How to Misunderstand Physics

 On Metaphor and Misunderstanding
Why physics is misunderstood

Originally part of  Usenet post Re: Empirical Utility of Dualism Posted: Dec 2, 2005 11:01 PM . Wolf Kirchmeir said: [...]
The three types of quarks could've been called anything at all. The terminology was preceded by the mathematical models that confirmed and predicted observations. The theoreticians could have used Greek letters, like they did for the tau, the mu, etc. Or Egyptian letters (which IIRC was actually suggested.)

Hint: learn the math.

"Quark" is borrowed from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Joyce borrowed the word from the German, wherein it refers to a kind of cottage cheese.

Me, I'd've proposed "flush" and "skint"; "womble" and "gronk"; and "tvepji" and "bsanji".

But nobody asked me. :-(

[A response to this post implied that naming the flavours of quarks up/down, top/bottom would lead to a “more interesting understanding” than the terms I suggested. “Flavours” is of course another metaphor. My comment on that post follows:]

The terminology was chosen to be deliberately arbitrary. The intent was to avoid what was called "a more interesting understanding," since quarks of all three types simply aren't like anything we can understand. Only the mathematical models make true sense of the phenomena they refer to. Ordinary-language accounts are metaphors, and like all metaphors they obscure as much as they illuminate.

It's somewhat like reading music. Some people can "hear the music" when they read the score, others (like me) can more or less accurately sing or play it, but for many a written score is just so many black spots, and they can't even "follow the score" when they hear the music played. When it comes to the mathematics of sub-atomic physics, very few of us can even follow the score, let alone pick out the tune or hear the music just by looking at the score. The physicists, bless their hearts, try to make their theories understood, but what their well-intentioned attempts actually do is foster a great deal of misunderstanding.

Addendum 2015-06-02: I think the misunderstanding applies to the physicists, too. I don’t think it’s useful to say that photons are waves or particles. All we know is that in some situations, we can use wave equations to describe their behaviour, and in other situations we can use particle equations. To say that the “wave function collapses” I think merely means that the probabilities described by the wave function are replaced by certainties when we observe/measure the consequences of some interaction. To refer to entities that interact as some entities that exist in and of themselves apart from the interactions is I think a mistake. All we can ever know is the interactions.

GMD-1 locomotives in southern Saskatchewan

R. W. Zimmerman & Blake Kiviharju. Prairie Branches (1980) A compilation of photos, some maps, and time-tables, with a few paragraphs of comment here and there. Self-published in the days before it became easy, printed before digital scanning and printing raised the quality of photo-reproduction, this pamphlet is a record of CNR branchlines in Saskatchewan. These radiated from Regina, and represent Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific attempts to compete with the CPR. Most of these lines have been abandoned in the 40 years since publication.
     The locomotive of choice for these lightly built and travelled lines was the GMD-1, which was essentially a stretched SW1200 locomotive with a low short hood added at one end. Built for the CNR and Northern Alberta Railway, it’s a surprisingly elegant design. Like the GP7/9 it looks like what it is: a locomotive made to do serious work. They lasted a long time, too, with a dozen or two still in service as of 2019, most on the CNR and in Cuba, one owned by Cando, and one on the Oregon Pacific.
  A valuable little book. It would be nice to republish it with modern technology, in a larger format, with larger photos. **½

Suppose God wrote a memoir....

     David Javerbaum. The Last Testament: A Memoir by God (2011) 1. In the beginning, I took a lunch with Daniel Greenburg of the Levine Greenburg Literary Agency. 2.For the future of print was without hope, and void; and darkness had fallen upon the face of the entire publishing industry. (Prologue, 1-2) Thus begins this Memoir; and if you have a good knowledge of the Bible, you will recognise allusions to its contents not only here but throughout the book.
     The God who writes this memoir is the God of the Bible, as understood by Javerbaum, and probably others, since he was a writer for Saturday Night Live at the time this book came into being. It’s a well-done and often subtle satire of those who believe in a God that resembles a human being, a conclusion that follows from the assumption that humans are made in the image of God.
     Certainly, the more literalist believers will find much to be offended by, but I think for those who understand that the Bible is one of many attempts to make sense of the astonishing creativity of the Universe that brought us into being, this book will be at least as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. If you have wrestled with questions of creed and theology, this book may suggest that most of those questions are unanswerable in St Augustine’s sense. The trick is to recognise which are mere verbal puzzles, which are matters of substance, and which are the consequence of ill-understood and mistaken assumptions.
     Recommended. A keeper. ****

Bernstein on Science and Scientists

     Jeremy Bernstein. Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos (1991) Bernstein wrote for The New Yorker and other magazines for many years. I liked his pieces then, and I like this compilation now. He’s a bit prissy, expressing doubt that “the merely personal” should be remarked in biographies of Schroeder, for example. Schroeder was a notorious womaniser. Bernstein’s modest about his insights into matters he doesn’t get, but very good at explaining what he knows. He’s a working physicist, and as such is careful to keep within his limits.
     He began his scientific career before the vastness of the Universe in space and time was understood. Cosmology was almost a fringe science, burdened with ignorance and poor data. It was the accidental discovery of the cosmic background radiation that shifted scientific opinion. This led to radio astronomy, and now the whole electromagnetic spectrum is exploited to make sense of what’s out there. Cosmology is a nice example of how better instruments lead to better data, and so not only lead to  confident insights, but also to answerable questions.
     His essays on the great physicists of the late 19th and early 20th century reminds one that quantum theory was accepted before there were good data to support it. It began with Planck’s quantised model of light. Now, its insights have become engineering principles.
     In one of his last pieces, Bernstein mentions global warming, and, touchingly, infers that we will change our way of life to avoid the worst effects. I think he would be appalled at the concentrated efforts to deny and distract from the threat.
     The compilation amounts to a history of science in the 20th century. Worth reading. ***

Canadian Politics in the 80s: cartoons by Wicks

Ben Wicks. The Second Ben Wicks Treasury (1987) Wicks invented Mavis and Bill, an Ottawa couple with political connections and insight, with a more or less cynical take on current Canadian political events. For example:

Mavis: How does Chretien feel about taking Turner’s job, bill?
Bill: Keen.
Mavis: How do you mean?
Bill: He’s not saying anything.
Mavis: Wow! He wants it as bad as that.
Bill: In the worst way.

At it best as good as Yes Minister, and a good primary record for a grad student aspiring to write the definitive history of Canadian politics in the 1980s. I enjoyed it, but I won’t keep it. **½

Offloading the Risk III: ARAMCO IPO fails to reach target

The New Yok Times reports that the ARAMCO IPO fell short of Saudi expectations.

"Investors balked..."

It seems that my assessment of the viability of the oil industry is more widely shared than I thought.

Am I a cynic? Sure. Ambrose Bierce's definition: "Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be."

Update 2023-03-03: Putin's War against Ukraine has upset earlier calculations about the fate of fossil fuels. In the long run, the war will delay the final collapse of that industry. Whether that collapse will take the form of a phasing out or just another part of a  general collapse of our civilization remains to be seen.

Offloading the risk II: Oil is cheaper than ever

 The Guardian published a report today on possible further cuts to OPEC oil production.

The 2019 oil prices varied from $55 to $75. (1) The 1950 oil prices were about $28. In 2019 dollars, that’s $300. So the 2019 prices are between 1/6 and 1/4 of the 1950 prices.

Verily, “oil is sloshing around” the world (See Offloading the Risk). No wonder ARAMCO is going public. At such low prices their profits must be tanking.

And with such cheap oil, the incentive to convert to renewables is reduced. That’s not good.

(1) See this page on Macrotrends.  Since the latest prices is shown in current dollars, the chart is not adjusted for inflation. The highest price shown is $164.64 in June 2008, or $18 in 1950 dollars, about 65% of the 1950 price.

The cost of externals: An accumulating debt

Steel, concrete, and climate change: the cost of zero-priced externals

New Scientist (November 16-22, 2019) has published an article showing the high carbon cost of making steel and cement, the two raw materials that make our techno-civilisation possible.

The article reports several projects to reduce the carbon cost. One is to use hydrogen instead of coal in blast furnaces. “If the economics work out”, that is. All these projects are priced at the actual costs of development and deployment. This makes them look expensive compared to traditional methods of making steel and cement. (1)

Steel and concrete are a prime example of how traditional economics has misstated the costs of our life style. Neo-liberal (Chicago school) economics prices externals at zero. Thus steel and cement have seemed to be cheap materials for making the things we want. In fact externals do have a price. We just haven’t bothered to work out good methods for pricing them, still less for paying them. (2)

As a species, we have evolved to use our environment as a freely available resource for making what we want, eg, spears. The cost of making these tools was the labour of making them. The cost to the ecosystems was ignored. Our ancestors didn’t notice or care that the tree they destroyed to make sticks for poking game animals to death meant that the ecosystem had to make another tree. As long as humans were a small component of the ecosystems, the long-term effects of our use of natural resources were minimal. (3)

However, the costs of externals accumulate. If we don’t pay them, they become a debt. Mother Nature always collects her debts. We either spend our resources now to mitigate and if possible reverse climate change, or we will pay with the loss of property and life.

(1) Concrete is made by using cement to bind the sand and gravel particles together. This process requires CO2, so some of the CO2 used to make cement is recovered from the air.

(2) Zero-priced externals mean that the goods are under-priced. The market works efficiently if and only if prices express costs accurately relative to each other. Mispriced goods distort the market, which leads to market failure.

(3) Human effects were actually not balanced by ecosystem recovery: archeologists have found evidence that agriculture began the climate warming cycle at least 7,000 years ago. Also, many local or regional extinctions of animals were caused by humans.