- #1
oldman
- 633
- 5
Long ago Martin Gardner, a columnist for Scientific American, wrote Fads and Fallacies in the name of Science, which some readers of this forum may have come across. He wrote of the astonishing gullibility of the public at large, and described many ways in which such folk had been conned by mumbo-jumbo parading as science.
I sometimes wonder if we physics folk should trust theorists as much as we do, and mention two cautionary examples here. They have to do with the configuration of the solar system, which I assume readers are quite familiar with.
The first example is Kepler's astonishingly convincing numerology. Most of us know him as the inventor of the three laws of planetary dynamics, which which we know, admire and accept -- apart from some tiny general relativistic quibbles. But Kepler had first, in 1595, dabbled in numerology. As most folk know, he modeled the arrangement of the first six planets by packing between their circular orbits the five Platonic solids, for example a Cube into the gap between spheres on which lay the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn and so on. All mysteriously geometrical stuff, like pyramidology.
But what few appreciate is how convincing this numerology was. Apart from a systematic error of about 24% (to be forgiven because all this was long ago!) the fit between modern data and his modelling is 99.9% correct (as shown in the attached graph). Would modern theorists not be impressed by the fit and quickly find a mechanism to explain such a systematic discrepancy? I fear so.
The second example is how naturally theoreticians ignore prominent things that are difficult or tedious to explain. For example the orbits of these same planets are all very nearly circular; not prominently elliptical. Only in Mercury's case does its distance from the sun vary by as much as 2% as it orbits. The reason for this circularity is is surely physical and historical and has nothing to do with numerology. But nowhere have I come across an discussion, however qualitative, of this important aspect of our local environment!
Before venturing into string theory or accepting such theoretical prejudices as the anthropic principle, I recommend a dose of martin Gardner.
I sometimes wonder if we physics folk should trust theorists as much as we do, and mention two cautionary examples here. They have to do with the configuration of the solar system, which I assume readers are quite familiar with.
The first example is Kepler's astonishingly convincing numerology. Most of us know him as the inventor of the three laws of planetary dynamics, which which we know, admire and accept -- apart from some tiny general relativistic quibbles. But Kepler had first, in 1595, dabbled in numerology. As most folk know, he modeled the arrangement of the first six planets by packing between their circular orbits the five Platonic solids, for example a Cube into the gap between spheres on which lay the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn and so on. All mysteriously geometrical stuff, like pyramidology.
But what few appreciate is how convincing this numerology was. Apart from a systematic error of about 24% (to be forgiven because all this was long ago!) the fit between modern data and his modelling is 99.9% correct (as shown in the attached graph). Would modern theorists not be impressed by the fit and quickly find a mechanism to explain such a systematic discrepancy? I fear so.
The second example is how naturally theoreticians ignore prominent things that are difficult or tedious to explain. For example the orbits of these same planets are all very nearly circular; not prominently elliptical. Only in Mercury's case does its distance from the sun vary by as much as 2% as it orbits. The reason for this circularity is is surely physical and historical and has nothing to do with numerology. But nowhere have I come across an discussion, however qualitative, of this important aspect of our local environment!
Before venturing into string theory or accepting such theoretical prejudices as the anthropic principle, I recommend a dose of martin Gardner.