I can’t really think of an area in physics where a consensus has been achieved only to be shown to be completely wrong.
Good point. I know little about physics but I tend to agree. Work awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics is more trustworthy than work awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, for example. I think a big reason that a consensus presented to the public is wrong is because there is outside pressure to get it right — pressure to find a way to lose weight, pressure to find how to reduce heart disease, and so on. Whereas there is no public pressure to get this or that physics question right. Less is at stake and the physics community can take as long as it wants.
Still, physicists make mistakes and other physicists go along with those mistakes. I can think of three examples:
1. When calculating the charge on an electron, Millikan famously used the wrong value for the viscosity of air. This didn’t prevent those using other methods from getting the same answer.
2. It was a rather bold title: How Nature Works (1996) by Per Bak. Yet the sand avalanche models on which the whole thing was based turned out to be wrong. Actual sand didn’t behave as predicted. There wasn’t consensus in the physics community that Bak was right, but many physicists took him seriously. (As far I can tell from a distance.) I’ve worked on explaining power-law data (the subject of Bak’s book) and the ideas in that book weren’t helpful.
3. Long ago, lots of physicists – if astronomy is part of physics — believed that the sun revolved around the earth.
There’s plenty of pressure and a lot at stake to get climate predictions right. So I think climate models are in the territory where big consensus mistakes are made. As Patrik points out, the story of the Yamal tree-ring data — which I wasn’t thinking of when I wrote the Elizabeth Kolbert post, or I would have mentioned it — is a very good reason to think that what Kolbert writes about climate is less certain than Kolbert thinks.
There wasn’t the same level of consensus, but my understanding is that string theorists were getting most of the grant money and positions and publications and now, well, not so much.
We don’t have many examples of physics work that has entered the political arena. This is one thing I think is different about climate modeling. It is influenced by political pressure, or at least all the attention.
The other thing I would emphasize is that this concept people have of “consensus” among All Physicists or All Scientists is something of an illusion. There are a fraction of scientists who do real climate science and modeling. The others do not and (unless they take an interest in the subject, and roll up their sleeves..) for the most part will only have the vaguest idea what the former are talking about. The latter group’s “consensus” with whatever the first group is doing is not meaningful and adds no extra weight to it IMHO. It probably does mean there have been no obvious mistakes that can be easily spotted at a glance by sharp minds, which is something, but as a practical matter it is unlikely that, say, the average high-energy physicist working on superfluids has sat down and thoroughly studied and evaluated a survey of the models, assumptions and data used to simulate the Kuroshio current. At most he maybe skims a paper or (maybe) is at a conference where some of the talks are about climate, and goes “uh huh” or “okay, I guess”.
If he’s politically interested in the issue, or trusts or is friends with the scientist doing the work, he may add his name to a public letter of some sort. The resulting tally seems to be what people call consensus – so we have maybe several dozen people doing actual work at the forefront, thousands of other scientists going “uh huh”, and we call it a Scientific Consensus and are very impressed. To me this is the real problem with the concept.
Seth,
The third example is unfair. Modern physics properly dates from Newton, the guy who demonstrated that you can explain the world with math. Indeed, it’s probably fair to suggest that the dawning of the scientific age was marked by Newton. But regardless, talking physics pre-Newtonian revolution isn’t fair. I’m not convinced that phlogiston works well either, even though that’s the immediate post-Newton response. But that’s at least harder to disqualify.
related?
Physics and Pixie Dust – PLASTIC FANTASTIC: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World.
aretae, Galileo used math to explain his results. It’s true, though, people made more mistakes the further back you go. And I agree there was great improvement starting with Newton.
Physics has a generally more consistent pattern of getting things mostly right, then either fine-tuning or generalizing.
Newton was right, and still is, but it turns out his laws of motion are a special case when Einstein generalized our understanding of nature..
The earth was flat, and still is. It’s just locally flat. We generalized our knowledge to say it’s a sphere. Then we fine-tuned our knowledge — it’s not really a sphere, but an oblong ellipsoid. We fine-tune further: it’s not a perfect ellipsoid, the southern hemisphere as a slightly larger bulge than the northern.
If our knowledge of the topology of the earth worked the same way it does in medicine, psychology, economics, or other psueodosciences, then one moment we’d think the earth is round, then the next it’s a cube, then a donut, then a Klein Bottle, then a dodecahedron.
“Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.”
— W. Edwards Deming
@ Sonic Charmer
Excellent point regarding consensus. One quibble: “The latter group’s “consensus” with whatever the first group is doing is not meaningful and adds no extra weight to it IMHO.”
With one exception. The consensus view on diet (carbohydrates, especially grains = good, fat, especially from animals = bad) has added a lot of extra weight. But only to people’s waistlines, not to nutritional science.
Jason Says: “… string theorists were getting most of the grant money and positions and publications…”
That brings up a good point. I don’t see why “consensus” should be the standard here. Can we think of examples where scientists got lots of grant money, prestigious positions, and high salaries, and then were shown to be completely wrong? That tells more about how the layman is being scammed by the (bad) scientists.
Tom in TX, Ranjit Chandra comes to mind. There are many examples. Ronald Fisher, the famous statistician, argued for years that smoking didn’t cause cancer. So did Hans Eysenck, a famous psychologist. Cyril Burt, a famous psychologist, fabricated data.
If I had to pick the greatest “scam” (= the public is misled) since 1900, I don’t think we have a winner yet but I think it will turn out to be either (a) animal fat is bad for us or (b) humans are causing dangerous global warming. Since I think we should reduce our use of fossil fuels, example (b) has had good effects. Whereas example (a), if I’m right, has done huge harm.
seth, in discussing global warming, I find it hard to get past the “big oil” funds the opposition and such–and it doesn’t help the most visible opposition is from the Republicans. Suggestions?
Also, on string theory, another point in the phycisists’ favor is that even though string theory overall is (probably) wrong, the research that went into contributed to our sum total of knowledge (whole new areas of math). Whereas much more of the diet research is simply a waste of time and money I’d say.
Jason wrote: “…even though string theory overall is (probably) wrong, the research that went into contributed to our sum total of knowledge (whole new areas of math). ”
The guy who gets the money always says something like that. Everything worked out fine for him.
But what could the money have been spent on if it hadn’t have been for the bogus idea? Maybe something that would have contributed to the sum total of knowledge, and resulted in something useful as well.
And the who-benefits argument cuts more than one way. Democrats will assure themselves of thousands of jobs regulating industry, if the theory of man-made global warming becomes sufficiently popular (whether it is right or not).
Jason, yeah, Big Oil put its thumb on the scale. And then Al Gore (with far better motives) put his thumb on the scale. I think blogging has turned out to supply a really powerful counterforce — toward actually establishing the truth of the matter. I think both Big Oil and Al Gore are no match for a bunch of bloggers who get no money, have no job at stake, have no chance of political office (or Nobel Prize), have time on their hands, and may even be anonymous.
Darrin Thompson, that’s a great quote.
Gee, I still remember studying ether and the nobel prize given for the test that was set to measure how fast the earth was moving through the ether (though the prize was awarded because the test failed, with interesting implications).
What about the consensus among evilutionist physicists that the world is more than 7,000 years old? Surely that stands beside the idea of human induced global warming in the foolish scientist hall of fame.
On 18 December 1953, Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir (1932, Chemistry) conducted a colloquium on “Pathological Science” at the GE Knolls Research Laboratory. Those in attendance remember it as “the most seminal exposition on the topic.” My father, a recent graduate of Caltech, was in the audience, and says it reminded him of what Richard Feynman stressed in his lectures about common pitfalls in the empirical process.
Thank you, Eugene, that was the most fascinating thing I’ve read this month.
The Copenhagen Interpretation is losing its hold on the consensus. That’s straight up physics and I think eventually people will accept that it’s wrong.