Yes, I agree that General Relativity corrects Newtonian gravity and mechanics, and correctly explains the particular phenomenon I was talking about. (It’s actually an example of a gravimagnetic effect – the gravitational analogue of magnetism.) But Newtonian mechanics was what we were talking about, and whether it was possible to be sceptical of it in the absence of a detailed knowledge of GR. The instability of the solar system in the face of a finite propagation speed was known in 1805, and Newton himself was uneasy about the point even back when he wrote Principia.

It’s not that I think students should be misled into thinking Newton’s work is in error, or that I think the specifics of the problems with it are something they particularly need to know. But far more important than a list of facts and equations about gravity – they need to know how science works. They need to know that there is no such thing as “settled science”, they need to know the limits to their own understanding, and to the understanding of scientists.

“It would be a terrible mistake to sow any kind of doubt in their mind that what they are learning is not reliable or trustworthy in their daily lives.”

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. By avoiding the sowing of any doubt, you give the impression that on settled topics science is infallible; that this is what all the science teachers and scientists claim. The danger is that when they grow up they will come across many examples where it turns out that this is just not so. They will be disillusioned, they will feel they have been lied to, they will start to suspect that their science teachers may have lied about other things, and they will stop trusting the authority of science altogether.

They may turn to New Age woo, or fads and scares, or nihilist cynicism, or lose interest completely. Offering more certainty than you’ve got is ultimately a suicidal strategy.

“There’s an enormous body of evidence for evolution and none for intelligent design.”

True. But the problem is – people keep saying there’s an enormous body, but nobody seems to know what it is! I’ve been in the odd evolution/creationism scrap too, and I keep coming across the same problem again and again. A huge number of the people arguing for evolution keep saying there’s loads of evidence, and that all the professional biologists with their years of experience agree, but they rarely seem to talk about what the evidence actually is. The conversation should start off with discussions about genetics, selection effects, broken genes, examples of bad design, ring species, isolated populations, gene mutation family trees, symbiosis, retroviruses and base repeats, and so on. It should at no point need to rely on anonymous “piles” of evidence, or the authority of experts. That’s not science.

It’s really annoying! I believe in evolution, because I’ve read enough about it to understand the concepts and build up enough of an armoury of examples and odd/interesting cases to follow what any creationists are doing and see the flaws. But half the time, I wind up arguing with misguided evolutionists who keep shooting themselves (and by extension, the theory of evolution) in the foot using these weak arguments, and seem not to know the strong ones.

I think it’s the result of the flawed education system. Students are taught evolution like they’re taught Newtonian mechanics – avoiding the sowing of any kind of doubt in their mind. As a result, they’re completely unprepared when creationists come along and sow that doubt, and all they can fall back on is the argument used to teach them it in the first place – authority, and steadfast faith in scientists.

And now again we see the same problem with climate science. What I want is the armoury of examples and concepts to be able to understand the fundamental reasons and evidence for it, and to be able to assess any claims for or against, like I have for evolution. In short, I want somebody to tell me what the evidence actually is. But I keep on coming across the same flawed arguments again and again. Some claim there are “piles” of evidence. Some cite the ‘consensus’. Some point me to papers or lists of papers that they have either evidently not read, or are unaware have well-known errors. Some cite “basic physics”. When we do get to evidence, almost all of it is directed at proving that the world has warmed, which even if it were not itself badly flawed by systematic biases and lack of data, in no way demonstrates that the warming is due to anthropogenic CO2.

And what it all seems to boil down to is: we don’t understand the climate, we can’t really model it very accurately yet, but we can’t think of anything else it could be. Our models, built to fit history on the assumption that CO2 is a major factor, don’t fit the history without CO2. and that’s it.

And which is obviously circular reasoning and a case of argument from ignorance, and doesn’t prove anything of the sort.

The problem sceptics have in attacking the “for” evidence is that they can’t find it to fight it. It’s lost in a fog of irrelevancies. One argument is the roll-call of weather disasters connected to global warming, that seems to persuade a lot of people. Aha! But weather is not climate, we say. Of course it isn’t you say, you never said it was. And tomorrow another weather disaster will be connected to global warming, and we go round the circle again.

I call it the cup-and-balls trick. Whichever cup you pick, the ball is always under some other cup. Whichever piece of ‘evidence’ you expend great effort to demolish, the response is just to shrug and indicate all the “piles” of other evidence, and in a moment the same cup will be back in play as if nothing had happened.

But I keep on hoping.

I expect he would have said “I don’t know” if the question had been “How exactly was man created?”. But Newton was not a biologist and he had no reason to doubt the creation story of his time. When asked about his belief in God he was giving his religious viewpoint, not a scientific one.

But to your larger point:

we can be sceptical about Newtonian mechanics if you like.

This idea that Newton’s theory was wrong simply because he didn’t stamp Physics “DONE” in 1687 is absurd. As Sean points out, Newtonian mechanics works perfectly well for every problem that Newton addressed, and in fact for most of the problems mechanics addresses today. That’s why modern graduate physics programs include courses on Classical Mechanics, while they don’t include courses on the Aether or the Dynamics of the Celestial Spheres.

Einstein wasn’t skeptical about Newton’s theories, he simply started working in a regime that Newton couldn’t possibly have observed. General Relativity is a refinement of Classical Mechanics, it didn’t overturn it.

While the question of two-body stability under conditions of Newtonian gravity plus a correction for information propagation time is a good undergraduate physics exercise, the effect is already embodied, along with other important issues, in Einstein’s Gravitation. And its beside the point here, anyway.

Yes, further considerations of the nature of things beyond Newton by Mach, Maxwell, Lorentz, Poincare, Einstein etc. led to marvelous new and interesting ways to to understand fundamentals of nature. But note that, by then, predictions of Newton’s gravitation and mechanics were borne out by a couple of centuries of tests and observations. Newton’s mechanics was superceded by Special Relativity and his gravitation by General Relativity, which are now generally accepted for two major reasons, neither of which are their theoretical beauty (and beautiful they are).

First and foremost, the quantities and formulae of Einstein can be shown to reproduce that of Newton in the limits of low velocities and low gravity fields (i.e. conditions which we are most likely to encounter ourselves in our daily lives, be it driving or flying in a jet or jumping on a trampoline etc). This is a major issue. This means that the incredible body of observations that confirmed Newton also confirm Einstein. Both theories are in close agreement in the normal conditions of daily life. One can use Newton to successfully calculate pool-table trajectories, automobile dynamics, or even lunar mission trajectories without having to worry about extremely small relativistic corrections.

The second reason are the results of tests which have subsequently confirmed relativistic predictions that depart measurably from the Newtonian. Generally these are in regimes of extreme conditions well outside the normal persons daily experience, i.e. particle accelerators, neutron stars, near the Sun. But the tests also include some extremely precise measurements of very small quantities, like the nanoseconds per day of gravitational redshift at different altitudes above the Earth’s surface. Newton was not so much overturned, but rather extended into new domains, by Einstein.

By talking about teaching “strengths” and “weaknesses” of Newtonian physics, are you suggesting that public school students be given the tensor calculus needed to understand the more modern theories, when students in high school are now struggling with simple fractions? Or even Differential Geometry, when enormous numbers of students fail to learn even the basics of Euclidean geometry? Its already a challenge to get students in public education to understand Newtonian physics at all. It would be a terrible mistake to sow any kind of doubt in their mind that what they are learning is not reliable or trustworthy in their daily lives. I would also add that a good physics class WILL teach Newtonian mechanics and gravitation through experimental methods and through application of the scientific method, in student labs. Thats how I learned it.

The Newton-to-Einstein theoretical progression is in no way comparable to “evolution” vs “creationism/intelligent design”. There’s an enormous body of evidence for evolution and none for intelligent design. If anything, the body of evidence for evolution is not being taught at all most of the time, or hardly any of it is. By using phrases “teaching strengths and weaknesses, and critical reasoning”, creationists want a back door to cover the usage of schoolbook material produced by the Discovery Institute and the like, printed in glossy color media to mimic actual science resources.

And the Newton-to-Einstein comparison likewise doesn’t relate to the “for” and “against” anthropogenic global warming.
Relativity was successful, as I said, in large part because it explained ALL those results which came before which were previously explained by Newton. While the body of data and argument coming from climate scientists is very complex and requires a lot of time-consuming effort to understand, the most I’ve seen offered by detractors is a few works by statisticians pointing out a few methodological flaws (mostly focused on tree-reconstructions at that -only a piece of the tapestry), or arguments about up-and-down blips in the trends of temperature graphs. The evidence “for” has been piling up over years, and “against” doesn’t seem to have a whole lot to counter with. The general response to the “for” evidence seems to be “its a conspiracy to secure funding” or “its groupthink – a failure of the scientific method” – hardly worth denoting as a scientific argument.

You can believe or disbelieve as you choose. I’ve made little progress persuading anyone here to take climate scepticism seriously, so I don’t see any profit in opening a second front on Newtonian gravity. I might invite you to consider how well your approximations would stand up over 100,000 years or so, but I doubt it would help.

My point was simply that it is perfectly possible to offer and consider evidence for and against even well-established theories like that of Newton, and that it is scientifically respectable to do so. The assumption, bred by an education system that teaches by scientific authority rather than scientific method, is that there are no arguments or evidence against such basic scientific results, so that it is considered natural for a teacher to simply tell you what the answer is. People believe that the default is to listen and believe, and that all this business of discussing the possibility it might be wrong is a strange and unscientific aberration, introduced by these political considerations.

The reverse is the case. The discussion ought to be the default, and teaching by rote authority ought to be the aberration. People ought to be taught about the problems and limitations when they’re taught basic stuff like Newton. It’s a particularly good example to use, because being so old, so many of the problems with it have been studied in great detail. It’s useful for the history, too. Consideration of the philosophical problems like the instantaneous-action-at-a-distance and others led to a lot of thought on the underpinning foundations, which led to a lot of work by people like Ernst Mach and Robert Maxwell, which led to general relativity. It’s actually some pretty subtle and technically interesting stuff.

It worries me that people can hear about a pretty good bill that observes that some controversial subjects have led to uncertainty about whether science teachers can teach science, and declares that henceforth they can do so without interference – and object to it simply because it uses language about considering scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories. Instead of recognising that as a routine description of science, they read it as code for some sort of attack on science. If you define ‘science’ as the dreadful authoritarian version they are probably used to in schools and colleges, I suppose it is.

#15,

Before Darwin, wouldn’t a scientist have simply said “I don’t know”?

Seriously?

Somebody who died more than a century before Darwin published his Origin of Species didn’t believe in Evolution?

I wonder what Newton thought about quarks?

I need to correct myself on that – precession of the perihelion of Mercury was observed in the 19th century. Also, while Eddington measured the bending of starlight around the Sun in 1919, the equipment to perform the astrophotography almost certainly existed in the 19th century.

The solar system would be unstable unless the sun could tell where the Earth was faster than the light could travel.

Thats just wrong. For starters, in your example, the numbers are miniscule. The Earth-Sun barycenter is 1/333,000 of an AU, or 450km from the center of the Sun. The Sun’s center taking 1 year to travel 2 pi x 450 km amounts to 0.046 km in 8 and a half minutes. Now, that motion is entirely perpendicular to the line of force F between Sun and Earth, so there will be essentially no change in the distance and therefore the magnitude of F, only direction. That direction change is atan( 0.046 / 1.5e8 ) or 3e-10 or so radians, about 6e-5 arc seconds. But more importantly, the near circularity of the Earth-Sun orbits ensures that the Earth “sees” a constant phase-delayed Sun, and also that the Sun “sees” a constant phase-delayed Earth by the same angle in the opposite sense. So they still will move in near-circular orbits, each thinking symmetrically that the other is 6e-5 arc seconds behind where it really is. No instability there.

N-body orbital perturbations (which themselves can fall into a Newtonian gravity framework, even though Newton himself didn’t solve the computational problem) are far more important when considering Solar System instabilities, and General Relativistic effects are also important. While the more extreme Jupiter-Sun barycenter will screw up the two body treatment above, and increase the numbers above by a few orders of magnitude, the direct Jupiter-Earth perturbations will predominate.

Anyway, if you really want to stress the breakdown of Newtonian physics you should go directly to G.R. which has been successfully tested in a number of ways and which DOES predict two-body orbit instability because of gravity wave energy loss (also tested with binary pulsars), although the time scales are extremely slow for our Solar System’s dynamics. And you should also note that G.R. predictions only depart significantly from Newton under extreme conditions and are otherwise only measurable with equipment that became available in the 20th century. Because G.R. largely reproduces the results of Newton in the non-relativistic regimes we have most experience with, only making small numeric corrections, it is disingenuous to compare that pair of scientific theories to something like “evolution vs creation” or “human-caused vs non-human caused global warming.

The implication is that if only those questions were resolved in favor of established science, then the problem with science education in public schools would find resolution. This could not be further from the truth and I submit that a preoccupation with controversial topics (not that the criticism is without merit) diverts attention and drains energy from more fundamental problems with the science education establishment. Why have these more fundamental problems steadfastly never been addressed?

Among other (and I mean many other) problems are the current national standards themselves—as promulgated by the National Research Council. While providing lip-service to “process skills” or “the nature of science” and “scientific inquiry,” the fact remains that because the standards are unrealistic and unwieldy, and they promote (rather than discourage) superficial and rote coverage of subject matter despite of their stated goals. These standards are not lost on state boards of education that are charged with designing high-stakes tests at targeted grade levels. Textbook companies are only too happy to comply.

So my main question (and complaint) is why science journalists have not looked into the current state of science education, where I think that they could provide a real service to the national dialogue. Rather, like The Intersection, they focus almost entirely on “sexy” topics with high public profiles. I have not encountered a real, honest, and in-depth investigative journalistic inquiry into the state of science education in the United States that addresses the disintegration of educational structures. This is also why, if indeed there ever was to be a motivation and financial commitment to a “Sputnik-like” response to science education in the United States, science reform efforts would necessarily be doomed.

Today, science education reform (indeed almost all education reform) efforts are couched in terms of school and teacher accountability and high-stakes test performance. During the actual “Sputnik moment” of the late 1950s and early 1960s, reform efforts were couched in term of designing excellent science curricula and training teachers to teach them. Consequently, we now are entering an era, not of increasing scientific literacy among the young people of our country, but rather for a few, privileged elite trained in expensive private schools. The public educational system, indeed the public itself, will increasingly be fending for themselves.

So why isn’t this a subject for science journalism?

Actually, this particular law isn’t singling out any principle for scepticism.

But we can be sceptical about Newtonian mechanics if you like. Did you know that Newton’s gravity doesn’t work unless you allow the force to propagate information faster than the speed of light? If the Earth is pulled towards the sun, and the sun pulled towards where the Earth was 8 minutes ago, the forces are not equal and opposite, and momentum is not conserved. The solar system would be unstable unless the sun could tell where the Earth was faster than the light could travel.

Somebody who was properly scientifically sceptical, looking for the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories would know about that; and be armed with the correct answer too. While those whose teachers had simply asserted the truth of Newton’s theory would be vulnerable to some mischievous sceptic coming along and showing them the maths. Scientists certainly knew about the problem very early on, Newton himself commented on the action-at-a-distance problem, and they worried about it even as they formed their ‘consensus’ around it.

Did you know Newton was himself a creationist? There’s a lot of stuff about God in the Principia, along with the mathematics. Not that it should be relevant, of course…