[/shameless self promotion]

Your comment:

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”?

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

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?

Let’s agree on what is the spirit of the thought -if not the detail- and move on.

-cvj

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 face regularly 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

-cvj

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.

Cheers,

-cvj

Cheers.

-cvj

Did Cole Porter have this trouble with pedants when he wrote about the Earth colliding with Mars? (Next July, so I’ve heard….)

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

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

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.)