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Register a new userScience Spoofs, Physics Pranks and Astronomical Antics
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Douglas Scott
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Some scientists take themselves and their work very seriously. However, there are plenty of cases of humour being combined with science. Here I review some examples from the broad fields of physics and astronomy, particularly focusing on practical jokes and paper parodies. This is a mostly serious overview of a non-serious subject, but Id like to claim that there is in fact some connection between humour and creativity in the physical sciences.
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Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse - a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us - are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldnt play a crucial role in legitimate scientific theories. I argue that the way we evaluate multiverse models is precisely the same as the way we evaluate any other models, on the basis of abduction, Bayesian inference, and empirical success. There is no scientifically respectable way to do cosmology without taking into account different possibilities for what the universe might be like outside our horizon. Multiverse theories are utterly conventionally scientific, even if evaluating them can be difficult in practice.
The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics honors three pioneering scientists for their fundamental contributions to basic cosmic questions - Professor James Peebles (Princeton University), Michel Mayor (University of Geneva), and Didier Queloz (University of Geneva and the University of Cambridge) - for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earths place in the cosmos, with one half to James Peebles for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology, and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star. We summarize the historical and scientific backdrop to this years Physics Nobel.
This article looks at philosophical aspects and questions that modern astrophysical research gives rise to. Other than cosmology, astrophysics particularly deals with understanding phenomena and processes operating at intermediate cosmic scales, which has rarely aroused philosophical interest so far. Being confronted with the attribution of antirealism by Ian Hacking because of its observational nature, astrophysics is equipped with a characteristic methodology that can cope with the missing possibility of direct interaction with most objects of research. In its attempt to understand the causal history of singular phenomena it resembles the historical sciences, while the search for general causal relations with respect to classes of processes or objects can rely on the cosmic laboratory: the multitude of different phenomena and environments, naturally provided by the universe. Furthermore, the epistemology of astrophysics is strongly based on the use of models and simulations and a complex treatment of large amounts of data.
In his Chronology, Newton uses astronomical evidence to support its extreme rejuvenation of ancient times. These elements, having a scientific varnish, provide some credibility to the work. They have been fiercely debated for a century, with a gradual undermining of Newtons assumptions. However, this has not dented the prestige of the English scientist. ----- Dans sa Chronologie, Newton utilise des preuves astronomiques pour appuyer son rajeunissement extreme des epoques anciennes. Ces elements, au vernis scientifique, donnent une credibilite certaine a lensemble. Ils ont donc ete aprement discutes, les debats sapant petit a petit les hypotheses du savant anglais pour finalement porter un coup mortel a lensemble. Cela na toutefois pas entame le prestige du savant anglais.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle accelerator operating at CERN, is probably the most complex and ambitious scientific project ever accomplished by humanity. The sheer size of the enterprise, in terms of financial and human resources, naturally raises the question whether society should support such costly basic-research programs. I address this question here by first reviewing the process that led to the emergence of Big Science and the role of large projects in the development of science and technology. I then compare the methodologies of Small and Big Science, emphasizing their mutual linkage. Finally, after examining the cost of Big Science projects, I highlight several general aspects of their beneficial implications for society.
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