Comments on: I see you, Pamela

By: Iant

Iant — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:32:59 +0000

How sad. There was an asteroid that just missed us, then a neighboring star failed to become supernova, thereâ€™s a behind schedule big meteorite, and now we have this issue. As proved: we will go extinct rather soon!
(I didnâ€™t suggest that non-astronomers have less dooms-day prophets, but astronomers are/were prized by laymen for accurate calculations:))

Iant

By: Aubri

Aubri — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:40:24 +0000

Argh. I wish people would learn that “observer” in QM is shorthand for “putting it in a situation in which it /could be/ observed”. It doesn’t matter if a living mind sees the results.

Anyway, it’s not like anything other than individual particles are ever in a real, interfere-able quantum state. By definition, every atom of a body is being “observed” by its neighboring atoms. We can write the waveform for the possibilities of a living or dead cat, but that doesn’t change the reality of what’s in the box; it’s just a representation of our (lack of) knowledge. The cat will still start to meow or stink at some point.

By: Chris!

Chris! — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 04:17:36 +0000

Since you posted something from somethingaweful.com a little bit ago did you see the magazine send up they did in the photoshop Friday?

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/magazine-mayhem3-2.php

By: ZZMike

ZZMike — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:17:50 +0000

I read that story when it came out. I thought it was a great example of someone - doesn’t matter who - thinking about the Heisenberg principle and applying it to everything under the Sun. I thought New Scientist was supposed to be a pretty good magazine - maybe even something like the old Scientific American.

By: Harold

Harold — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:33:28 +0000

I remember when I first read about Boltzmann Brains in New Scientist, my first thought was, “This stuff is so weird and so utterly unbelievable even to an educated layman, it really needs to be taken with a large grain of salt…or is this just another Alan Sokal hoax?” A few months later, NS reported that some scientists were convinced that Botzmann Brains would be the predominant form of intelligence in most versions of the universe - and therefore may elbow aside our puny human intelligences!

Sadly, Alan Sokal’s object lesson in the gullibility of non-scientists when confronted with convincing-sounding gobbledygook spouted by a respected scientist has primarily had the effect of teaching non-scientists to disregard pretty much anything that scientists say that doesn’t conform to their own observations. While this may result in a healthy level of skepticism when faced with alarms of impending invasions of Bolzmann Brains or universes condemned to death by scientists who dared to peer into the Great Unknown, it’s also resulted in a general distrust of any statements that require much more than a high school education.

By: Acleron

Acleron — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:24:57 +0000

moopet you are right. The last time I bought a copy was when an article reckoned that firing microwaves within a continer could make it move!!

By: Blake Stacey

Blake Stacey — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:05:08 +0000

I’ve heard more complaints about New Scientist than about any other science magazine, and from a wider variety of fields, too: astronomy, computer science, linguistics, medicine, physics. For my writeup of one such incident, with lots of sources cited, see here, and for an editor of New Scientist not caring, see here. (In the latter case, said editor dared me to write 2400 words of pop science that he could critique. I picked a topic and wrote about 1800 of those words before John Baez and Chris Hillman convinced me that it’d be a waste of my time: “No Man but a blockhead ever did anything involving being peppered with buckshot, except for money.” I’ll probably finish up that piece soon anyway; it’s on Jack Cowan’s theoretical neuroscience. I have written material aimed for high-school students, who might be a more sophisticated audience than the editorial teams of glossy magazines.)