Category Archives: Science

Respect my worldview!

Posted by on October 28, 2011 No comments | 2,765 views

You probably have heard that demand from various people? The idea for the post was triggered by this brief Twitter exchange on #skeptics:

Respect!The top reply there is mine, and this little exchange got me thinking. I have no idea who SnBEternally is and what their problem is. They did tell the whole of CSICON to go fuck themselves though, so there’s some animosity at least.

Anyway. So why this demand for respect? First let me clarify what I am referring to here. I do respect people’s freedom of religion, belief and speech. This is not what I’m targeting her. What I am talking about is why should I respect a given belief by default? There are numerous religious and alternative beliefs I simply cannot respect or accept because I’m a secular humanist. I don’t respect the acts of terror performed by fundamentalist Muslims. I don’t respect the hatred displayed by Christian fundamentalists towards gay people and other groups they target. I don’t respect the homoeopath who sell water and sugar for medicine to sick people. I don’t respect the anti-vaccine activist who indirectly cause great suffering for individuals and put the flock-immunity of dangerous diseases of the entire population at risk. I don’t respect the global warming denier who is too fond of their wasteful lifestyle to want to sacrifice it for the common good. I don’t respect the pope for sweeping child abuse under the rug and opposing prevention of the spreading of HIV in Africa. The list of assholes I don’t respect is long. Too long.

But let’s flip the coin and ask: Why do these people crave our respect? I don’t really give a shit if they don’t respect my world view. My world view doesn’t rely on that. It isn’t fixed. I evaluate my world view based on how well it fits with reality. Specifically I rely on scientific evidence when I make up my mind what to believe. If the evidence isn’t present I either make up my mind based on available data, or don’t form an opinion at all. I have no problem with not knowing the answer! This maybe is the key. The religious and the alternative thinking seem to demand an answer regardless of how well the answer applies to observable reality. Where did the universe come from? God made it. How does homoeopathic medicine work? Quantum mechanics does it. (As a physicist, the QM explanations for homoeopathy is complete gibberish to me). So why this craving for respect? The answer is simple I think: validation. Their world view is not self-consistent, self-evident or self-reliant, thus they need external affirmation. That is why they get so annoyed when we don’t provide this. This is also why it is a bad idea to pay too much lip service to these people. The so-called “accommodationism approach”.

Neutrinos and speed of light

Posted by on September 23, 2011 3 comments | 3,948 views

I just finished watching the 2 hour long webcast from CERN about the very surprising results that neutrinos have been measured with a velocity greater than the speed of light by a couple of thousandths of percent. If this turns out to be correct, i.e. can be confirmed by other neutrino experiments, it may have great implications for our current understanding of physics. It may not necessarily prove current physics wrong, it may just put a limit on the range of current physics. I.e. there may be new theories that will explain these results without having to chuck “old physics” in the bin in the same way as Einstein’s physics did not replace Newtonian physics as such, but expanded on it. That is after all what the LHC was built for.

So what are the results from OPERA? Well in a nutshell from the conclusion of the presentation:

Conclusion 1Basically what this says is that the neutrinos arrived at the detector some 730 km from the point they were created 60.7 nanoseconds before a photon would have arrived had it undertaken the same trip.

The big question is of course: are the measurements correct? The big points here are the synchronization of the clocks at both locations and the accurate measurement of the distance between them. The paper from arxiv.org linked below describes in detail how these are calibrated and how accurate they are. Another point, and this is probably where the error is made, is how they fit the plots of the arriving neutrinos. The 60 nanosecond shift produces the best fit, but I don’t think this looks very convincing (as discussed in the link to Résonaances below).

Other previous measurements of neutrinos from supernovae have not shown this result. This question was asked in the Q&A session after the presentation, and the answer given was that these are high-energy neutrinos at 17 GeV. Supernova-neutrinos are not, they’re in the 10 MeV range, so a factor of a thousand less. As you may know, nature does a lot more funky stuff at high energy than at low energy, another reason for building machines like the LHC. What needs to happen now is to have some of the other experiments try to reproduce this result at the same energies.

The article from NewScientist below also gives a possible explanation for this phenomenon using extra dimensions.

Regardless, time will show if this result is real or a fluke of some sort. If it turns out to be real, it requires explanation, and that’s where all the fun begins … for physicists at least!

Further reading:

Other comments:

Updated 24.09.2011

Times’ Greenland ice sheet blunder

Posted by on September 23, 2011 No comments | 1,472 views

A couple of days ago NewScientist reported in the article «Times Atlas grossly exaggerates Greenland ice loss» that the Times Atlas is claiming that the Greenland ice sheet has shrunk by 15%. This is of course not true as it would have a significant effect on sea level resulting in a 1m rise in levels, which would be quite noticeable many places around the world.

Now that error was not really my point for writing this, you can read all about that in the article, but the point is that immediately the “warming-denialist” trolls come crawling out from underneath their rocks making comments like:

NewScientist Comments

Not surprisingly it is “Martin” and “Jan” here who gets it spectacularly wrong.

Firstly, this claim is not a “global warming pillar” as the claim by Times is clearly an error, and scientists are also pointing this out in the article. Secondly, the satellite surveillance does a lot more than just photograph the extent of the ice sheets. Modern technology is a bit more sophisticated than that. That comment is purely based in ignorance. But that seems to be the trend amongst these people. First they claim that the erroneous data or claim is a pillar of climate science—which it is not as climatologists would point out, then they further claim that global warming cannot be true based on this first misconception. You don’t need to be a rocket-surgeon to spot the logical fallacy here. Recognize it from the creationsists “god of the gaps” argument? A quick google and a read of different reports on this story shows that the vast majority of the politicised denialists argue in this fashion.

Let me enlighten you numbskulls a bit: One of the main pillars of global warming is the actual data showing … wait for it … global warming! It isn’t that tricky. But then we understand these people’s agenda. If you can deny global warming, you can deny the main suspect cause, human activity. If you can, by hiding your head in the sand, deny that we did this, you can continue your current way of life and ignore the environmental impact of your lifestyle. This is ultimately just selfishness, and so incredibly irresponsible.

University of Oslo 200 years

Posted by on September 2, 2011 No comments | 1,528 views

Yesterday my university, the University of Oslo, celebrated its 200 year anniversary …

The University of Oslo has played a pivotal role in many of the major changes in Norway over the last 200 years. How the UiO has changed Norway

The day started—for me at least—with this years Kristine Bonnevie Lecture on Evolutionary Biology, which this year featured an introduction by Richard Dawkins on the importance of communicating science. He made a very inspired and passionate talk on how to communicate science to the public, something he is very good at himself. He also went a bit Feynman on us, describing the beauty and poetry of science. Which obviously is a good thing. Then followed a talk by Elizabeth Hadly who spoke about climate change and its effect on mammals, also a very good talk which I unfortunately missed the middle of due to losing the streaming feed and having to get in to the overcrowded auditorium. The lectures ended with a panel debate and Q&A with the two speakers and the physicist Jim Al-Khalili. The topic was again communicating science, and a lot of good questioned were asked and skilfully answered by the panel.

Also, Dawkins was awarded a honorary doctorate by the faculty of mathematics and science on Thursday together with a number of other people. Full list here (in Norwegian)..

Then followed one party after the other, and an outdoor concert with the Norwegian band “bigbang” and a few other artists. A long and good day :)

CEES LecturesPhoto from the Q&A session at the lectures. In the photo the panel from the left: Jim Al-Khalili, Richard Dawkins and Elizabeth Hadly.

UiO 200Photo taken at the concert later the same evening.

No new physics … yet

Posted by on August 30, 2011 2 comments | 1,589 views

LHCI have left the field of particle physics for computational physics (quantum mechanics in many-particle systems), but I still follow what happens at CERN and the LHC. Especially the blog Résonaances is a good source for updates.

Latest news is that the LHCb detector has not detected any anomaly in the Bs-Bsbar mixing. Bs-mesons are heavy mesons made up of a bottom-quark and a strange-quark. One matter and the other one anti-matter (the only possible way to combine two quarks due to colour-charge restrictions). These mesons however will oscillate between two states. Essentially the quarks swap who is the matter and who is the anti-matter particle through an exchange of virtual top-quarks (mostly) and W-bosons. Current physics predicts that this mixing violates conservation of charge/parity (CP), however so-called new physics—essentially what the LHC was built to find—predicts a larger violation. This has not been found. Which is disappointing. Why the need to find “new physics”? Well, because the Standard Model is incomplete. It doesn’t explain all the phenomena we observe—like dark matter for instance—so we need to figure out what’s missing from the theory.

This is also of course the case for the infamous Higgs. The last particle predicted by the Standard Model that not yet has been discovered. Not that it is far behind the rest. The top-quark wasn’t confirmed until 1995.

The problem with the Higgs is that the theoretical model (electroweak theory) of the Higgs has two unknown parameters. For this reason we don’t quite know where to find the Higgs (essentially how heavy it is). However we have a fairly good idea of how it will behave depending on how heavy it is, so we can look for signs of its presence along the mass axis in the data. The other challenge is that the Higgs resonance is in most cases so weak that it drowns in background “noise” from other more common processes. Or in other words. Many other particles do the same thing as the Higgs. Like the Z-boson. So how do you tell which did what? Well, that is the challenge.

The latest news from ATLAS and CMS is that they have excluded the Higgs from 145 to 466 GeV. The old exclusion was a lower bound of 115 GeV from back when the LEP accelerator was running at CERN and from Tevatron in the US. Tevatron also gave us an exclusion range in the 150-ish to just over 180 GeV range. The new limits now leaves us with the 115-145 GeV window. The Higgs is running out of places to hide … if it exists at all.

The relevant posts from Résonaances: