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The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

We still have time to mess this up!

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

We need fewer warriors in public service and more gardeners.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

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Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

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False Scribes! False Scribes!

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

It’s not even safe to go out and pick up 2 days worth of poop anymore.

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Tech Reform Watch: Pre-Inauguration Edition

by Major Major Major Major|  January 18, 20216:55 pm| 99 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues

The Washington Post today has several articles about the incoming administration’s, and new congress’s, thoughts and priorities on regulating tech companies. If you’re interested in this–and you should be if you’re reading this on, say, the Internet–I recommend checking them out, or at least reading the overview. Silicon Valley braces for tougher regulation in Biden’s new Washington:

Democratic leaders for years have proposed a bevy of new legislation to shrink Silicon Valley’s corporate footprint, restrict its insatiable appetite for data and stop the spread of falsehoods online. But the party’s calls for regulation have grown more urgent in the days since Biden won the presidency, his party took control of the House and the Senate, and Trump and his allies further exposed the risks of a largely unregulated Web.

[…]“I think for the Internet industry, in particular, it’s going to be tough sledding for the next two years at least,” predicted Rob Atkinson, the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank that counts companies including Google and Microsoft on its board.

The accompanying articles drill down into “gig work” reform, making contractors into employees; net neutrality, the policy that internet service providers must treat all traffic equally regardless of origin or destination; antitrust; and Section 230 reform.

Of these, I think net neutrality will obviously happen, and gig work reform will probably not. Antitrust I can’t speak to. But Section 230 reform, well, damn near every politician wants a bite at that apple. I hate to both sides this, but in terms of the literal words that come out of their mouths, it’s sort of true: Trump vetoed the NDAA because he wanted a version that repealed Section 230 outright; Biden spoke in 2020 about how we should repeal Section 230 outright.

What is Section 230, you ask? I have a primer here. tl;dr: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says that tech companies aren’t liable for content posted by their users, and can moderate it as they choose. You can comment about violent insurrection here without us being liable; we have the right to ban your ass.

The WaPo Article does a good job outlining the power players in this coming fight. The person to really keep an eye on is Brian Schatz (D-HI), chair of the Internet subcommittee. His current legislation, the Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency (PACT) Act, is offered in good faith, and sounds nice on the surface, but has a number of significant flaws. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good explainer:

The PACT Act ends Section 230(c)(1)’s immunity for user-generated content if services fail to remove the material upon receiving a notice claiming that a court declared it illegal. Platforms with more than a million monthly users or that have more than $25 million in annual revenue have to respond to these takedown requests and remove the material within 24 hours. Smaller platforms must remove the materials “within a reasonable period of time based on size and capacity of provider.”

[…]On first blush, this seems uncontroversial—after all, why should services enjoy special immunity for continuing to host content that is deemed unlawful or is otherwise unprotected by the First Amendment? The problem is that the PACT Act poorly defines what qualifies as a court order, fails to provide strong protections, and sets smaller platforms up for even greater litigation risks than their larger competitors.

I will refer you to the link if you’d like to learn more. One very important point is that this, like many regulations, would benefit entrenched companies and make it harder for competitors to form and grow. There are ways to write regulations that minimize this, and we need to be very careful that we are doing so, unless we want Facebook and Twitter to be even more powerful. Indeed, Facebook is pushing for many of these regulations, for this reason. So if you find yourself on their side, maybe reconsider.

“Oh please don’t throw us into the complicated briar patch you’ll need to pay our lobbyists to help plant. We would just be soooo sad if you created regulations only large companies had the resources to follow!” pic.twitter.com/7lmHKGn2Ya

— ☃️ Tynan 🌨 (@TynanPants) January 18, 2021

Twitter, by contrast, is literally invested in creating and elevating open standards for distributed social networks that would limit the coercive power of companies like Twitter. By all accounts Dorsey didn’t ask for this power and doesn’t want it. TechCrunch has a good writeup of where they are in the process, as well as a general discussion of what the heck I’m talking about. (You can also read my own post on distributed social networks.)

Section 230 reform will need sixty votes to pass, which will either doom it or mean we need to fold in Republican priorities, such as legally mandating that Republicans can say whatever the hell they want, anywhere, at any time. I wish I were joking:

Social media is our generation’s public forum. It ought to be subject to the same protections provided to all public forums.

I am calling for First Amendment protections to be applied to this New Town Square.

Censorship of elected officials by unelected elites is UNAMERICAN!

— Madison Cawthorn (@CawthornforNC) January 9, 2021

If we’re negotiating with people like this… maybe we’ll get lucky and nothing will happen. I don’t know, what do you folks think?

Tech Reform Watch: Pre-Inauguration EditionPost + Comments (99)

The Web Is Broken, Everybody Knows It, And Donald Trump Has Proven It

by Major Major Major Major|  January 9, 20214:44 pm| 121 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All

I’m sure we’ve all seen the news that Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Shopify, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Pinterest, Discord, and Reddit have similarly cracked down on Trumpy content. Parler, a social network for people that find Twitter insufficiently extreme, has been banned from the Google Play store, and Apple has fired a shot across Parler’s bow that will probably end with the app being banned from the App Store. (Thanks to commenter Wyatt Salamanca for the above link and the reminder to write this post.)

Is this good? That is a difficult question. It isn’t hard to whip up a slippery-slope argument. It also isn’t hard to say that Trump’s social media accounts present a truly unique problem at this time, which justifies a unique response. But is that special pleading? It’s easy to argue the importance of free speech, just as it’s easy to ask what the true goal of enlightenment principles were, and whether slavish adherence to them will get us where we want to go. But is ditching principles for two weeks going to weaken them? Should it? Reasonable people can disagree (not that all of the people disagreeing are reasonable).

I’m interested in a different question, though. How did we find ourselves grappling with this problem in the first place? Much as I’d like it to be Donald Trump’s fault, it really isn’t. This is an inevitable result of how the Web works 2021: walled gardens and closed protocols have concentrated informational power in the hands of a few companies, companies whose every action affects the structure of our press and our democracy. As a wise man once said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”

So, what’s to be done? I don’t know, but I do know one way we could have done it better. So, if you’re interested, join me below the fold for a discussion of distributed social networks.

show full post on front page

What is a social network? In a nutshell, it’s just people, forming connections, posting content, and reacting to said content. We know these mostly as centralized systems like Twitter, where a single organization controls all of the content and user accounts. It is completely predictable that such an organization, of sufficient size, will find itself in a constant, morally fraught fight against extremism, harassment, and illegal content. This architecture will always have a serious problem via Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: “Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well.”

So what is a distributed social network? Let’s talk about the most popular one: Mastodon. Mastodon is, essentially, a series of communication protocols that are woven together to link decentralized communities.

Huh?

One protocol you might know is HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. Anybody can set up an HTTP server, and if you send it the right text, it sends you a web page, or whatever. You can link websites together, form informational networks, and so on, very easily with this protocol. This is what the Web is, or was, back in the day: a mostly-open collection of linked documents encoded in HTML, an open standard. We would later call this Web 1.0, and it was very different from the walled gardens of today.

Mastodon occupies a space somewhere between Twitter and Web 1.0. Anybody can set up a Mastodon instance; think of it as their own personal Twitter. Mastodon instances can form voluntary connections with one another, and all instances, user accounts, and posts (“toots”) share an open data format and communication protocol.

The key word here is interoperability. It’s a little like Reddit, where people run subreddits with their own rules, except in this case, there would be nobody who actually runs Reddit–it’s like a community of linked subreddits.

Here’s a toy example. Let’s say I run a Balloon-Juice Mastodon instance, and Scott Lemieux runs a Lawyers, Guns, & Money Mastodon instance. We both have public timelines, and can post replies to each other, etc.

Now let’s say that the people from some troll or Nazi instance discover ours, and we want to get rid of them. We can block individual users or even their entire instance, preventing them from reading (and therefore replying to) our posts. Their Mastodon account is still around–it’s just formatted data, after all–it just won’t do them any good here.

In a system like this, you deal with a Donald Trump not by deleting his Mastodon account–which you cannot do–but by banning that account from the respectable instances. He’s still welcome at any instance that does choose to deal with him, which in this case would be something like Parler (or for a real example, Gab, which is a Mastodon fork). We’ve reduced the moral footprint of this decision dramatically, even as we’ve achieved a similar result.

I hold little hope that we will end up in an open, decentralized informational utopia any time soon–it’s just too hard to monetize, compared to the alternatives–but a man can dream.

Update: I just remembered that Twitter is funding a small, dedicated team to explore this space and either develop a new standard or bring an existing one to the next level. So, good for them!

The Web Is Broken, Everybody Knows It, And Donald Trump Has Proven ItPost + Comments (121)

Respite: Magnets!

by Tom Levenson|  December 29, 20204:50 pm| 100 Comments

This post is in: Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Science & Technology

My brother the magpie sent me this old clip of Richard Feynman explaining that explaining why magnets repel or attract each other is not at all a simple matter:

 

I saw this aeons ago, and had forgotten it, and am very glad to reencounter it.

Respite: Magnets!

Because 2020, I can’t help hearing our current predicament in Feynman’s discussion of the vast substructure of shared knowledge required to make even simple communication possible.  A big part of the Trumpist take over of the GOP–and much of America–has turned on destroying even the possibility of am agreed baseline for reality.

In Feynman’s metaphor, it is as if half of the country are aliens, and have no idea what, say, “shall” means in the sentence, “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.”

So there’s that: we’re living with Vogons.

But this is supposed to be a respite–so just enjoy the listening for a few minutes of very smart talk. It’s a relief, or at least it is so for me, to be asked to think in the company of a virtuoso at that craft.

ETA: I should add: Feynman was a very smart guy, but not an exemplary one, in particular in ways that also bear on 2020.  His treatment of women as documented in his own memoirs was awful–and his doing so as a Caltech professor created conditions in which female students would have had no doubt about their status and function in the mind of the most famous star in the department.

Elite science as an enterprise has long had this problem.  In the last few years some of the most egregious of the misogyny and abuse has been exposed, but the job is very far from done. Which means that the above isn’t intended to celebrate Feynman as an avatar of reason. Take what he says for what it is: an elegant, accessible bit of teaching (his reputation turns almost as much on his being one of the legendary teachers of physics as on his genuinely important contributions to physics itself), and do not see the whole of the artist in his art.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming:

Image: Raphael, School of Athens, 1511

 

 

 

 

 

Respite: Magnets!Post + Comments (100)

Let’s Talk About Section 230 of the CDA (Or: Why You’re Allowed to Comment on This Post)

by Major Major Major Major|  December 28, 20201:05 pm| 52 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been in the news a lot lately. Conservatives hate it!

As I told @jack, by labeling posts, @twitter is taking a policy position. When taking a policy position, you’re acting as a publisher (even under current law). #BigTech can’t pretend to not be a publisher & get special benefits under #Section230.https://t.co/I3yebollh1

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) December 7, 2020

Liberals hate it!

It is now broadly recognized that Joe Biden doesn’t like Section 230 and has repeatedly shown he doesn’t understand what it does. Multiple people keep insisting to me, however, that once he becomes president, his actual tech policy experts will understand the law better, and move Biden away from his nonsensical claim that he wishes to “repeal” the law.

In a move that is not very encouraging, Biden’s top tech policy advisor, Bruce Reed, along with Common Sense Media’s Jim Steyer, have published a bizarre and misleading “but think of the children!” attack on Section 230 that misunderstands the law, misunderstands how it impacts kids, and which suggests incredibly dangerous changes to Section 230. If this is the kind of policy recommendations we’re to expect over the next four years, the need to defend Section 230 is going to remain pretty much the same as it’s been over the last few years.

Well… not all liberals.

Just look at the #BlackLivesMatter movement. So many cases of unjust use of force against Black Americans have come to light via videos on social media. Not a single #MeToo post accusing powerful people of wrongdoing would be allowed on a moderated platform without 230.

— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) December 11, 2020

Jeez, this must be a really complicated law if nobody can even agree on what it says. What’s that? It’s not? This is the only part that isn’t basically statements of principles, a glossary, or footnotes?

(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material

(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2) Civil liability

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]

(d) Obligations of interactive computer service

A provider of interactive computer service shall, at the time of entering an agreement with a customer for the provision of interactive computer service and in a manner deemed appropriate by the provider, notify such customer that parental control protections (such as computer hardware, software, or filtering services) are commercially available that may assist the customer in limiting access to material that is harmful to minors. Such notice shall identify, or provide the customer with access to information identifying, current providers of such protections.

People are wrong about this law in myriad ways. The most popular misconception seems to be that websites must act as “platforms, not publishers” if they want this protection; making editorial decisions, this argument goes, turns them into publishers. You will notice that this does not appear in the law.

It is very, very straightforward. A website–ANY website–which allows user-generated content is (broadly speaking) not liable for that content and can moderate it however the hell they want. In other words, Section 230 grants the people who run any website the right, under the first amendment, to control what happens on their own property, and shields them from liability should a user, without the site’s knowledge, post illegal content.

Many of the suggested “reforms”, such as those by butthurt conservatives, are offered in bad faith. But even legislators we like more, such as Brian Schatz (D-HI), are introducing bills that would compel censorship and lead to regulatory capture by the largest businesses, like Facebook and Twitter. (Do you want Facebook stamping on a human face forever? Because this is how you get it.)

What would a world without Section 230 look like? We actually have a great case study. In 2018, a package known as FOSTA-SESTA was signed into law, with the stated intent of cutting down on online sex trafficking. It removes Section 230 protections for user-posted content found to be promoting “sex trafficking”. This opened websites up to huge potential liabilities, mostly around advertisements for sex work. Rather than figure out how to proactively prevent this content from being posted, sites like Craigslist simply shut down their entire Personals section, and sites like Backpage simply shut down entirely. This probably does not decrease the amount of sex trafficking, but, as the DOJ argued at the time, probably does make it harder to detect and prosecute. This doubtless also contributed to Tumblr’s decision to ban all adult content (as well as “female-presenting nipples”), and Facebook’s decision to start shutting down communities that kinda sorta hint at porn or sex work, even in jest. Needless to say this has been to the detriment of online communities for sexual minorities.

So, keep an eye on this. If you like commenting on political blogs, it may soon be relevant to you.

(But don’t take my word for it. TechDirt has a wonderful post going over all this: Hello! You’ve Been Referred Here Because You’re Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act)

Let’s Talk About Section 230 of the CDA (Or: Why You’re Allowed to Comment on This Post)Post + Comments (52)

Dr. Fauci’s Warning

by Cheryl Rofer|  December 24, 202012:14 pm| 137 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Science & Technology

Dr. Fauci is warning us that it may take more than we thought to get to herd immunity. Now that anti-science Donald Trump is on the way out and Fauci is advising President-elect Joe Biden, he’s telling us what he thinks.

A year ago, we knew next to nothing about SARS-CoV-2. Since then, experts have bootstrapped us all the way to effective vaccines. The bootstrapping started from what we know about other coronaviruses and pandemics in general. It’s a matter of informed guesses, testing them against each other and observations, modifying them, and testing again.

Because the math of epidemiology is similar to the math of chemical kinetics, I’ve been following the modeling. It is also bootstrapping, guessing parameters, testing them, and modifying them. It’s a set of multiple parameters (an unknown number of them) being fitted to data that has serious limitations. The estimates get better as we get more data. That’s what Fauci is saying. Our first guess for herd immunity was around 70%. With almost a year of data, it looks like that could be as high as 90%.

This ties in with what I’ve been thinking, but I want to let the people who are expert in epidemiology and virology lead. I can see what they are doing, but they have knowledge that they’ve acquired through experience that I don’t have. Here’s my version of what’s behind Fauci’s warning.

We don’t know R0, the inherent rate of spread of SARS-CoV-2, and we won’t know for some time. Pulling it out of the data is a statistical operation and needs a lot of data. Additionally, the data are lumpy – that’s what people are talking about in “superspreaders.” The lumpiness is measured by another parameter, k. We don’t know k either.

We can measure the rate of spread in a particular situation. I’ll call that R, but it sometimes is designated RT and other names. I have seen confusion of R and R0, even from modelers, who should know better. R0 does not vary, but R does. However, the estimate of R0 changes with time, as more data comes in. Because the level of immunization depends on R0, that changes with time too. That’s what Fauci is saying.

New Mexico has recently gone from an R of about 1.3 to an R of about 0.86. That’s R, not R0. R above 1 means the number of cases is going up; less than 1, that the number is going down. The reason R has decreased for New Mexico has very little if anything to do with the virus itself or R0. It’s because people are acting more responsibly and staying home, wearing masks, practicing hygiene. Here’s a site that estimates up to date values of R for all the states, although they call it Rt.

In order to back out R0 from that, we need to know how much of that decrease is due to staying home, how much to wearing masks, and so on. It’s hard to get at those numbers. Modelers estimate them, try them out in the models against observation, modify them, and try again.

And k. Don’t forget k. Lumpy data can help or hinder the analysis. What I see so far is that it seems to be more of a hindrance.

Fauci is probably being conservative – it’s better to predict a more difficult situation so that people can be relieved when it’s not that bad – but there are many indications that the first guesses of 70% immunization for herd immunity are too low. As percent immunization goes up, estimates of R0 and k will improve.

SARS-CoV-2 won’t be easy to control. But we control measles, and it needs 95% herd immunity. A year ago, nobody – nobody! – was immune to SARS-CoV-2. That’s why it has swept the world. For the diseases we’re familiar with, most people have some immunity, whether old folks who had the measles when they were kids or residual immunities to the flu carried over poorly every year. Better times are coming.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

Dr. Fauci’s WarningPost + Comments (137)

Open Thread: JAXA Hayabusa2 Asteroid Explorer.

by TaMara (HFG)|  December 15, 202011:14 am| 72 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology

A large number of particles are confirmed to be in “sample chamber A” inside the collected capsule (~11:10 JST on 12/15). This is thought to be the sample from the first touchdown on Ryugu. The photo looks brown, but our team says “black”! The sample return is a great success! pic.twitter.com/34vIx17zOX

— [email protected] (@haya2e_jaxa) December 15, 2020

Auto Draft 31

 I love this profile!

 

From the press release:

Confirmation of the asteroid Ryugu sample collection
by the asteroid explorer, Hayabusa2

 The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is pleased to confirm that samples from asteroid Ryugu have been collected within the sample container inside the re-entry capsule of the asteroid explorer, Hayabusa2.

 The Hayabusa2 re-entry capsule was recovered in Woomera, Australia on December 6, 2020 and delivered to the JAXA Sagamihara Campus on December 8. Work then began to open the sample container inside the re-entry capsule. On December 14, a sample of grains of black sand thought to be derived from asteroid Ryugu was confirmed to be inside the sample container. These are believed to be particles attached to the entrance of the sample catcher (the container in which the samples have been stored).

 Work will continue with opening the sample catcher that sits in the sample container. The curation and initial analysis team will remove the samples and proceed with the analysis.

Auto Draft 32
In other looking to the skies news – The Geminid meteor shower, which is typically active every year between Dec. 4 and Dec. 17 – best nights were last Sunday, but you might still catch a couple – it’s been too cloudy here this year to see anything.
Colorado photographer Lars Leber caught this shot in -11 degree weather, in between cloud cover (it’s been snowing on and off since Saturday).
Open Thread: JAXA Hayabusa2 Asteroid Explorer.
Geminid Meteor at Eleven Mile Reservoir (Colorado)
I watched the Geminid Meteor Shower at Eleven Mile State Park last night. Clouds moved through frequently but I was able to see hundreds of meteors. One was so bright, it lit up the whole ground for a second. Of course it was out of the camera frame. This meteor here was the coolest one I captured. I really like the green glow. Was it worth spending a few hours in up to -11 degrees? I think so. 🙂
And then, of course, the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn coming up on December 21st.  My youngest brother keeps nagging me to go out and look at them now, because they are already stunning, but of course, we’ve had cloud cover for days now.

Similarly, the planet duo will be located in a position that will make it seem as if the two have actually merged. “With bare eyes, it will be nearly impossible to tell if there is one planet or there are two giants next to each other. With binoculars or telescopes, you can see them clearly,” said Dr Abhay Deshpande, a Senior Scientist working for the Government of India and the Honorary Secretary of an amateur astronomy group named Khagol Mandal.

During the conjunction, Saturn and Jupiter will appear just 0.1 degrees apart to an observer on Earth. In fact, they will be so close that both can be easily adjusted in the same telescopic field of view.

The last time the two planets were so close is said to be in 1623—just after famous Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei started observing the sky using a telescope. Such a close approach of Jupiter and Saturn happened earlier in 1623 and 1683, and will happen again in the years 2020, 2080, 2417 and 2477—essentially three pairs of years when the angular separation or distance is nearly 0.1 degree or so.

Also because of the angle of the sun and Saturn, it’s very easy to see Saturn’s rings with minimal equipment and news helicopters have been having fun with it.

Open thread

Open Thread: JAXA Hayabusa2 Asteroid Explorer.Post + Comments (72)

Respite Via One From The Filing Cabinet

by Tom Levenson|  November 30, 20207:39 pm| 71 Comments

This post is in: Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Science & Technology

So, as some of you have noted, I haven’t had a great deal to say for quite a while now. Lots of reasons, some obvious (how many times can you say the Republican Party is a death cult? All of them, Katie, I guess), some relating to just life stuff, but it’s past time for me to do my part here.

I do have some posts brewing on some present-day stuff, but I got a message today that someone had commented on my long-dead site, The Inverse Square Blog, which led me back to some of the stuff I’d written in the deep recesses of time, when Megan McArdle was my favorite target.

I’ve given the McArgle-Bargle beat up, as I’ve grown tired of cutting off hydra-heads, and the piece I’m resurrecting here is actually a column I put up at ScientificAmerican.com back in the day (2011). I’m reposting it here as a conversation starter, because though the question it discusses is long settled, the dynamic behind it is very much still with us.

Bit of background. A neutrino experiment collaboration called OPERA announced in September of 2011 that its instrument had detected neutrinos traveling from the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva to the OPERA in Gran Sasso, Italy faster than the speed of light.

Respite Via One From The Filing Cabinet
Created with GIMP

This was huge news at the time, but most working physicists had little confidence that the result would survive–not because the Opera team were bad scientists, or because there was any fraud involve, but because of…well, that’s what’s discussed in the piece.

The result was shown to be in error by late spring, 2012, and the claim was withdrawn.  I wrote my piece before that happened, because it seemed to me to be a great example of science working as it should–and as a way to see science as a daily, lived, human experience. That view of a process engaged with all the flaws of our species that nonetheless can reliably produce lasting, comprehensible results is a theme I’ve written about a lot.  A large part of my interest in this area comes from the fact that this understanding of science as both a process and its results is completely at odds with the malicious parody of science the right uses to wreck the application of reason and experiment to the bettering of the human condition. The example I give in the piece you’ll find below the fold is the hardy perennial, climate change denialism; we’re seeing the same moves now with the weaponized politicization of basic public health (and molecular biology, for that matter) around COVID.

La lucha continua.

So, below the fold find more, and treat this as a thread for conversation about whatever that provokes, or anything else at all.

show full post on front page

I’ve been doing a little poking around the matter of the Italian Grand Prix (neutrino division).  Plenty has been written about this already, of course, but what strikes me a few weeks into the story is how effectively the response to the announcement of a possible detection of faster-than-light neutrinos illustrates what actually goes into the making of a piece of science.  That, of course, also sheds light on,what it looks like when the intention is not to create understanding, but to obscure it.

First, to the neutrinos themselves.  For many of the actually knowledgeable folks I talk to (i.e., not me) the question about infamous Faster Than Light gang of neutrinos is not if they’ll be found out, but when.

That is:  while the experimental technique reported in the OPERAmeasurement is good enough to be taken seriously, many physicists note that challenges to special relativity have a very poor track record.  A number of other observations would have to be radically reinterpreted for the measurement of the travel time of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso to stand up as an authentic discovery of faster than light travel.  See my earlier post on this subject for a bit of background and some useful links.

An example:  the OPERA result, if it holds up, would complicate (to say the least) the interpretation of the hugely wonderful detection of neutrinos emitted in the stellar collapse that produced  Supernova 1987a.  As the parent star of the supernova collapsed, the catastrophe produced 1058 neutrinos, give or take a couple.  In what was dubbed the  first triumph of neutrino astronomy, three detectors at widely separated locations detected a grand total of 24 of those (anti)neutrinos, all arriving within 13 seconds of each other.

Those neutrinos did reach planet earth before light from the supernova blast arrived. But that quirk of timing has nothing to do with faster than light travel.  Rather, it turns on the details of supernova physics.  Neutrinos are produced in the initial stellar collapse, and because neutrinos interact with basically nothing — they are untouched by either the strong nuclear force or electromagnetism  — the supernova-neutrinos sped out from the dying star more or less at the moment of the blast.  Light, by contrast is electromagnetic radiation – and readily interacts with charged particles.

That property caused the light of the supernova to crash around the interior of the evolving supernova explosion as photons interacted with all the extremely electromagnetically energetic matter at hand – a dance that held them up for a time.  After a few hours, that light escaped from the interior of the supernova blast and could begin an uninterrupted journey our way. But by that time, it lagged behind the neutrino signal, which is what produced the gap between the neutrino and optical detections of the event.

Think of it as gridlock in the midst of a stellar rush hour — an obstruction 1987a’s neutrinos, riding on (highly metaphoric) rails, were able to avoid.  The fact that the two signals arrived only hours apart simply means that the neutrinos travelled at or very close to the speed of light — not faster than.  If the neutrinos traveled faster than light – even at the rather small excess suggested by the OPERA experiment — they should have arrived much earlier than they did – four years or so before the light from the explosion.

Now there is a way out of this seeming contradiction, because the supernova neutrinos were significantly less energetic than the ones measured in the OPERA experiment — so it’s not accurate to say that both results can’t be true.  But even so, were superluminal neutrinos to prove to be real, then whatever new physics that might be invented to explain the result would have to do so in a way that still allowed Supernova 1987a’s neutrinos to behave as observed.

That’s the problem for any challenge to a fundamental pillar of knowledge:  if the new observation is correct, it must be understood in a way that accommodates all the prior work consistent with the older view that is under scrutiny.  As physics popularizers always note:  Einstein’s account of gravity — the General Theory of Relativity — delivers results that collapse into those of Newton’s earlier theory through the range of scales for which Newtonian physics works just fine.  If it didn’t, then that would be a signal that there was something wrong with the newer theory.

Hence the stakes here.  Given that special relativity — the concept at risk if superluminal neutrinos turn out to  exist — has been described to me by a physicist friend as more a property of the universe than a “mere” law of nature, it becomes clear, I think why this result is so fascinating.  If neutrinos really do go faster than light, then there’s a huge challenge to come up with a theoretical account of what’s going on that allows OPERA’s neutrinos the ability to race whilst Supernova 1987a’s crew dawdled along at mere light speed — to name just one issue that would need resolution.

That is:  facts on their own are orphans. They require a conscious act of decision on the part of their interrogator to gain meaning.  In an essay published the same year Einstein proposed special relativity, the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare​ asked “who shall choose the facts which…are worthy of freedom of the city in science.”  For Poincare, the answer was obvious:  that choice “is the free activity of the scientist” — which is to say that it falls to a theorist to think through how one fact, placed next to another, fits into a coherent framework that can survive the test of yet more facts, those already known and those to be discovered.

All of which is to say that even before the Italian observations stand or fall on attempts to replicate the finding, theoretical analyses — thinking hard — can go a some distance in determining whether superluminal neutrinos prove “worthy” of a place in science’s city.

And that’s the long way round to commend a really excellent piece by Matt Strassler, an old friend whose day job as a theoretical particle physicist at Rutgers informs his recently acquired mantle as a physics blogger.  Check him out — not just this post — because, IMHO, he’s very rapidly proving himself to be in the first rank of popular translators of some really deep stuff.

In the linked piece, Matt writes about an argument put forward by Andrew Cohen and Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow, both theoreticians at Boston University.  To gloss Matt’s explication: Cohen and Glashow have developed some earlier thinking that originally focused on the phenomenon called Cerenkov radiation.  Matt discusses Cerenkov radiation here — basically it’s electromagnetic radiation emitted by  energetic particles going faster than the speed of light in a medium (water, or air, for example, rather than a vacuum) — which, as Matt explains, does not violate special relativity.

Neutrinos do emit such radiation, very weakly, but that’s not the key to the argument; the effect is too small to matter for the OPERA result.  Rather, Cohen and Glashow point out that superluminal neutrinos should have produced a different kind of emission that is roughly analogous to the Cerenkov effect — and that each time one of OPERA’s neutrinos did so, it would have lost a lot of energy — enough to register on OPERA instruments.  Which means, as Matt puts it, that

… the claim of Cohen and Glashow is that OPERA is inconsistent with itself — that it could not have seen a speed excess without an energy distortion, the latter being easier to measure than the former, but not observed. The upshot, then, is that OPERA’s finding that its neutrinos arrived earlier than expected cannot be due to their traveling faster than the speed of light in vacuum. Something is probably wrong with OPERA’s expectation, not the neutrinos.

Now this is a theoretical argument and it could be wrong in a variety of ways.  In the comment thread to Matt’s post, the very clever physicist Lee Smolin​ points to one possible physical case in which Cohen and Glashow’s proposition would not hold.  Theory, interpretation, decides what facts are worthy of being known — but theories are subject to revision, of course, and never more so on those occasions when one fact or another stubbornly refuses to submit to judgment.

But what I find so pleasing about this whole sequence of thought is the way it illustrates what actually happens in science, as opposed to the parody of scientific process you see in a lot of public accounts — especially when politically contentious research is involved.

The OPERA team made the best measurement they could; when it refused to succumb to their search for some alternative explanation, they published the result, no doubt reasonably certain that it would be subject to relentless examination — under which there was (and remains) a very good chance this work will be shown to be wrong.  Cohen and Glashow have now offered a formal structure that suggests that what we know of the way the universe actually works presents a major logical challenge to the validity of the OPERA claim of discovery.  The ultimate resolution will turn both on continuing experimental work and on the kind of effort Glashow and Cohen offer:  the hard work of figuring out what it would mean if the result were true — or perhaps better: what understanding do we possess now that suggests the OPERA result is either real or an error.

Contrast that process with the critique of climate science that comes from the Right, as I discussed briefly in my post on Eric Stieg’s rather blistering reviewof the recent announcement of a study affirming (yet again) mainstream climate research.  Stieg wrote, in effect, that the attacks on climate science turn on a refusal to engage one blunt fact:   there is an underlying physical understanding of the basic theory of the system under study:  climate change driven by changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.  That theoretical framework determines the course of empirical research, the search for facts worthy of being known:

…the reason for concern about increasing CO2 comes from the basic physics and chemistry, which was elucidated long before the warming trend was actually observable…The warming trend is something that climate physicists saw coming many decades before it was observed. [Italics in the original.] The reason for interest in the details of the observed trend is to get a better idea of the things we don’t know the magnitude of (e.g. cloud feedbacks), not as a test of the basic theory. If we didn’t know about the CO2-climate connection from physics, then no observation of a warming trend, however accurate, would by itself tell us that anthropogenic global warming is “real,” or (more importantly) that it is going to persist and probably increase.

Which is another way of saying that most of the noise from those who both deny  the reality of climate change and would impugn the honor of climate researchers misses the point.  Not because there isn’t reason to test the reliability of any measurement — of a fast neutrino or a tree ring sequence, either one — but because the issue in either case is understanding what we do know, and then engaging the challenge of a new result in that context.

Hence the (perhaps meta-) value of the faster-than-light neutrino story.  This experiment will have to overcome the hurdles thrown up by special relativity’s ubiquitous influence, by the physics of high energy phenomena and so on.  That’s how the process of discovery moves from tantalizing initial impressions to settled knowledge.  Understanding that process illuminates the hurdles facing climate science denialists:  to advance their case, they must reconcile their criticisms of mainstream climate research with the exceptionally well understood basic physics of radiative transfer and the thermal properties of different gases — as well as streams of evidence flowing from direct observations and from the ongoing inquiry into the correlation between evolving climate models and what we can see of the climate itself.

By contrast: cherry-picking dishonestly-excerpted emails is not science.

Oh — and as long as we’ve come this far, let me add a note about another challenge to the faster-than-light neutrino claim that’s come up over the time I’ve been working on this post.

In one of dozens, at least, of efforts to pry apart the actual workings of the OPERA experiment, University of Groningen Ronald van Elburg, has offered his candidate for the (by-many) expected systematic error that could have tricked the OPERA researchers into believing they had observed an effect that is not there.

Elburg has zeroed in on one of the obviously critical elements of the measurement, the calibration of the clocks that timed the neutrinos on their journey.  To make that observation, the team relied on the atomic clocks used to synchronize the signals from Global Positioning Satellites — GPS.  The tricky part is that the satellites that house the clocks are in motion — pretty fast too — relative to the labs on the ground and the neutrinos traveling between the source and the detector.

When one object is in motion, travelling in a different reference frame than that of some measuring apparatus, then special relativity comes into play.  As the TechReview’s Physics ArXiv blog describes the issue, this means

[that] from the point of view of a clock on board a GPS satellite, the positions of the neutrino source and detector are changing. “From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter,” says van Elburg.

The correction needed to account for this relativistic shrinking of the path as seen from the point of view of the measuring device in space is almost exactly the same size as the seeming excess speed of the neutrinos the OPERA team believes they’ve detected.  And that would mean that…

far from breaking Einstein’s theory of relatively, the faster-than-light measurement will turn out to be another confirmation of it.

It’s not as open and shut as all that.  Elburg’s argument makes the assumption that the OPERA team failed to account for the quite well-known special relativistic effects on GPS signals — and while they may have, we don’t know that yet.  At the same time the original OPERA paper reports some checks on the timekeeping essential to the experiment.  I understand that the group is working through the long list of necessary responses to specific suggestions like this one — while at the same time preparing for a yet higher precision measurement of the effect they think they have seen.

But the broader point remains:  experimental physics is (and has always been) very, very hard to do, involving an effort to push the limits of precision beyond any current standard.  Because the effects sought are at the limits of our capacity to detect them (necessarily; if it were easy, we’d have seen whatever it was already) there is an enormous amount of subtle knowledge that goes into constructing the framework of each experiment.  The machines don’t just have to work; you have to understand in detail how quantum mechanics and relativity and all the increasingly subtle applications of the broad ideas play out at the speeds and energies and distances involved. Understanding what’s actually happening at the subtle edges of experiments — even seemingly simply ones — turns out to be very difficult to do.

How difficult? So much so that Albert Einstein himself made an error that is quite similar in some ways to the mistake Elburg suggests could have happend here.  In 1930, in one his famous arguments with Niels Bohr,  Einstein devised a thought experiment to show that it would be possible to measure a quantity to a finer level of accuracy than Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle permits.  Einstein’s argument seemed airtight, and according to an observer at the scene,

It was a real shock for Bohr…who, at first, could not think of a solution. For the entire evening he was extremely agitated, and he continued passing from one scientist to another, seeking to persuade them that it could not be the case, that it would have been the end of physics if Einstein were right; but he couldn’t come up with any way to resolve the paradox. I will never forget the image of the two antagonists as they left the club: Einstein, with his tall and commanding figure, who walked tranquilly, with a mildly ironic smile, and Bohr who trotted along beside him, full of excitement…The morning after saw the triumph of Bohr.

It turned out that Einstein had left one crucial physical idea out of his analysis;  he did not account for the effects of his own discovery, the general theory of relativity, on the behavior of the experimental procedure.  Once gravity was factored into the argument, the violation of quantum indeterminancy vanished.

That is simply to say that the neutrino experimentalists may well have made what seems from the sidelines like an obvious mistake.  But if Albert Einstein could fall prey to a similar kind of error, that should tell us all we need to know about how hard it is for any one person, or even one group, to think through the full subtlety of experience. Which is why science works the way it does, by continuous criticism and self-criticism.  As the neutrino story plays out, we’re watching how science ought to work.

Which, and finally we complete the long road home, is why science honestly done and described is vastly different as both a practical and a moral matter than the masked-as-science attacks on this mode of discovery that now dominate the thinking of one of the two major American political parties.

(Back to 2020: the thread. Open it is.)

Images: Light painting in an abandoned railway tunnel, 4 September 2011.

William Blake, When the Morning Stars Sang Together, 1820.

Jan Vermeer, The Astronomer, c. 1668

 

 

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