And again into a lull...
Dec. 15th, 2015 02:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pheloniusfriarWell, I've written both my exams for this semester. I think I did okay on the first one, but did pretty poorly on the second (almost no time to study for it and it was less than 24 hours after the first one I wrote, I was exhausted walking into it). I went into the second one (Numerical Analysis... really the mathematical analysis of numerical analysis techniques... so Meta, Even This Acronym) with a 91%, but the exam was worth 50% of my mark so I don't expect to walk away from this course with an A unfortunately. <rant>This sort of thing really underscores the failings of the university system as it stands: it's an adversarial system designed to challenge you under unrealistic conditions. I mean, think of it this way: when am I ever going to be trying to do, for illustrative purposes (it applies to almost all courses like this), numerical analysis on an island cut off from the rest of civilization and all reference material under a strict time limit? Let me tell ya, I'll be gathering food and building shelter first, not setting error bounds on discrete numerical algorithms that approximate the solutions to ordinary differential equations. Just sayin' (although that probably makes me a good person to have along in an emergency situation). In short, I'm being judged on my ability to perform in unrealistic conditions that I will never experience again as long as I live — reasonable only for contestants of Japanese and Spanish game shows</rant>. Anyway, I have to finish an English essay (!!!) and then I'll be done my semester. It might be as early as today, definitely tomorrow at the latest.
Anyway, I went through another of those World Science U lectures, this time "The Accelerating Universe" with Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess. Gotta say, this one was a real dud for me, although your mileage may vary. He really looked like he didn't want to be there (and some of his quips support that notion), and I came away with the impression that I didn't really sympathize with him... his presentation left me without an empathic impression. Weird. The material was okay, but was mostly just a rehash. The best part was when he talked about all the other ways research in so many diverse areas (besides the work he did using supernova to calculate how far away distant galaxies were) completely agree with the result that his team came up with. Spoiler alert: we know nothing at all about 95% of what the universe is made from (and this is a result that has only been known for about 20 years, it's a freshly-minted puzzle and probably one of the most breathtaking results of modern physics). He did make a fun little joke about science presentations though when he was showing images taken with the Hubble telescope of supernova in distant galaxies: "How do we find them? An average of one occurs per galaxy in a hundred years, so we just watch tens of thousands of galaxies at once and we see them all the time. All you need to do is look at images, and if you see big yellow arrows like this pointing at a part of the image of a galaxy, there's usually a bright spot at their tip, and that's the supernova!". Heh. I think the thing that really stood out as being different in this overall package is that the lecturers have little clips that answer a particular question (their purported "office hours"). For the other presenters I've seen, they spend a fair amount of effort to craft a good answer, but Riess' answers were only a few seconds each and didn't really constitute a full discussion on the (brief) subject [conversely, Spiropulu went on a bit long in these sections I thought, but I did appreciate all the information she conveyed]. The questions were also pretty cut and dried (almost yes/no answers), and didn't really add to the presentation.
It was only within the last hundred years that we've learned the universe is expanding. What do you think we'll learn about the universe in the next hundred years?
I think we will figure out why it is expanding and why that dynamic is changing (yes, dark energy, but what is it?). We have been very good about describing the what and in many ways the how, but we still don't understand the underlying causes that produce the features we observe.
One of Einstein's great contributions to astrophysics was the idea of a cosmological constant — but he formulated his ideas in the context of long-held assumptions about the universe, which turned out to be false. Technology, in his time, was holding back deeper truths about the universe. Do you think the same can be said today? Will we upend some of our fundamental beliefs in science once technology advances significantly?
Well, considering that we really only agreed that there must be dark matter in the 1970s (even though it was found earlier, but nobody was convinced), and dark energy in the 1990s, and both of those discoveries happened because of advances in observational and data processing technologies (which, in some senses is the more important of the two due to its general purpose nature), there is no reason to suspect that our understandings won't be shaken over and over again as long as we keep looking with better and better technologies.
Adam Riess's team of scientists was famously in competition with another group that ultimately came to the same conclusion about the existence of dark energy. What do you think about competition versus collaboration in science? Does one impact scientific advances more than the other?
Collaboration certainly impacts discovery more than competition ever could; however, competition makes for better science -- and by better, I mean that the results are improved in quality both before they are shared (to avoid looking like idiots... or "dumbasses" as one of my profs used to say) and that they can be independently verified and/or critiqued (usually a bit of both). An excellent example of this are the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. These two huge collaborations (that developed and built each detector independently, so one error in design or construction of one should generally not exist in the other) are in competition with each other, so if one team announces something and there's no "signal" at the other detector, extreme care needs to be taken in accepting the results. In the end, it tends to be more of a friendly competition than a cut-throat "winner takes all" attitude, so even though it's a race to results, knowing the other team is there to make sure that good science is being done is a huge benefit to the teams and to the public.
In this Master Class, you've learned a staggering concept: roughly 95% of our entire universe is in a form that is essentially unknown to us. Given that science has certainly taken profound strides in understanding the universe over the past few centuries, how does this realization affect your view of our state of knowledge?
Well, I've lived through the evolution of this knowledge, including when it was still not corroborated from so many sources, and I actually take comfort in knowing that we really didn't know as much as we thought about the universe (things were looking pretty tidy after the Standard Model finally settled down). Like the transitional period from "classical" physics to "modern" physics, I think we may be going through another such transition in understanding. I can't wait to see what this all turns out to mean!
And, for this underwhelming performance, this post gets Har Mar Superstar's pet store dance video (Note: completely PG, but what has been seen cannot be unseen). As I post this, I hope I never meet Dr. Riess if he ever sees (so astronomically unlikely) this post... he strikes me as having a biting wit that would probably leave a mark on yours truly ;).
Anyway, I went through another of those World Science U lectures, this time "The Accelerating Universe" with Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess. Gotta say, this one was a real dud for me, although your mileage may vary. He really looked like he didn't want to be there (and some of his quips support that notion), and I came away with the impression that I didn't really sympathize with him... his presentation left me without an empathic impression. Weird. The material was okay, but was mostly just a rehash. The best part was when he talked about all the other ways research in so many diverse areas (besides the work he did using supernova to calculate how far away distant galaxies were) completely agree with the result that his team came up with. Spoiler alert: we know nothing at all about 95% of what the universe is made from (and this is a result that has only been known for about 20 years, it's a freshly-minted puzzle and probably one of the most breathtaking results of modern physics). He did make a fun little joke about science presentations though when he was showing images taken with the Hubble telescope of supernova in distant galaxies: "How do we find them? An average of one occurs per galaxy in a hundred years, so we just watch tens of thousands of galaxies at once and we see them all the time. All you need to do is look at images, and if you see big yellow arrows like this pointing at a part of the image of a galaxy, there's usually a bright spot at their tip, and that's the supernova!". Heh. I think the thing that really stood out as being different in this overall package is that the lecturers have little clips that answer a particular question (their purported "office hours"). For the other presenters I've seen, they spend a fair amount of effort to craft a good answer, but Riess' answers were only a few seconds each and didn't really constitute a full discussion on the (brief) subject [conversely, Spiropulu went on a bit long in these sections I thought, but I did appreciate all the information she conveyed]. The questions were also pretty cut and dried (almost yes/no answers), and didn't really add to the presentation.
It was only within the last hundred years that we've learned the universe is expanding. What do you think we'll learn about the universe in the next hundred years?
I think we will figure out why it is expanding and why that dynamic is changing (yes, dark energy, but what is it?). We have been very good about describing the what and in many ways the how, but we still don't understand the underlying causes that produce the features we observe.
One of Einstein's great contributions to astrophysics was the idea of a cosmological constant — but he formulated his ideas in the context of long-held assumptions about the universe, which turned out to be false. Technology, in his time, was holding back deeper truths about the universe. Do you think the same can be said today? Will we upend some of our fundamental beliefs in science once technology advances significantly?
Well, considering that we really only agreed that there must be dark matter in the 1970s (even though it was found earlier, but nobody was convinced), and dark energy in the 1990s, and both of those discoveries happened because of advances in observational and data processing technologies (which, in some senses is the more important of the two due to its general purpose nature), there is no reason to suspect that our understandings won't be shaken over and over again as long as we keep looking with better and better technologies.
Adam Riess's team of scientists was famously in competition with another group that ultimately came to the same conclusion about the existence of dark energy. What do you think about competition versus collaboration in science? Does one impact scientific advances more than the other?
Collaboration certainly impacts discovery more than competition ever could; however, competition makes for better science -- and by better, I mean that the results are improved in quality both before they are shared (to avoid looking like idiots... or "dumbasses" as one of my profs used to say) and that they can be independently verified and/or critiqued (usually a bit of both). An excellent example of this are the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. These two huge collaborations (that developed and built each detector independently, so one error in design or construction of one should generally not exist in the other) are in competition with each other, so if one team announces something and there's no "signal" at the other detector, extreme care needs to be taken in accepting the results. In the end, it tends to be more of a friendly competition than a cut-throat "winner takes all" attitude, so even though it's a race to results, knowing the other team is there to make sure that good science is being done is a huge benefit to the teams and to the public.
In this Master Class, you've learned a staggering concept: roughly 95% of our entire universe is in a form that is essentially unknown to us. Given that science has certainly taken profound strides in understanding the universe over the past few centuries, how does this realization affect your view of our state of knowledge?
Well, I've lived through the evolution of this knowledge, including when it was still not corroborated from so many sources, and I actually take comfort in knowing that we really didn't know as much as we thought about the universe (things were looking pretty tidy after the Standard Model finally settled down). Like the transitional period from "classical" physics to "modern" physics, I think we may be going through another such transition in understanding. I can't wait to see what this all turns out to mean!
And, for this underwhelming performance, this post gets Har Mar Superstar's pet store dance video (Note: completely PG, but what has been seen cannot be unseen). As I post this, I hope I never meet Dr. Riess if he ever sees (so astronomically unlikely) this post... he strikes me as having a biting wit that would probably leave a mark on yours truly ;).
