Just heard a Radio 4 Today programme piece involving Simon Singh, a pop song, and the age of the universe. Since the audio is not up yet, I’ll refer to this Guardian article which Simon wrote, and then quote from it. Simon Singh is a science writer. I’ve referred to his work before. He wrote, for example, the excellent book Big Bang, which I urge you to read if you’re looking for a marvellous history of the idea and science of the Big Bang and the development of modern cosmology in general.
Anyway, the story goes that some singer I’ve never heard of called Katie Melua wrote a song called Nine Million Bicycles. (Note that it is currently in the top 10 on the song charts, so lots of kids are listening to it.) Simon did not like the words. Now let’s see if you recognize the tone in Simon’s narrative:
In the past, I have found her ballads to be enchanting, but Katie’s latest little ditty is deeply annoying, because she demonstrates a deep ignorance of cosmology and no understanding of the scientific method.
Familiar? He could be mistaken for a CosmicVariance blogger, if a bit less gentle in his manner (although I will blow a fuse below).
Anyway here are the words:
There are nine million bicycles
in Beijing,
That’s a fact,
It’s a thing we can’t deny,
Like the fact that I will love you
till I die.We are 12 billion light-years from
the edge,
That’s a guess,
No one can ever say it’s true,
But I know that I will always be
with you.
Simon goes on to say (he says it so well, I’ve no option but to just quote):
When Katie sings “We are 12 billion light-years from the edge”, she is suggesting that this is the distance to the edge of the observable universe, which in turn implies that the universe is only 12 billion years old. This is incredibly frustrating, because there are thousands of astronomers working day and (of course) night to measure the age of the universe, and the latest observations imply a universe that is almost 14 billion years old, not 12 billion.
I suspect that Katie took some poetic licence in order to make her lyrics scan. She replaced the bisyllabic number “14″ with the nearest monosyllabic number, namely 12″. This alteration is just about acceptable, but the next line in the song is unforgivable. To say that the age of the universe is “a guess” is an insult to a century of astronomical progress. The age of the universe is not just “a guess”, but rather it is a carefully measured number that is now known to a high degree of accuracy.
He goes on to say:
In short, Katie Melua has no right to call the age of the universe “a guess” or quote it as 12 billion years when we now know it to be 13.7 billion years old. You might think that I am being rather uptight, but the role of the scientist is slowly being undermined with a growing belief that scientific results are merely subjective guesses that go in and out of fashion.
Simon does not stop there. He is a physicist after all, and we firmly believe that we can have a go at doing any task (just smile indulgently at that remark and let it go, please), and so he offers a rewrite of the song:
We are 13.7 billion light-years from
the edge of the observable universe,
That’s a good estimate with
well-defined error bars,
Scientists say it’s true, but
acknowledge that it may be refined,
And with the available information, I predict that I will always be
with you
Of course, the only reason Radio 4 carried this story was not because they give a damn about science literacy, but because they can have fun with this by getting her to come on and sing the rewritten song so that we can all laugh and say “those boffins are very clever, but they can’t write lyrics that scan”. And indeed, this is what they do in the piece. Such a giggle. (Almost certainly this is why the Guardian carried the piece in the first place, and probably why Simon -or his literary agent- thought of writing the song lyrics so clumsily -in order to get picked up by the press…but you might think I’m cynical, so I’ll stop.) (They are finally podcasting or streaming the whole of the Radio 4 Today programme, so if you want to hear the piece, it was at about 7:35am or so on the Saturday 15th Oct show, which you’ll find on this page.)
They do give Simon some air time to say his piece, which is good, and alleviates some of my annoyance at this segment’s undertone. And it is rather nice that they end with him saying: “It’s a long time since I did physics research, but it never quite leaves you”.
[Update: As several have pointed out in the comments (as should have I in the original post, but I was focusing on a different point - sorry), while Simon is right about trying to get the age of the universe right ~13.7 bn yrs, he falls into the song's trap that this can be converted into the size of the universe by simply multiplying by the speed of light. As Simon knows (!), the universe is expanding. But that's not the central point of this post. ]
* * *
Oh, wait. That was supposed to be the end of the piece, but then I spotted that the song’s writer, Mike Batt (who we are told also wrote the Wombles theme tune, which I think is supposed to endear us to him and further alienate the science guy), wrote a piece in the Guardian to reply to Simon.
He starts out:
I would remind Mr Singh that if we are talking in billions of years, 0.7 of a billion is a vague approximation in itself.
Oh God. Not if we’re talking about 12 or 13 of them, you ignorant fool. That’s 5-6%. This first volley does not bode well. He continues:
The song does not “guess” which edge we are 12bn light years from. Could it not be the edge of a planet or star which happens to be (according to current scientific estimation based on available information) 1.7bn light years this side of the edge of the observable universe, which he claims to be 13.7bn light years away?
Edge!? Other edge!? Aaaaaaarrrrgh. I can’t read further…
…but my duty to you, dear reader, forces me to struggle through garbage about counting bicycles, attractive chinese tour guides (no doubt put in to show how much of a real he-man he is as compared to the wimpy science guy), and then he ends with:
As a scientific pedant, I’m sure he will accept the apology of one pedant to another (my pedantry being directed towards use of the English language) for the fact that the fourth sentence of this article ends with a preposition, but at least I am not one to flagrantly split an infinitive, as he does by using the phrase “to objectively measure”. Scientists are allowed to split atoms, but please lay off infinitives.
You see what we’re up against folks? Shocking ignorance, misdirection using irrelevances and smack-him-in-the-face smugness – combined as only my countrymen can do so well. This wallowing in ignorance is why we’re going to have a devil of a time making real progress as a society and a civilization on really important issues of science. It’s all connected. See my final paragraph in my previous post on the energy crisis, for example. And this is why I get so annoyed and exasperated when people write in and say “it’s only those whacky Americans who have science education problems, not us superior British”. No. No. No. The seeds are right there, and they’re sprouting.
I’m so, so annoyed because this twaddle of an article will be left as some sort of last word on the matter.
-cvj
October 15th, 2005 at 3:46 am
Looks like Mike Batt is a total-space-nut-hyphen-basket.
October 15th, 2005 at 4:06 am
An excellent piece, thanks.
Simon Singh also wrote The Code Book about cryptography through history.
But, maybe Katie doesn’t really love the bloke she’s singing to? She’s tied the positiveness of her love, to two falsehoods; the exact number of bikes in Beijing and the inaccuracy of the calculated age of the universe. Looking at it that way changes the song’s tone completely.
Lack of precision is dangerous not just in science.
October 15th, 2005 at 5:12 am
Simon Singh’s response is exactly why scientists are considered nerds and eggheads who lack common sense.
October 15th, 2005 at 6:04 am
Clifford: You do realise Mike Batt and Simon Singh are both joking, don’t you? These articles were published in a newspaper, so unfortunately we scientists don’t get a smiley to warn us that A Joke Has Occured. I fear that Ben’s criticism in comment 3 would have been better directed at your blog post.
You might be interested in my top five songs about astrophysics. The Melua/Singh controversy is briefly discussed in the comments.
October 15th, 2005 at 6:54 am
Clifford: You do realise Mike Batt and Simon Singh are both joking, don’t you?
It’s sometimes hard to be sure (people will seriously advocate some astonishingly idiotic positions), but I also think they’re both joking. In particular, the sentence:
“at least I am not one to flagrantly split an infinitive”
is either a brilliantly subtle joke, or one of the Iron Laws of Online Discourse coming back to bite Batt in the ass.
(Said Iron Law being “Any post pointing out a spelling or grammar error will itself contain a spelling or grammar error.”)
October 15th, 2005 at 7:15 am
I thought Singh’s article and Batt’s response were extremely funny. (I particularly liked Batt’s assertion that he, unlike Singh, isn’t one “to flagrantly split an infinitive”.)
I wonder whether they’re both aware of a famous precedent: Charles Babbage wrote to Alfred Tennyson to complain about his poem called (IIRC) “The vision of sin”, which contained the lines “Every minute dies a man, / Every minute one is born”. Babbage pointed out that the population is increasing and therefore the two lines can’t be exactly right, proposing instead “Every minute dies a man, / Every minute one and a sixth is born”.
The astonishing thing is that Tennyson actually did revise his poem, though not the way Babbage wanted: he replaced “minute” with “moment” both times.
October 15th, 2005 at 7:17 am
(My reply and Chad’s crossed… I don’t think there’s the slightest possibility that Batt didn’t know what he was doing with that sentence, for what it’s worth.)
October 15th, 2005 at 7:24 am
“We are 13.7 billion light years from the edge of the observable universe……”
The most shocking thing here is that Singh thinks that you can measure the distance to the edge of the observable universe by simply multiplying the age by the speed of light. Excuse me Simon, but we don’t live in Minkowski spacetime you know….better brush up on your GR before you pontificate….
October 15th, 2005 at 9:08 am
All this kerfuffle made me wonder was, how long would it take to cycle to edge of the visible universe?
And if the song doesn’t do much for Katie Melua’s scientific credibility, what does singing a song by Wombler Mike Batt do for her musical credibility? She has a nice enough voice but she’s no Ella Fitzgerald. On the other hand, she does have my namesake Chris Spedding (no relation)on guitar so she can’t be all bad
The worst thing, though, is the fear that when this song reaches those aliens who are planning on radioing the blueprints of a Stargate to us, they might think again.
October 15th, 2005 at 9:58 am
[Jack wrote (post 8):
"We are 13.7 billion light years from the edge of the observable universe......"
The most shocking thing here is that Singh thinks that you can measure the distance to the edge of the observable universe by simply multiplying the age by the speed of light. Excuse me Simon, but we don't live in Minkowski spacetime you know....better brush up on your GR before you pontificate....]
IIRC going by Ned Wright’s website the current distance to the edge of the observable is a bit over 40 billion light years. Alas, Simon missed a grand opportunity to make that point and increase public awareness of cosmo basics.
October 15th, 2005 at 10:07 am
Hmm. So Mike Batt has gotten into the spirit of things with a mildly playful rebuttal of Simon Singh? I guess it’s funny then that he deploys his pedantry on behalf of English with respect to splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions, neither of which is really a significant error in English usage. That’s okay, though. He did say he was a pedant, and pedants like to fuss over inconsequentialities.
Wait a tick. What Batt actually said is “As a scientific pedant, I’m sure …”. Unless he meant to claim that he is the scientific pedant, this is a genuine mistake in English usage (although a common one). I’m sure he meant Singh though. Batt coult, however, lose his English pedant’s license for this solecism.
October 15th, 2005 at 10:10 am
People:
Simon’s main point is a serious one. On the other hand the rewriting of the song is silly and clearly and attempt at humour and (sadly) the only reason the press picked up on it. Feel free to dismiss the whole thing as just a joke, but just remember you did that when this sort of continued trivialization of the seriousness of people not understanding what basic science does comes back to bite you.
Sure, he missed out some science in his little piece. I can’t speak for him as to why that is the case, as he evidently knows the science. Editors forcing him to make cuts, perhaps?
cheers.
-cvj
October 15th, 2005 at 10:44 am
A close reading of the lyrics does not eliminate the possibility that the “guess” is the writer’s guess, which the writer (and/or singer) can qualify any old way. The rest of us may object only if it’s claimed as absolute final truth.
October 15th, 2005 at 10:49 am
Sure, he missed out some science in his little piece. I can’t speak for him as to why that is the case, as he evidently knows the science. Editors forcing him to make cuts, perhaps?
Possibly, in the sense that he’ll have been given a word limit and, either in consultation with staff at the Guardian or on his own, he decided that what he really wanted to do in this article was be funny. He’s written several excellent books on science, and for once he’s letting his hair down. Is that really so bad?
I take your point, but I think most people realised this series of articles was a joke. I was pointed in its direction by a friend who studied English and can barely operate a kettle, never mind read a popular science book. He got it. Most Guardian readers will have got it, since the Guardian is a notoriously irreverent and sarcastic paper. The Enlightenment remains on a strong footing in the UK, and we can afford to play around a bit more. Perhaps your concern comes from science’s weaker position in the US, and the relative lack of levity and bite in US newspapers.
One of the aims of this blog, as evidenced by the posts on non-scientific topics, is to show that scientists are regular people with foibles, senses of humour, and politics just like everyone else. It succeeds admirably, and I would argue that Singh’s article does so too.
With the exception of Ben Goldacre’s fabulous Bad Science, which picks low-hanging New Age fruit with great wit, any scientist or journalist who takes every possible opportunity to point out scientific inaccuracies becomes a bore and a boor, and will soon be ignored. As an experienced writer and public figure Singh no doubt realises this.
October 15th, 2005 at 11:05 am
“The Enlightenment remains on a strong footing in the UK, and we can afford to play around a bit more. Perhaps your concern comes from science’s weaker position in the US, and the relative lack of levity and bite in US newspapers.”
Right.
-cvj
(If this was a television show like The Office, at this point I would momentarily look directly at the camera to the audience.)
October 15th, 2005 at 11:10 am
“The Enlightenment remains on a strong footing in the UK, and we can afford to play around a bit more. Perhaps your concern comes from science’s weaker position in the US, and the relative lack of levity and bite in US newspapers.”
Could someone remind me what the budget of the NIH/HHMI in the US is currently (in this truly dreadful funding period) compared to the MRC/Wellcome in the UK?
Or did I miss the joke?
October 15th, 2005 at 11:20 am
Samantha: “Or did I miss the joke?”…. brilliantly put!
-cvj
October 15th, 2005 at 11:45 am
I should have said “science’s weaker political position in the US” as there’s no doubt that US science is remains the best in the world. I’m not even sure that science’s political position in the US is weaker. I don’t spend a lot of time over there, so my data points are noisy, politically-charged debates like stem cell research and intelligent design.
That notwithstanding, the aim of that paragraph was to make the point that Singh’s article might be taken less seriously by his audience than it appears to have been by Clifford. I did not intend to disparage the US, or US science in particular. Try reading my comment with that paragraph removed.
October 15th, 2005 at 12:34 pm
What disturbs me about Singh’s pedantry is that he seems to have forgotten that until recently (this year? the year before?) we were being told that according to best estimates the universe was only 12 billion years old. And a decade or so before that it was supposed to be 20 billion years old.
Why should anyone expect someone not a physicist or a cosmologist to keep up with the exact figure (to within 10%). It’s not as concrete a figure as the height of Everest, say.
Oops.
October 15th, 2005 at 12:56 pm
“Why should anyone expect someone not a physicist or a cosmologist to keep up with the exact figure (to within 10%). ”
The same way you keep up with developments in any other field. You make the effort to read some of the numerous sources of information out there. My central point: treat sceince like any other exciting field by not assuming that what you were taught in school is some sort of museum information that is frozen for all time.
And I’m talking about the non-specialist media here, not science journals.
By analogy, what you’re saying is equivalent to saying “Why should anyone who is not a politician or an economist keep up with what the latest interest rates are (to within 10%)…..” But somehow it is big news every time Brown or Greenspan may change it by 0.25% Hmmmm.
-cvj
October 15th, 2005 at 1:20 pm
Count me in with those who think that, if you’re going to be pedantic (even in the service of a joke), you better be careful to get it right. The error between 40 billion light-years (the closest-to-correct answer) and Singh’s 13.7 billion is rather larger than the error between 13.7 and 12.
Which is why being a pedant is such a dangerous game. There are too many minefields to unwittingly step in.
October 15th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
Fair point, but the discussion seems to be more about whether we should care or not if people think “those scientists can’t make up their minds anyway, so why bother trying to get it right?”. It is not far removed from the “evolution is just a theory” attitude. Do you see my point?
-cvj
October 15th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
Sure. But in demonstrating that we can make up our minds, and therefore should bother to get it right … we should get it right.
October 15th, 2005 at 4:50 pm
“Why should anyone who is not a politician or an economist keep up with what the latest interest rates are (to within 10%)…..”
Oh come on! How many people have mortgages or savings here? An interest rate is (or should be, in a free market) a direct reflection of the net time preferences in an economy. Either way it is directly relevant to our day-to-day life.
The only way cosmology is ever going to *affect* us is if there is a big rip around the corner: What’s the hubble constant? Whats the deceleration parameter this week guys? w-parameter? Heh, you’re right – they’re definately not frozen in time.
The fact is, i don’t know of planks constant exactly, but i do know it’s small (~e-34) and thus quantum effects happen at small scales. That doesn’t make me ignorant – understanding the concept is the important part – if i want to know it exactly i can just go look it up. The same thing applies to the song – (s)he’s got the basic idea, that the universe (might) be finite – so i just can’t see why anyone would have a problem with the lyrics.
And if you’re taking task to the “it’s a guess” part of the verse, well apply a bit of artistic license to paragraph 3 of this post and see what you come up with ;-P
cheers
ps. katie melua is good. make sure to listen to her first cd (i haven’t heard the 2nd, although i’m sure it’s up there).
October 15th, 2005 at 5:13 pm
I wonder whether they’re both aware of a famous precedent: Charles Babbage wrote to Alfred Tennyson to complain about his poem called (IIRC) “The vision of sin”, which contained the lines “Every minute dies a man, / Every minute one is born”. Babbage pointed out that the population is increasing and therefore the two lines can’t be exactly right, proposing instead “Every minute dies a man, / Every minute one and a sixth is born”.
The astonishing thing is that Tennyson actually did revise his poem, though not the way Babbage wanted: he replaced “minute” with “moment” both times.
Lovely. I believe Babbage added to his above correction something like –
“Actually the exact number would have a large number of decimal places, but this should be close enough for poetry”
October 15th, 2005 at 7:53 pm
Tell Ms Melua to sign Eric Idle’s Galaxy Song, then everybody should be happy…
October 15th, 2005 at 7:56 pm
Er, she needs to sing it to make everybody happy, otherwise she’ll probably just end up in a brouhaha with Mr Idle’s agent.
October 15th, 2005 at 8:10 pm
It matters to my mortgage every time the interest rates change. Does it make any difference to my life at all when cosmologists change the age of the universe? Except that they don’t do that; they change their estimates of the age. Which may be interesting to you and me, but to most people is a good deal less interesting than a pundit predicting the details of Brown’s next budget speech.
Face it, nobody can know everything, and most people work out strategies for sorting out what’s useful to know and ignoring everything else. And the exact age of the universe just isn’t very useful in everyday life.
It’s plain disingenuous of Singh to pretend that he didn’t realise that not everybody read the relevant paper in Nature and understood it and cared about it. He knows it was very lightly reported by the general media, and it could easily have slipped by any person not a cosmologist or a pub-quizzer. (I’m not a cosmologist, btw.)
October 15th, 2005 at 8:39 pm
Several of you have missed the point entirely , imho.
It is not neccessarily knowing the absolute value that’s the important thing, it’s knowing that it is not just some arbitrary number that the cosmologists will just change willy-nilly that’s the important thing. It’s understanding that it is a number that can be quoted accurately and be subject to scientific inquiry, and not be some magical airy-fairy thing that nobody can prove or disprove. That its quoted value changes is a tribute to there being active science going on in that field, and not a reason for ridicule.
On the other hand, to claim that you can’t easily find out what its current quoted value is if you cared to -just like you can for interest rates- is equally erroneous. It is certainly not “very lightly reported by the general media”.
Cheers,
-cvj
October 15th, 2005 at 9:53 pm
ligthen up, its just a song.
October 15th, 2005 at 10:42 pm
I guess it’s funny then that he deploys his pedantry on behalf of English with respect to splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions, neither of which is really a significant error in English usage.
Actually, neither is a mistake at all. See:
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=split+infinitive
http://www.bartleby.com/61/55/S0655500.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preposition#English_prescriptive_guidelines
http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/050.html
October 16th, 2005 at 6:17 am
I googled “age of the universe” last night, and the first entry said “11 to 20 billion years”, so I don’t know about “easy to look up”. Since the estimate of 12 billion held sway for a few years, it’s quite likely that a lyricist could pick up an encyclopedia with the old estimate in and use that, and who’s to blame him, really? What level of research is Singh suggesting is appropriate for one line in a pop song?
Did Cole Porter have this trouble with pedants when he wrote about the Earth colliding with Mars? (Next July, so I’ve heard….)
October 16th, 2005 at 9:25 am
Ok. Right. If you can’t Google it and get the first entry, it must be hard to find. You’ve got me there, haven’t you?!
Cheers.
-cvj
October 16th, 2005 at 10:20 am
And in fact, when you Google age of the universe, the first thing that comes up is Ned Wright’s Cosmology Tutorial, which says right there that the age is 13.7 +/- 0.2 Gyr.
October 16th, 2005 at 10:32 am
Thanks Sean! Seems to be true for AskJeeves and Yahoo too…. so those hard-pressed folks out there won’t have to force themselves to a “level of research” which involves scrolling down a list of hits. What a relief.
Cheers,
-cvj
October 16th, 2005 at 10:52 am
I will support Sean on this one, noting that there are too many minefields on the path to being a perfect pedant. As far as I can tell, the 13.7 Gyr age is based on WMAP data, under the assumption of a non-cyclic universe. However, they acknowledge that none of their observations are inconsistent with a cyclic universe, so it might be (for instance) that a beam of light sent out from the Earth would never actually reach the edge of the universe.
I would argue that fixing the age of the Universe at 13.7 Gyr without mentioning that the number relies on certain assumptions about the model of the Universe is a more serious scientific error than that committed by the pop song’s author: the smarter that you are, the more inferences you are capable of deriving from your assumptions, so the more you are morally obligated to make sure that your assumptions are correct. I don’t mean to sound impertinent by saying that–it’s just that I’ve been reading too much Aristotle recently, where this type of mistake is painfully evident.
October 16th, 2005 at 12:32 pm
PB – I refer you to comment #29
-cvj
October 16th, 2005 at 4:06 pm
CVJ – But it is just an arbitrary number if the universe turns out to be cyclic after all. I have a full respect for the science that went into arriving at the number of 13.7 Gyrs. I also have a full respect for the beauty of the mathematics behind the homocentrics and epicycles employed by astronomers to explain the motions of the heavens before Copernicus. I am not questioning the rigor of the derivation from the assumptions, but the assumptions themselves, because, to my knowledge, it is not yet safe to say that they are correct. And, if they are not correct, then the error in the quoted figure could be arbitrarily large. In that respect, I do not understand how comment #29 addresses this point.
October 16th, 2005 at 4:31 pm
PB:- Any scientific endeavour builds on a foundation of assumptions, but that does not make the enterprise arbitrary! How many of the assumptions do you want to quote every time you quote any meaured number? You don’t give a long list of these assumptions, or you’d end up with every unwiedly sentences (and song lyrics!).
What you do instead is tacitly assume that the listener has an agreement that you’re roughly talking about the same framework. I’m not talking about experts here: We all should get some idea about what that basic framework is from keeping up on what’s going on in science world the same way we keep up with what Brad and Angelina are doing or what the football league tables are, or what the current world economic conditions are: Books, magazines, tv, radio, popular talks on topics by your local university professors, whatever. (Entertainment TV and movies too, if I had my way about it.) If the framework is not mentioned at all, it is usually safe to say that you’re using the prevailing framework, and not an alternative that has less support from the current data, etc, etc. Until the data require us to move to a new model, we stick with the one we’ve got. This is how an active scientific field works, and this is what I referred to in the comment.
By your reasoning, any number is totally arbitrary since we might change our assumptions about the framework of physics – maybe for some good reason- artitrarily far in the future and then that number’s value becomes arbitrary. That is, I hope you agree an utterly ridiculous way to proceed, and you render science powerless if you proceeed this way.
Everyone: This is the central point of what we’re discussing here – not whether some idiot song writer can use Google or not, but whether the discussion and other reporting about it that I spoke of in the post are reinforcing the public’s view that what science does is arbitrary or not: “why bother getting it right…you can’t prove it one way or another”, or “It’ll only change next year anyway so it does not matter”…etc.
All those people
wringing their hands and bleating until they’re blue in the faceregularly expressing understandable concerns about the Intelligent Design non-debate/debate should be just as concerned about this prevailing (and perhaps growing) attitude, and it is amazing to me that they can’t see that.Cheers.
-cvj
October 16th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
CVJ- I think we’re coming closer to common ground. Of course I don’t mean that one needs to restate every assumption used when making an argument. There are, from my point of view, two types of assumptions: firstly, those we accept as correct (or at least useful approximations of) descriptions of the world based on experimental evidence; secondly, those we posit because of the apparent aesthetical perfection of the idea. I agree that omission of the first type of assumption is essential to make scientific works readable (and singable). However, as I understand the present state of affairs, the assumption that the universe had only a single expansion is of the second category, which is why I drew the analogy with pre-Copernican astronomers. To suggest a more recent analogy, it is as if a mathematician were upset at incorrect reporting of results which depended wholly on the truth of the Riemann Hypothesis. That is to say, chastising the journalist for misrepresenting the truth seems a bit uppish when an entire body of contradictory results exist that depend on the falsehood of the Hypothesis, with neither side able to give more than handwavy explanations of why the other is incorrect.
October 16th, 2005 at 6:24 pm
PB. Your analogy is badly flawed. Furthermore, your clean separation between the two types of assumptions is highly unrealistic.
Let’s agree on what is the spirit of the thought -if not the detail- and move on.
-cvj
October 16th, 2005 at 6:46 pm
Does calling the song-writer an idiot for putting the wrong figure in his song (a figure that was right not very long ago) actually help the cause of science at all?
Did Singh’s patronisation of Batt in the Guardian help anybody? It just got his back up, and helped Batt make a fool of himself. But then again, the concept of the universe not having an edge or centre is difficult to grasp, and if no-one ever sat him down and explained it to him, why should he grasp it? It took until the 20th century for the savants to come up with the idea, after all. Is there any particular reason why the idea should be imprinted into every brain in the world only a generation after Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”?
With the number of scientists who are also teachers, you’d think that they’d treat the ignorant with just a little less contempt. Or is this how they treat their students also? If you want people to know, you don’t just lay the information on them with a verbal cudgel, you teach them.
If Singh had taken the time to meet up with Batt, talk about the structure of the universe, the nature of space-time, over a drink or two perhaps, maybe he would have lit a spark in Batt’s brain and he’d've produced a scientifically accurate song, full of appropriate imagery. As it is, Batt probably thinks Singh’s a twat now, and who can blame him?
October 16th, 2005 at 6:57 pm
I am amenable to your suggestion. At some point in the future, when I’ve had time to reflect more on the discussion, I’ll post a more thoughtful analysis on my blog, which, of course, you will be free to ignore if you so choose.
October 16th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
Err, to be more clear, my comment #43 was in response to Clifford’s #41.
October 16th, 2005 at 7:07 pm
NelC…. have a look at several of the other discussions about education we’ve had on this blog and be assured that at least this group of scientists who are teachers do not, in general, treat the ignorant with contempt. We are aware that we are ignorant about lots of things, and so this would be a silly posiion to take, at least in my opinion. Also, Singh’s article may have got some people thinking, and a little discussion going. It may therefore have served a useful purpose.
Your comment:
is really unfortunate, and so I have to ask: Do you say the same thing about basic concepts in modern medicine? Or the atomic model? or DNA? All 20th century science. Of course, your reply will probably now be “but those are important to everyday life, and cosmology is not”, and I’ll roll my eyes in frustration at that point, since it would be missing the point, but then I’d offer no further argument.
Oh, and we’re in the 21st Century now, by the way.
Cheers,
-cvj
October 17th, 2005 at 9:45 am
If I may…in addition to Simon’s excellent book, you might also enjoy this.
[/shameless self promotion]