scientists as superstars

This is a bit silly. Science is just as much a performance art as music.

The difference is that scientists are mainly performing to impress other scientists. If they misrepresent their results in a way that gets newspaper attention, it doesn't impress the other scientists who decide whether they get promoted or not.

John Larkin doesn't know much about science, and much of what he thinks he knows comes from climate change denial websites, who are in the business misrepresenting scientific data for profit.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman
Loading thread data ...

We talked. He talked more than I did. It was fine; he's really nice and really smart. I helped him get his PhD in control theory. He came up with some algorithms that saved billions in consumables on DUV lithography lasers.

Phil knows him. We had a huge amount of fun together once, brainstorming some optics and physics.

I think people should be tolerant and friendly and help one another. I think people are different, and that's good.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
jlarkin

mage-public-eye/

e
;

ry,

It is a problem in some fields, but one problem with scientific research is that you don't know what factors you need to control until you have done t he research. Ostensibly identical experiments can produce different results , and that can lead you to find which bits of the experiments weren't actua lly identical, which can be very educational.

These two papers

formatting link

formatting link

give different results for the number of people who get Covid-19 (as certif ied by the CPR test) and don't exhibit any symptoms.

The first says 15+/-3% at the 95% confidence level, and the second observed 104 out of 128 positive test results on a total of 217 people.

The second comes from an Antarctic cruise ship, and most of the people who got infected seem to have got infected by eating food that was contaminated with virus particles, rather than breathing air contaminated with virus lo aded droplets.

This isn't a bug but rather a feature.

Economists and scientists don't actually get power. They can get influence over people with power. The Chicago school monetarists definitely peddle no nsense that plays well with right-wing politicians. Scientists rarely work that way.

Lysenko is the only example that comes to mind. The book "The Bell Curve" w as marketed as science, but Charles Murray isn't a scientist and while Rich ard Herrnstein looked like a scientist (a professor of psychology at Harvar d) he was a star pupil of B.F.Skinner which means that he had a rather high tolerance for pseudo-scientific nonsense, and the book did get savaged bec ause it's scientific content was dire.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Perhaps. But a bad idea is still a bad idea even when realised as well as i t can be.

Until recently, the US had a disproportionate share of the world's money, a nd the world's biggest domestic market. If you want to create stuff, you ne ed to spend money, and that mostly comes from venture capitalists.

The US has now got itself into a state where it is run for the benefit of t he top 1% of the income distribution, which includes all the venture capita lists.

If you grow up as part of bottom 99% of the income distribution you don't g et as well educated as your contemporaries in other advanced industrial cou ntries, and US venture capitalists are now tending to fund foreign inventio ns. A couple of Australia's more prominent technical whiz kids made their m oney with US venture capitalists, and are now in a position to fund local i nventions.

John Larkin does seem to think that the world doesn't change.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

age-public-eye/

Not that John Larkin seems to be able to predict the exact content of my po sts.

He can predict that he won't like them, but that reflects the fact that the y don't flatter him as extravagantly as he feels is appropriate.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

e:

at-image-public-eye/

more

lone;

istory,

e

nce.

ial

The US used to have a uniquely large and wealthy domestic market.

The European Union now offers a bigger domestic market, with equally high m edian incomes. Smart phones took off faster in Europe than they did in the US

nywhere. The Homebrew Computer Club changed the world.

Not really. My first home computer was a UK Amstrad PC - I had a founding s ubscription to Byte, and had been using computers at work since 1964, but w hat changed the world was people making and selling basically IBM personal computers more cheaply than IBM was willing to do.

It has picked up again in the last few decades.

The Chinese are careful with their inventions. If they invent something goo d, they don't want the US copying it.

They did okay with machine tools, railways and steam ships. Isambard Kingdo m Brunel pioneered with the first trans-Atlantic steamer, and the first scr ew driven trans-Atlantic steamer.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

age-public-eye/

. It is mostly rogue engineers who have given science a bad name. If one o f those nut cases becomes a "hero," we're in serious trouble.

neers.

Engineering is all about communicating what works to the people who do the work. You do have to know what you are talking about to have anything usefu l to communicate, and you do have to have a decent appreciation of what wor ds mean to other people to be able to do that.

which includes Engineers under Applied Science and therefore if you have be en involved in R&D then indeed you are a scientist.

formatting link

That's not what it says at all.

is is not a binary question , but an analog one with degrees or exponential s depending on education or actual inventions, or applied science products created.

visory, so he would probably not consider himself a scientist. Nor would yo u consider some Engineer who has spent most of their time in Project Manage ment to be a scientist.

reviewed published report.

Actually a *cited* peer-reviewed publication.

st of those papers are crap.

True, but if they are crap, they don't get cited. In general, most of the l iterature, isn't crap, but merely not all that useful.

According to Google Scholar, my most cited publication is a patent on an ul trasound scanner - with 41 citations - which only got submitted because I'd had to spend so much time explaining why a feature was "obvious" that it c learly wasn't obvious to those skilled in the art. I've got no idea why it gets cited.

The millidegree temperature controller paper has 24 citations, and probably deserves them - it threw a number of useful tricks at a well-known problem .

The next item down the list - "A fast and economical gated discriminator" - has five citations, and I've never been interested enough to work out why.

ers published, but how many and which field the PhD's were in. Physics bein g the most respected.

That's why I add "cited" to the peer-reviewed publication requirement. With out real-world feedback paper is just paper.

ust a matter of papers or degrees but also diligence in critical thought an d finding solutions when none seem to exist.

Wrong. Science is all about publishing results in a form that other people can exploit. If you don't read the literature, you aren't in science, and i f you haven't published something useful in the literature - useful enough for somebody else to read and cite - you haven't contributed to it.

"Diligence in critical thought and finding solutions when none seem to exis t" isn't confined to science.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

e:

ote:

I left in 1993, and it still seemed to create problems then.

A whole lot of Indian circuit design theory explored two-transistor circuit s. My suspicion was that the university departments involved didn't have th e equipment budget to buy a third one. At the same time Russian academic pa pers were still discussing valve-based circuits - thermionic-tubes based ci rcuit to Americans.

That isn't actually how the place worked.

You may have read "The Idea Factory"

formatting link

but I worked at the UK equivalent - EMI Central Research - for three years.

There wasn't any "deliberate mixing" but there were lots of very smart peop le on the same site. I remember having a fascinating conversation with a gu y from the Audio lab on the next floor up about a Christopher Longuet-Higgi ns paper on going from sound frequencies to musical notation. Somebody from the Audio lab had thought that they had proved that it couldn't be done a few years earlier.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Sometimes you have to.

Of course John Larkin hasn't got much of an idea how they are different, and concentrates on the differences in time they are willing to spend flattering him.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

On a sunny day (Fri, 19 Jun 2020 06:49:20 -0700) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in :

It is good if people get interested in science.

Making idols of some scientists is not so good, a typical example is Albert OneStone

Politics, after WW2 Jews needed a bit of a hero, and OneStone's theory was 'proven' over and over again, to the point where if your thing conflicted with it you simply did not get published. Now OneSTone was a total failure, his 'theory' is just a bit of math that describes reality, but has been shown to break down, and you cannot PROVE a theory but can sure disprove it. I have read that OneStone's wife was a mathemagician, and he likely got his ideas from her, but did not give credit. Spooky action at a distance? Oh well. He never united graffiti with the other forces.. Anyways few hundred years ago if you mentioned the earth was not at the center of the universe but moving around the sun in Europe you were burned by the church. Being a scientist and right for a change is not always good for your health.

Personally as far as Albert OneStone goes I think we need a break, I like Le Sage's theory of gravity as it at least proposes a mechanism, and am working on some experiment now that the Tritium decay has had its time. You start looking and the obvious 'If this effect is present WHY did nobody see it for what it is?' So I scan my memory, and hopla, somebody did notice and cause waves, reproducing that experiment failed however, then you think "buy WHY", and then there is that simple answer... then "how can I best measure this?" and then you find this: PhysRevLett.124.201801.pdf Detecting Light Dark Matter with Magnons - Physical Review ... google But US DOD already had a go with the one that my memory found.. is it classified?

So Albert OneStone as a political puppet makes sense, any scientist standing next to the lying leader? Does it? What's the game now?

Manipulation of people... an industry that uses looping around the earth to keep jobs for ever, some forces in the people somewhere must say enough, let's have some reality.

All work in progress...

Science is fun!

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Fri, 19 Jun 2020 09:33:48 -0700) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in :

Enrico Fermi was an Italian Madame Cury was French

You simply bought your scientists when the dollar was still coupled to gold.

Now since Nixon it is not and massively printing paper .. people seem to be hoarding tissue paper too. Worth nothing

But you now have Elon, I have read he is from S Africa though..

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Fri, 19 Jun 2020 15:11:25 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

I think it is spelled 'sinker'? What is left of his followers after they discover most of his brain has switched off because of the 'medicine' he takes, will probably die of corona due to keeping no distance at all in his campaign. Nature has its ways and laws.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

People have always come to the US for a fresh beginning and a chance to do what they can without being dragged down by old establishments. The native Americans were the first.

For some reason, Canada and Australia and Brazil didn't get that scientific and invention immigration. I guess there is enough positive feedback that one technology center prospers around a nucleus, like MIT and then Stanford.

The selective migration to the US - the most adventurous, most irrelevant, most unmanageable, most creative, sometimes most criminal

- people emigrated here. That created what we are, for better or worse. And to some extent it brain-drained the rest of the world of creative people. Anti-semitism and anti-Protestant movements and potato famines sure didn't help Europe keep talent.

Of course, some people came here involuntarily.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
jlarkin

-public-eye/

as 'proven' over and over again, to the point where if your thing conflicte d with it you simply did not get published.

Albert Einstein was famous long before WW2 started, and the basis of his fa me was the four papers he published in 1905 - on the photo-electric effect, which took Plank's quantised energy and used it to explain what was going on, on Brownian motion (which was the first real evidence that discrete ato ms and molecules act as discrete articles) the special theory of relativity (which is probably what Jan think's of as Einstein's "theory", even though it was only a precusor to the general theory, which was the big one), and the paper on mass-energy equivalence.

describes reality, but has been shown to break down, and you cannot PROVE a theory but can sure disprove it.

Jan Panteltje doesn't know what he is talking about. Einstein did fail to u nite quantum theory with general relativity, but that is the kind of heroic failure that lesser mortals can't even aspire to. His theory was a whole l ot better than anything we'd had before, and nothing has replaced it.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Gravitational lensing, relativity, E=MC^2, gravity waves, stimulated emission, quantized photoemission, pretty good ideas from a young patent office clerk.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
jlarkin

Actually Polish, but she did marry a Frenchman

Nobody bought Marie Curie. Enrico Fermi moved to America in 1938 because his wife was Jewish, and the Italian Fascists had copied the German Nazi habit of being unkind to Jews - the value of the US dollar didn't come into it.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

That's one way of describing religious nutters who wanted to be exceedingly unkind to people who didn't share their bizarre beliefs in ways that more civilised countries didn't tolerate.

formatting link

Some 14,000 years ago, long before there was any kind of "establishment" an ywhere to drag them down.

They did, but the kind of books you read don't tell you about it.

pers around a nucleus, like MIT and then Stanford.

Or Bell labs?

Amazing how Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and E

Ernest Rutherford's family had emigrated to New Zealand before he was born, but he moved to Cambridge in the UK after completing his first degree in N ew Zealand, and he stayed there for the rest of his life (apart from a brie f spell in in Canada as a professor at McGill from 1898 to 1907).

Lawrence Bragg (whom I once met) was born in Australia, but moved to the UK - rather than the US - once his academic career got underway.

As a brain-draining country, the US seems to have missed quite a few quite a few clever people.

The Irish potato famine persuaded a lot of Irish people to move elsewhere.

They "volunteered" to go anywhere where they could earn enough to eat.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Yup, besides being very smart, he's a nice guy and a fine Christian besides--IIRC he does a bunch of charitable work with disadvantaged kids. (I may be confusing him with another fellow, but I don't think so.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

This is D, the one we talked droplets with. I was astounded how much math you guys did in under an hour.

He's on the Fellow track, same outfit.

(I also complained to his management (in the men's room yet), and got him a raise. Maybe that's why he's so friendly.)

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
jlarkin

Yeah, DR. That's who I mean too.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Reply to
Phil Hobbs

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.