The laws of physics are safe for now.
It occasionally comes to pass that someone, for reasons that frankly escape me, would like to make the point that science doesn’t know everything. It doesn’t, of course, which is so obvious that the point hardly needs making. Equally obviously, science does know some things; when it comes to mundane features of the natural world, one hopes that existing puzzles will eventually be figured out.
One of the favorite anecdotes for the don’t-know-everything crowd involves the flight of the honeybee. As you may have heard, “bees shouldn’t be able to fly,” according to science as we know it. In fact, this idea goes back to French entomologists August Magnan and André Sainte-Lague, who in 1934 calculated that bee flight was aerodynamically impossible. Since bees have been observed to fly, the smart money has always been that Magnan and Sainte-Lague were, in scientific parlance, “wrong.” But that’s not the same as understanding how the darn insects actually do flit around.
Now we know. Bioengineers Michael Dickinson, Douglas Altshuler and colleages have analyzed the flight of the bumblebee (if you will), using a combination of high-speed photography and robotic models. The trick is that bees have flight muscles that have evolved differently from those of other insects — unintelligent design, I suppose. Consequently, they flap much faster than any other animal their size, and emply a unique rotation of their wings.
Chalk up another success for science. I understand that Dickinson and Altshuler will now start working on how to get experimental predictions out of string theory.
Their point, I think, is usually not to say that science doesn’t know everything, but that science has been famously wrong about things in the past (and hence, is probably wrong today, about evolution, the big bang, etc.). Which is why it’s funny how often that they’re wrong about what science has been wrong about. Well, sad-funny.
Sean, you often refer to the calculation of the cosmological constant as the worst physics prediction ever made. I think that the statement, “bees shouldn’t be able to fly” is a little worse! Since Magnan and Sainte-Lague weren’t physicists, can we disown that one?
I mean I have to apologize for reducng this to a string/M theory issue, but really Sean, you started it. 🙂
🙂
Actually, I’m not sure that it’s more obvious that bees can fly than that the cosmological constant is not at the Planck scale. That prediction is still worse.
Sean, please say “my science” or better “my personal pet theory that is ignorant of unorthodox work that can’t get into arXiv.org because the peers are too prejudiced to even read it”. Don’t drag down science just because orthodoxy suppresses dissenters. Science is not about personal pet theories of people controlling arXiv.org and other journals, it is not dictatorial consensus which ignores contrary facts, like political leaders.
I’m sorry. This bugs me. The cosmological constant is not “predicted” to be Planck scale, simply because, in a QFT context, it is not predicted at all. It is a renormalized coupling and can have any value whatsoever.
What is true is that, in order to achieve the observed value at low energies, the bare value (at the cutoff scale, which we might take to be the Planck scale) must be fine-tuned to enormous accuracy.
But that’s not the same thing at all as saying that the value of the cosmological constant is predicted, and that the prediction comes out wrong.
I know the professionals, like Sean, understand this, and it’s OK to use the shorthand locution when talking among ourselves. But, when talking to the general public, as you attempt to do here, you should be more careful to distinguish what is, and is not “predicted”.
Fair enough. What I actually say in talks is that it is a “disagreement between theoretical expectation and observation.” But of course you can tune it, and in a sense that’s what happens in the landscape.
Then again, “bees can’t fly” was never really a prediction either.
I’m pretty sure that the actual claim made in the 30’s was that bees were unable to glide (using assumptions that were relevant to fixed wing aircraft). This claim is much less controversial than the oft stated “scientists proved that bees can’t fly” chestnut (not least because it’s correct — bees can’t glide).
I’d almost have welcomed hearing this claim mentioned after the more famous or widely cited Behe claim on the bacterial flagellum about which I’ve heard a lot this past month. If I recall correctly Drosophila (fruit flies) also have solved flight in a different fashion as well.
If you want to read a great book on bumblebees, Bernd Heinrich’s “Bumblebee Economics” is a classic. Bumblebees live at the edge from an energy point of view and this book is about their bioenergetics. It has recently been re-released with a new introduction by the author about which see here ( ).
Thanks for the post and also the comments.
Interesting Ed,
Gliding would have had me better understanding the easiest rote in a Langrangian sense about “satellites as bees,” once the easiet path is known. So maybe gliding, in that sense?:)
But more then that, developing such features to the dynamical nature of such rotations( the second part of my posting ) in that cosmological sense? As a sphere?
Are there no isomorphic relation to this(circle valuations), in a cosmological sense, at the quantum level? Is this not the problem with assumptions about the background versus the non background?
The assumption is that “energy” had to always exist, and the landscape, seen from that perspective, as we develope that gravitational sense?
Sorry, it ain’t easy, and sorry for any mistakes.
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“The cosmological constant is not “predicted” to be Planck scale, simply because, in a QFT context, it is not predicted at all. It is a renormalized coupling and can have any value whatsoever.”
If you look at the Lunsford unification of GR and EM, it disproves the cosmological constant. If you look at the mechanism of gravitation by which the outward force of the big bang causes an equal inward force which produces the compression of masses (GR contraction term) and gravity (Feynman-Lesage shielding geometry for the gauge boson radiation push), you see the result predicts no cosmological constant (like Lunsford), and a true density around us which is lower than the ‘critical density’ by the factor (e^3)/2 = 10.04.