it can’t be financial issues in such a case; we aren’t talking about NASA type space budgets; just a lab, some glassware/microscopes and a couple of lab technicians. It seems to be the subject matter which is so distasteful and I cannot conceive why.
Of course it may all be complete rubbish. It’s virtually impossible to prove a negative (i.e. to prove it doesn’t work) but that didn’t stop a number of institutions saying that cold-fusion is nonsense because they couldn’t reproduce the effects claimed by Fleischman and Pons.
What I really don’t understand is why none of the victims of the concept cops ever said: “But think of the military applications!”
“Will you take a cheque or do you want cash?”
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Idlex
I make the probability of putting at least 4 out of 7 pegs in the right place blindfold as 92/5040 = 23/1260 = 0.018 a little under 1 in 50, so in the same palce as yours. However this is not significant at the 1% level. If the null hypothesis were that ‘there is no positive correlation between the subjects guesses and the actual placements’ then this result would be observed in about 2 cases in 100. I think I would like to see the results of a series of such experiments.
I’m assuming I’ve done my calculations right. So I stick out my neck when I say that many who ought to know better, particularly in health research, do not understand enough probability theory to know what a signifcance test tells the experimenter. Stuart Sutherland devoted at least a chapter of his book on Irrationality to this. If Nobel laureates get the wrong numbers it does not suprise me. I would be suprised if they were wrong in their area of speciality (except of course for those like Pinter who get pseudo-Nobel prizes) because despite all the push to publish, egotism and so on that does infect the scientific community there is still a strong tradition of rational criticism. Regrettably the government’s commitment to science being based on ‘fun’ and ‘accessibility’ is probably not helping matters.
I’m not a physicist so I couldn’t really say much about the possibility of a space elevator. The bits I do understand seem to make sense – stationary orbit and ultra strong ultra lightweight ‘cables’. Do we know enough to have a Kittyhawk experience?
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Jack,
I agree with your figure. Of 5040 possible permutations, the numbers of occurences of 0, 1, 2, etc right answers are:
0 – 1854
1 – 1855
2 – 924
3 – 315
4 – 70
5 – 21
6 – 0
7 – 1
So the probability of getting 4 or more right answers is 92/5040 is 0.01825. CSICOP’s three professors who worked out the probabilities came up with a probability of 0.01899, which is different – even if not much different.
It appears that they used the Poisson approximation, which works fine for large numbers, but not small ones:
P(N = k) = 1/(e * k!)
Using this with n=7 we get (almost unreadably)
k P(k) 5040 * P(k) ‘true number’
0 0.367879 1854.1 1854
1 0.367879 1854.1 1855
2 0.183940 927.1 924
3 0.061313 309.0 315
4 0.015328 77.2 70
5 0.003066 15.4 21
6 0.000511 2.6 0
7 0.000030 0.4 1
That said, while I can work out the exact probabilities, their significance entirely defeats me. I am told that 1 in 50 isn’t very significant in a scientific experiment, but 1 in 100 is.
Which reminds me that the experimenters in this case declared that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”. How on earth does one measure extraordinariness?
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I suspect the space elevator is going to have to wait until someone hits the profit motive button. i.e. there is something in space which would be worth a TON of money on Earth but conventional rocket systems will eat the profit. (Joe M)
I’m sure that there are fortunes to be made out there, mining asteroids or manufacturing stuff in zero gravity, and even stuff as humble as waste disposal (e.g. of nuclear waste). But it’s so prohibitively expensive to get into space that anyone who does the numbers right now is looking at heavy losses.
But the same must have been true 500 years ago if anyone had done the figures for circumnavigating the world and bringing back spices. One wonders how the Portuguese ever got round to building caravels that allowed them to do exactly this.
Do we know enough to have a Kittyhawk experience? (Jack R)
It seems we may. NASA has become interested in them, and there’s talk of trying to get one working in the next 10 or 20 years. The main problem seems to be the cable: they’re proposing to use carbon nanotubes, which have the required strength. But nobody’s figured out how to weave them into a cable.
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idlex
many thanks for your figures – I’ve spent a happy afternoon inspired by them and ‘discovered’ an interesting relationship which was probably spotted by some ancient Greek. Anyway it is related to the observation which lurks in your figures and tables that if you have set of n things with a unique ordering then the probability that a good shuffle puts them all into the wrong position tends to 1/e.
As far as what it means is concerned…
Probability is a branch of pure maths. What we mean by ‘probability’ in the real world and hence the ‘meaning’ of significance tests is not something that there is agreement about. It also depends on consequences. If our nuclear power station had a new test and we were told that if there was a major problem then the test would only fail to tell us 2% of the time then we may not be altogether happy with that test.
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Sorry – I meant significance depends on consequences in everyday terms
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many thanks for your figures – I’ve spent a happy afternoon inspired by them
My pleasure, Jack.
And I’m slightly relieved to hear that ‘significance’ is not a matter about which there is agreement. But then again, I’m slightly disturbed…
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many who ought to know better, particularly in health research, do not understand enough probability theory to know what a signifcance test tells the experimenter. Stuart Sutherland devoted at least a chapter of his book on Irrationality to this. (Jack Ramsey)
This sounds quite an interesting book. Is it about mathematics?
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idlex
It’s not primarily a hard sums book. He’s interested in all sorts of irrationality. I was particualrly interested in the chapter on medical research because in my (then) naivity (how do you spell it) I thought that real researchers in whatever field understood probability theory, despite the interpretation. It turns out that many don’t! If you have access to a uni library you will probably find it there or quite possibly in a good public library.
It’s also got stuff on how people ignore evidence even when it is to their disadvantage.
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this book sucked
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jeff
let me have a list of other books that suck – I’ve nearly finished colouring in my present one
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Jack: I’m afraid thet your ascerbic remark must have fallen on cloth ears. Whoever J. Garcia is , his style of literary criticism lacks a certain depth , don’t you think?
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Mac
Certainly I suppose one could call it terse. Possibly he needs to save wear and tear on his keyboard?
You don’t think he is the J. Garcia, who as we all know never died but is living in a Montana commune with JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Princess Di and the High Guardians of the Holy Grael?
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Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead? I had not heard that he too still lives, in the manner of Elvis and Jim Morrison.
But perhaps Boris’ blog attracts spirits from the underworld. Indeed, perhaps all of us here died many years ago.
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One never knows Jack.
If all the non-dead from way back in history were laid end on end . what a “carrion” that would be .
Sorry about the horrible pun Jack , but I feel slightly jsded at the moment.
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idlex
You read it here first! I usually like to start one undead story or conspiracy theory a day. It’s good for the wind!
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Jack; a propos the latest side slip :
I can’t help but wonder, when the seemingly endless season of repeats of the ‘Carry On’ series of films is once again stirred into motion: is the title ‘Carry On’ a play on the word “carrion”?
Carrion:(n) A carcass or carcasses; dead and rotting meat, left where the beast died, thus providing food for the less able hunters of live prey, and that universally feared and hated, (though badly misunderstood), bird; the vulture.
Surely even the worst case of the double entendre phase of any school-kid gets outgrown one day?
The films were adolescently funny in their day; (mostly, anyway); but we are a little, if only barely, more sophisticated today, and when I see the ‘ nudge -nudge’ provoking scene, for the 100th time , of Barbara Windsor’s so called bosom , freeing itself / themselves , from that horrible towelling bikini top, I think of all the public schoolboy fantasies that must have gone into the writing of that particular scene.
I wouldn’t mind , but;
a) they weren’t to be seen , and
b) I’ve seen bigger ones on a snake.
But then ; I’ve been around a long time.
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Mac
As a trainee gent I wouldn’t dream of commenting on ladies’ bosoms but from ancient memory I think you’re right about BWs.
However I have a fondness for Carry On movies. Carry On Up the Khyber is one of my favourites. I recall a very pleasant reminisce of the last scenes with She Who Must Be Obeyed’s cousin’s Pakistani hubby. I was a little worried he might be offended but he seemed to take more delight than I in the awful, in the Biblical sense of course, British humour.
We, or you, may be a little more sophisticated but I can’t say the same for the comedy. Every now and then I catch a glimpse of Little Britain. It’s always about some poor woman urinating in a supermarket. I think that bears as much relation to comedy as throwing a hand grenade into a river does to fly fishing, not that I’ve tried either.
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Jack : Hoo bloody ray ! I have never mentioned that particular programme in any conversation I have ever had, with anyone , for fear of being seen as a person devoid of laughing gear, and now I find another of the same mind.
I fear that the humour of Little Britain passes me by , as did that supposed mumour in The Office .
I have , I think , a very healthy sense of humour , but I cannot laugh at what I fail to see as funny.
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I find Little Britain cruel rather than comic. And the Office made me squirm, because it was too like a few offices I’ve experienced – only not as funny. Could never stand Carrion films.
But Absolutely Fabulous worked for me most of the time.
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Mac and idlex
My son has a healthy sod ‘em attitude to the establishment, including his old man’s musical and literary tastes, but he fails to find Little Britain funny. I wonder if we have an emperor’s new clothes scenario. We are feed the idea that it is sufficient to be offensive to be clever or funny but whilst some degree of offence is often part of humour it is not enough on its own.
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Jack : it seems that there are little enclaves of common sense in the UK after all .
My brood are all anti Little Britain , and to go even further, they, (and I) , hold the belief that there is ‘comedy’ and ‘alternative comedy’. The latter is mostly not funny, we find.
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Mac
Maybe alternative comedy is short for alternative to comedy – for those that don’t like a good laugh
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Jack:Précisement , mon brave.
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The Common Energy Policy Green paper demonstrates Europe’s disappointment with alternative technologies, and why we need to to open up our coal mines and build new nuclear and coal power stations.
http://www.oxfordprospect.co.uk/Europe%20Watch.htm
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