Transcription
Chuck, I got another explainer.
>> What is this one?
>> So, I thought I'd talk about unexpected results.
>> Okay.
>> So, this is more just a free association for just what that is in science. I I don't have a prepared thing to say about it.
>> All right.
>> So, just so hang with me.
>> Okay.
>> All right.
>> I like where it's going already.
>> All right. Almost all science that is conducted in modern times, certainly in the United States, is proposed to a funding source. And then there are your colleagues that will peerre that proposal.
>> It's a good system.
>> And then cast judgment on whether those resources should be allocated for that proposal.
>> As I call it, haters going to hate but for a good reason.
>> Well, that's why you have more than one person. If there's a bias in there, you have we have checks and balances on what might be a bias. But that's cool though because and if you know in advance that one person is your sworn enemy, we put them on a different committee, not on this one. Right. Okay.
>> And [snorts] you can request that. If you know that there's
>> But the the the the great thing about that is if you are full of poop, okay, then it doesn't make a difference because everybody is calling BS on you.
Correct.
>> At once.
>> Correct. And so that's all that that's
>> go take a walk, take up another profession, come up with another idea. Yeah. Okay. So it's it's a wonderful BS meter.
>> Yeah. And by the way, maybe it's not BS. Maybe you genuinely think it's real or is true. But if you can't get anyone to agree with you, go home.
>> Well, then then now we proved it's BS. [laughter]
>> Okay. So if you you know, you can believe your own BS and that doesn't make it any less BS. Okay.
>> So Chuck should be on these committees. That's what it [laughter] sounds like. So that's how that happens. It recently we've heard people in the government declare that some research papers were stupid or ridiculous or frivolous.
>> Yes.
>> Keep in mind they who know nothing about the science are passing judgment on a research project that was written up, proposed and approved by a committee,
>> right,
>> of other scientists.
>> Of other scientists. When the committee judges that it should be funded, they're not voting on whether it's going to be true,
>> right?
>> They're voting on whether it's a sensible idea to test.
>> Yeah. It's worthy of exploration.
>> Worthy of exploration, worthy of further study,
>> right?
>> Okay. So, the money gets allocated. Often it's in the old days you get computer money, but that's so small a fraction of the total cost. Today you might need money for a graduate student who will do some it might be their thesis project a postocck you might need travel money to report on your research at conferences and so there's a cost to doing the research if it is welldesigned if you don't get the result you look then the what we call the null result should still be interesting
>> okay yeah
>> the most famous null result was Michael Sin and Morley, they heard that the speed of light might be something interesting to measure.
>> Oh, okay.
>> Why not?
>> Right. Yes.
>> The late 1800s. Let's do this. This is before relativity, by the way.
>> Oh,
>> all right. So, they said, here's Earth orbiting the sun. Let's measure the speed of light with Earth in motion around the sun, and then measure the speed of light opposite our motion around the sun.
>> We should get two different numbers. In one case, the speed of light will be the speed of light plus earth's orbital speed and in the other case it would be the speed of light minus earth's orbital speed. So they invented the intererometer.
>> Oh
>> oh my gosh, how useful the intererometer would become. So what you have is you take the waves of light from one beam wavelength of light and compare it with another and bring them together and if they sync up then the crests add up and the troughs add up so you get a bigger wave.
>> Okay. If they exactly don't add up, they'll cancel each other,
>> right?
>> And anything in between, you get these interference patterns. So interferometer is checking that. And when you do that, you can make very precise small measurements of things. They make the measurements, they get the same result no matter what.
>> They got no variation in the speed of light. No matter how, when, or where they measured it. No matter what angle to Earth's orbit, with it, beside it, perpendicular, null result. It became the foundation of relativity.
>> Right?
>> The speed of light is constant in all reference frames,
>> right? That's insane.
>> It's completely insane.
>> First of all, here's insane. Let's measure the speed of light. [laughter]
>> Just to think to do that,
>> just to think to do that, it's pretty insane.
>> Okay? And they invented a new technique to do it because speed of light to measure it accurately. How are you going to do that? You Chuck run ahead down the line, right? To catch, you know, Galileo tried it.
>> Did he?
>> Yes. He got a friend of his to go on a mountaintop with a lantern and a little cover for the lantern, right? And he had a lantern with the cover. And so he he told him, "When you see my lantern open up, then you open yours and then we we try to time this." And he knows the distance between them. And I I'll never forget what he wrote. He said something like, "The speed of light, if not infinitely fast, it's damn fast." [laughter] Oh, that's funny.
>> No, it's something like I don't know how fast this is, but it's really fast. I can't measure how fast it is. Right.
>> Right. If it's not infinite, it's surely very fast. So,
>> uh that interomet interferometric measurement of the speed of light unchanging is probably the most famous null result in the history of science.
>> Wow.
>> So, a well-designed experiment, you'd want the no result to still be interesting. You're more likely to get funded if the no result triggers other research projects to find out why there was no result.
>> Right? So if you if your question leads to deeper questions then
>> whether or not you're the one asking
>> whether you're the one asking or not.
>> It's good. It's it's a good project to do and that works in any any of the sciences. Okay. Occasionally you design an experiment and you have certain expectations based on your understanding of what is. You say, "I want to perform an experiment to test this result that should come about based on this understanding of what I have of the world."
>> Mhm.
>> And you do the experiment, you get a different result, an unexpected result. That's the best kind, right? Because not only did your expectations not get fulfilled, that tells you that your assumptions are flawed.
>> Right. The way you see the world down here, you shouldn't see it that way.
>> Exactly.
>> Right.
>> So now we got to go and adjust the assumptions to account for what you did see.
>> Right.
>> There's nothing more exciting than getting the wrong answer. They say the scientists have their cherished theories about the universe. You know how cherished they are? If someone found something that contradicts it, done with that. done with that, then you're famous overnight.
>> Exactly.
>> Over if it's if it's verified.
>> If it's verified, right?
>> All right. So, the unexpected results force you to rethink the assumptions that went in to the experiment you proposed in the first place.
>> So, unexpected results are some of the best results you could ever get from an experiment. And Isaac Azimov knew this. He noted that unlike Archimedes
>> Mhm.
>> who is rumored to have run down the street naked out of his bathtub after discovering the the buoyancy law of of materials of different density.
>> Right?
>> They said he ran down the street saying Eureka
>> Eureka, right?
>> Okay. Isaac Azimov knows that that's not how this goes down.
>> Right.
>> Okay. The most astonishing thing a scientist can say is not Eureka, but that's odd. Yeah, [laughter] that's ah
>> EXACTLY [laughter]
>> in fact we've interviewed Adam Ree. Adam Ree, one of my people. He's a fellow astrophysicist. We occasionally get the Nobel Prize in physics. Maybe once a decade they'll toss us a bone. [laughter] And he's co-discovered the accelerating universe.
>> Ahu. the accelerating universe on top of the already expanding universe,
>> right?
>> And to hear him speak of it, he's just running the equations and his answer was negative for the collapse, the future collapse of the universe. He's I must have made a mistake.
>> Let me go back and look.
>> You check again. What does this mean? Then you get a colleague to check it. Did I make a mistake?
>> No. No. That looks like correct. Well, the only way to interpret that that negative sign, right,
>> is an accelerated expansion,
>> right?
>> And so then that led to the Nobel Prize discovery of the accelerating universe, confirmation of the accelerating universe. So unexpected results, which that was are some of the greatest discoveries you can have we can have. That's amazing because it moves the needle on our understanding that led to the original proposal to begin with.
>> That's what makes science so great. And and one of my predictions that I made, I predicted based on some rudimentary statistical evidence that there'd be five times as many galaxies in the universe as was either cataloged or projected at the time. That that was a prediction,
>> right?
>> Five times as many. So that got people interested. Well, let's test that. And they got better data, bigger telescopes. There are 10 times as many galaxies as I had predicted. Exactly. Okay. So I was wrong. I got the wrong result. But it's once again science is standing on the shoulders of others, right? Where you have a result. It might not be the final result, but it's on route to the result.
>> Collaborative cumulative efforts.
>> Yes. And more galaxies was the was the takeaway there. There's some galaxies, guys, you know, check check on this. And so now the the number might even be a little higher. We're up to probably a trillion galaxies in the universe.
>> It's insane. But these are examples of scientific results that are not Eureka. They're not, oh, oh my gosh, they're just h I don't understand. Let me check it. And if you can reassess the assumptions you make, the the entire body of knowledge moves forward.
>> Wow.
>> Thereby increasing the area of knowledge, thereby also increasing the perimeter of our ignorance.
>> Oo, there you have it.
>> As it goes out.
>> Yeah, the ignorant part I'm very well acquainted with. [laughter] So there it is. I just love it. I thought it needed a shout out of unexpected results.
>> It's a good shout out. You know why? Because I think a lot of people have the impression that science is about we're going to do we're going to have A and we're going to find B and we're going to prove we're going to prove B with C or No, it's not that. Plus it's it's messier than that. Especially on the frontier where you're checking me, I'm checking you. You move it a little bit this way. But then I think, wait, that's a dead end. But it opened an idea for me that I hadn't thought of. Let me try that. And it's this branching sequence of inquiry cuz that's what science is.
>> And this is what I love about it and what I like to say to people. Science is more than anything a way of thinking
>> and a way of querying nature,
>> right?
>> To arrive at what is objectively true in this world.
>> Absolutely. Objective truth. What the hell is that?
>> Objective truth.
>> NOT IN AMERICA. [laughter] NOT IN AMERICA. Better take your objective truth and go on back to wherever you came from. I don't know what you're talking about.
>> Chuck just Chuck just blew a gasket.
>> Time to end [laughter] this explainer on unexpected results. Until next time, keep looking up.