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I have a confession to make.
You see, for a long time I’ve had this belief that writing about cutting edge science is mostly irresponsible. What looks like evidence for a new elementary particle today may be gone by tomorrow when someone realizes they forgot to carry the 3 or whatever. The cutting edge of science is akin the early period in a relationship: it’s filled with tense emotions on both sides and it’s more than likely that it ends with someone getting hurt.
And so when I started writing about science, way back in 2016, I took the lay of the land and decided I wasn’t going to be one of those people selling quick fixes for understanding the natural world. Let other folks try to explain Topological Phase Transitions to people who don’t even know how to take a proper derivative. I was going to take a “wax on, wax off” approach. Walk you through the simple “light clock” thought experiment that Einstein dreamed up to demonstrate time dilation in a way that kindergartners could understand. Remind you how sound waves worked before explaining that black holes are basically just like regions of water where sound can’t escape.
Now did I flirt, at times, with discussing automated cars, our future on Mars, and even an unregulated cryptocurrency* used primarily to purchase slave children from Mexican cartels on something called “The Dark Web”? Sure, but in fairness to me, I didn’t expect anyone to take me seriously.
What I’m trying to say here is that I think I’m changing my mind a bit. I still think reporting on the cutting edge of science is sort of reckless—but as T. Swift says, players gonna play, play, play, play, play. And if those players don’t learn about cutting edge science from me, well, they will learn it from someone else. And that person may not include nearly as many parenthetical qualifiers (or detailed footnotes**) to keep the reader’s enthusiasm in check.
So it is with great reservation that I become, my dear reader, the science savvy Virgil to your “failed chemistry twice” Dante, as we set out to explore the many circles of Click-Baity-Science-Bullshit Hell that one may stumble upon on your Yahoo News homepage.
Shall we?
The Cutting Edge As of July 13, 2017: Gravity Waves, Schmavity Waves
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is where physicists first heard the sound of the universe shaking. In September of 2015, LIGO detected this:
It may not look like much, but to the physicists working at LIGO this was the equivalent of God appearing in a burning bush and saying “gravity waves are real.” A few months later the scientists released their results to the public and for a day we were all physics geeks.
So why am I bringing this up now, more than a year later? Because some folks out of Copenhagen who apparently have dual Ph.Ds in physics and killjoyology have recently published a paper calling the whole “we detected a gravity wave” thing into question. Or, that’s the impression you get if you happen to get your astrophysical news from The Daily Mail. The title of The Daily’s article is “Controversy over gravitational wave discovery as experts say rogue noise raises doubts over historic finding,” which might lead you to believe that the physicists popped their champagne corks too soon.
At this point, we have a couple options. We can run with what we’ve inferred from The Daily Mail’s headline and get upset at the irresponsible researchers at LIGO who sold us a #FakeNews story about how space and time can shake (as if).
Or, we could take a moment, recall that The Daily Mail is a shitty place to learn about breakthroughs in science, and head over the Starts with a Bang blog, which is where we should have gone for our astrophysical news in the first place. There, the brilliant Ethan Siegel explains in this article that maybe the LIGO team fudged the bucket a bit with the data analysis. But even in the worst case scenario, the result wouldn’t be “nothing to see here.” Instead it would be “yep, still detected gravity waves, we just need to tweak our plots a bit.”
The upshot of all this fuss over gravity waves?
Science is messy and sometimes people get hurt.
But gravity ways are still very much a thing that scientists have observed, despite the best efforts of those crazy Danes.
(In unrelated and completely unscientific Danish news, I recently traveled to Switzerland by way of Copenhagen and I can tell you from first hand experience that the bathrooms in the Zurich airport are far more clean and inviting than the bathrooms in the Copenhagen airport. Plus, the airport stores in Copenhagen were filled with the most disgusting looking candy and bags of what I can only describe as cinnamon buns that were sun dried and then vacuum sealed. Sorry Niels Bohr, but I’m in no rush to get back to Denmark).
BTW, tomorrow we’ll be discussing the next bit of interesting LIGO related news – extra dimensions. Tune in to find out if they exist…
Footnotes:
* When I wrote my first Bitcoin article back in February the coin was selling for around $1,000. It is now selling for $2,500. If you’d listened to me you could have made a 250 percent profit in less than six months. Warren Buffett would be envious of that kind of return.
** I don’t actually have anything to add here, I was just doing this for dramatic effect.
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