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Not to take away anything from Mr Penzias but here’s how I remember his name :-)
“Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn’t know what it was when they had found it, and hadn’t described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times”
- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
RIP Mr Penzias
Have any other Nobel Prizes been awarded to someone who only discovered some phenomena but didn’t do any further research to advance our understanding of it? It seems to me that that falls in the category of blind luck rather than research and shouldn’t qualify for the Prize.
Many. Just to give an example, the very first Nobel in physics was awarded to Röntgen, who discovered 'A new kind of Ray' (which only later named x-rays and were shown to be photons with a different wavelength). He noticed a detector going off even though his device was in a sealed box.
Btw X-rays are called "rentgenové záření" ("Roentgen radiation") in Czech.
I believe in German-speaking countries the X-ray machine is called Röntgen? E.g. in a hospital you will have directions for "Röntgen".
We call it "Röntgenstrahlung" (X-rays), "Röntgengerät" (X-ray machine), "Röntgenaufnahme" (X-ray picture). We even made a verb out of it, even though that's probably colloquial: "Wir müssen Ihr Bein röntgen" (we need to X-ray your leg).
Rentgen is a noun in Czech meaning 1. the machine, 2. the picture, the root of an adjective (rentgenový), Amd the root of a verb (rentgenovat).
a lot of languages call it Roentgen rays or similar
At my work maybe 10 years ago, we had a little trivia competition on a fun day, about 25 people taking part - one of the questions was "who discovered the X-ray?", and all 7 of the eastern Europeans got the correct answer, but none of the Americans, Indians, or Asians in the group got it right (except for me, but I'm special).
In lots of languages, both are used (thought X-rays becomes more and more common).
The nobel prize is granted for discoveries that advance human knowledge. Whether that discovery is through chance, sheer hardwork or some linear combination, what matters is the discovery. It is not not disputed (by anyone) that the discovery was important here. The theory of the Cosmic microwave background was already out there -- it just needed someone to confirm the theory !
One could argue that the microwave background radiation was discovered precisely by the nobel winning experimenters because they refused to explain away the "noise". They were persistent and kept trying to eliminate possible sources of this noise. Perhaps other similar horn antennae had the same noise but this noise was just explained away by the other experimentalist as being an artifact of the equipment ? One may never know.
Lastly, it has been my experience that luck seems to strike competent and fastidious researchers more often than average ones.
Let's suppose for reasons of this discussion, that Bell labs had assigned a junior engineer to determine how noise was getting into the antenna, not a couple of PhD's who were well along in their careers. Further, let's also assume that, through sheer hard work, some innate brilliance, and maybe some consultations with his mentors, this engineer arrived at the same discovery. Do you think that he would be awarded a Nobel Prize or would he be ignored because he doesn't sport the right credentials?
Not a scientist chiming in, but I'd guess that the project had "lead" scientists who set everything up for the antenna experiment and any data from the junior scientist (what I think you meant) would need to be vetted and still fall under the purview of the lead(s).
Here, here. We take it for granted now, but even such things as HBO’s white-noise intro, the echoes of creation, is a cultural artifact of their tenacious attention to detail.
Discovery of penicillin
OT but this book is so incredible. The breadth of information covered is amazing, even for being ~20 years old at this point.
The audiobook at .7 speed is my sleep aid.
The audiobook at .7 speed is my sleep aid.
I love little hacks like this.
Without aspersion on Penzias and Wilson, Robert Dicke should have been recognized in due time. He was a supremely gifted experimentalist on top of everything else. Credited with inventing the lock-in amplifier, he graciously deferred to others. His radiometer and switch also had great impact. Stockholm should hang its head for this oversight.
I worked with Arno about a decade ago and he was still sharp as a tack.
What did you collaborate on?
Not what you might expect: we were building small distributed solar thermal plants that stored energy in a tank of supercritical water (basically: inject steam into tank of water -> it condenses; open a valve on the top and it flashes out as steam).
Since the pressure varies depending on solar flux and how much was in the tank we couldn't use a turbine (the shape of the turbine is tuned to a constant flow) so instead used multi-stage steam engines (the first new steam engine designed probably in 75 years. These were ordinary container-sized pressure vessels and the steam engines were built into a container too. Easy to repair; you could make your own parts, and last forever.
Cheap PV and batteries killed it.
Arno was full of good advice.
What's PV?
Thank you for asking. I'm always vexed by impenetrable acronyms here, as if everyone's expected to know them as part of a common knowledge base.
Positive Q sign = lying in bed unconscious with tongue drooping down one corner of mouth; means either dead or will be soon.
Source: Retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years in practice)
My proof: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5DdrMc8AAAAJ&hl=en
Ha, Thanks! I just ran into the other room and asked my wife who is a retired OR nurse what "positive Q sign" meant and she stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth. I love learning new terms :)
Maybe you can tell me what I'm missing here. What does his comment have to do with anything else in the thread?
That's the best thing I've read all day: thank you!!!
... what
Photovoltaics, aka solar cells.
Oh that sounds like a ton of fun. In the 90's I was working on solar concentrators because the panels were so bloody expensive. Funny how that got entirely obsoleted by economies of scale.
Is there still a niche for concentrators? Like for cloudy weather or restricted space. Or does the economy of scale eclipse even that accessory market
Cloudy weather is harder, not easier when using concentrators (because it concentrates parallel rays of sunlight, not ambient light). Restricted space would still need to be covered with something and here you'll find that covering it directly with photovoltaic panels is more cost effective and will get you more power for a given area. As far as I'm aware concentrators are pretty much dead except for when you need lots of localized heat, for instance a solar oven. There they definitely work better than anything that is based off photovoltaics and because they tend to be totally passive probably more rugged and reliable too.
To my surprise there seems to be a small revival, though I don't quite understand the applications (not that I follow it closely).
In general land is less expensive than the cost of trackers or concentrators (capital cost incl installation, plus op ex of maintenance & power) so you deal with your cosine loss by just installing more panels.
The Skinner Universal Unaflow? Fascinating!
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/terrajoule-unst...
Ha ha I’m glad my dog made it into that article.
Another fascinating and refined mechanical contraption killed by solid state innovation
Definitely. Though being a 21st century mechanical device it was heavily instrumented and had an electronic control system. Amusingly, our electronic cylinder indicator showed a problem in one of the stages but the old-school mechanical one did not. The ME's told me "your instrument is bad" but when the stage was taken apart...sure enough the head gasket had a hole.
The advantage of the mechanical system is that it would last indefinitely and could be repaired on site. People in India could make most of the spare parts themselves and do the maintenance themselves.
But the advantages of the semiconductor + battery systems were: 1 - no moving parts and 2 - massive economies of scale due to mass factory production of highly uniform parts that could be used in lots of applications. Makes sense that it won -- our approach was superior only in certain applications.
I have some good memories and little stories from my brief time working with him. Great guy.
Though the title is copied from the article, the title is needlessly inflammatory. Given the replication, practical application and self-admitted quantum physics vs. standard model crisis/failures of modern particle physics, astronomy, and cosmic theory, declaring victory around the Big Bang Theory is, and may always be premature, despite the surrounding dogma.
Would anyone who knew him personally agree that he claimed to have "confirmed the big bang theory", and that he would want to be remembered in that way?
Would anyone who knew him personally agree that he claimed to have "confirmed the big bang theory", and that he would want to be remembered in that way?
Almost certainly not, at least not the scientists who knew him. The scientific method does not involve proving (or "confirming") theories; it only involves falsifiable theories and attempts to falsify them.
it *only* involves falsifiable theories and attempts to falsify them.
Your view is needlessly narrow. Coming up with new theories, collecting new data, verifying how theories fit that data is also part of the process even if it doesn't falsify them. To quote wikipedia it's on going process:
"The process in the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypothetical explanations), deriving predictions from the hypotheses as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions."
The scientific process only involves falsifiable theories. The process does allow refining theories to fit new evidence, for sure, but a refined theory is a new theory, with the old one disproven, but this only works when theories are falsifiable. Therefore we never speak of "proven" or "confirmed" theories.
The scientific process only involves falsifiable theories.
What is your source? Wikipedia disagrees with you.
Think some context here would help. Karl Popper established the limits of “truth” as much as Gödel and his incompleteness theorems did…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
TL;DR: If a theory isn’t falsifiable—if it doesn’t make any predictions which can be proved or disproved—then it’s more philosophy than science. By this standard, for example, string theory fails.
The scientific process only involves falsifiable theories
This is definitely not true. One obvious example is that important scientific work is done turning unfalsifiable theories into falsifiable ones. After gravitational waves were predicted by general relativity there was some argument about whether they were a real observable thing or just an artifact of the maths. Those guys were undoubtedly doing "real science" while discussing something that some of them thought was undetectable (and therefore unfalsifiable).
Another example is that a lot of science is exploratory without any particular theory you're trying to falsify.
Science is more interesting and broad than your dogma about what it should be.
scientists only speak this formally in rare occasionally, like when they are trying to discredit a competitor.
The vast majority of the time, when a working scientists says "proved" they understand the epistemic limitations of the terminology.
What theory were the people observing the 1769 transit of Venus trying to falsify? If they weren't doing science, what were they doing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1769_transit_of_Venus_observed...
They were collecting data. The theory had already been worked out at that point, but it required data to be put to use. I think this does broadly fit within the framework of Popperian falsification that OP is describing. But I'd also agree that classification and data gathering, as well as hypthothesis generation are of course all vital parts of the scientific process. It is worth noting though that a surprisingly large number of scientists have issues grokking or putting into action the concept of 'falsifying the null hypothesis'.
Science only involves falsifiable theories != science doesn't involve first gathering data. It means that unfalsifiable theories aren't science.
While "confirmed" is a very strong term, CMBR is an obscenely good piece of evidence that something that is pretty much 99%+ similar to modern theories of the big bang, and it ruled out most other theories.
In a 2005 autobiography, he described some of his work as having "provided strong support for the “Big Bang” interpretation of our earlier discovery". - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1978/penzias/biogr...
Strong support is obviously not the same as confirmation, so I think you're right that he might have disagreed with this word choice.
"settled a debate over the origin and evolution of the universe."
Really?
Yes, until that discovery the consensus was pretty much that it could be either big bang or steady state. Penzias' discovery was a smoking gun that put all but the most stubborn critics (Fred Hoyle was arguably the most prominent) of the big bang theory to rest. These days there is not a single professional cosmologist that doubts the big bang theory as far as I am aware. (Note that by "big bang theory" we mean the theory of the evolution of the universe a fraction of a second after the singularity event.)
I do think there is recently a model that the CMB is not the echo of thd big bang (without necessarily disclaiming the big bang itself). Cosmology will have to answer that one in the next decade.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018MNRAS.478..283V/abstra....
Oh yeah, a assuming a universe that is cyclically expanding and contracting is so much better than the one time expansion of the big bang:
Obviously, the idea of the universe oscillating within a given range of redshifts is a mere hypothesis full of open questions. The primary question is: which forces drive the oscillations. Without proposing any solution, we can just speculate that [gravitational collapse] might play a central role in this model [p 16, ibid]
That's kind of irrelevant though. You could still have a big bang, just without the CMB as it's signature. In any case the fact that modeling cosmic dust backwards through time produces a redshifted black body radiation that more or less looks like the CMB is something you can't just dismiss. Or else you're not being scientific, you're just being religious.
It's very much not: "modeling cosmic dust backwards through time" necessarily means you have assumed a cosmology, and in particular this result of the BB spectra from just dust absolutely needs that the cosmology is cyclic because that's the only way to get the constant densities that starts the entire derivation.
No, modeling cosmic dust backwards in time is just rolling back the expansion parameters that are well accepted and based on observation.
I find it interesting that comments questioning the validity of Big Bang are not popular here. Quoting Sabrine,
"The Big Bang is the simplest explanation to the universe that we know, and it's probably wrong"
Replace Big Bang with almost every theory ever and the statement is still true.
Why does anyone give a damn about Youtubers.
Everybody knows it's wrong in the sense that Newton's theory is wrong, and that Einstein's theory is probably wrong. Models get refined in physics all the time, that's how it works.
The BBT has a lot of issues in the details, but the overall picture - that around 14 billion years ago the universe was in a hot dense state and has been expanding ever since - is absolutely undisputed since Penzias' discovery. We can literally see the expansion, and we can even see the glimmer of that initial hot dense state. That's exactly the CMB discovered by the Penzias and Wilson.
Yeah… it’s a eulogy given to the general public. Sometimes they say nice things even if they aren’t 100% accurate.
Confirmed how. It is a theory. CMBR discovery is not confirmation of anything other than the existence of CMBR
“it’s just a theory” slur is misleading and conflates two separate meanings of the word theory.
There is lots of mysteries related to big bang, but steady-state model of cosmic evolution has been falsified. In early 1960s statistical evidence from radio astronomy ruled out the steady-state model.
But isn't saying that the big bang theory has been "confirmed" also misleading? That seems like a fair critique to me. Not to dismiss anybody's work, but it is important to express scientific accomplishments and advancements accurately (especially to a public that is vulnerable to manipulation by sources they deem to be authoritative).
All words are misleading without appropriate knowledge and reading level. If the meaning is constantly lost for you when reading science or economics, it's not because the writers are bad, but because your reading level and general knowledge level are not high enough to read those articles.
Human language has syntax, semantics and pragmatics. HN comment section has disproportionate number terminology nitpickers and misunderstanders who somehow have problems with semantics and pragmatics. They represent a small minority of HN users. I suspect many of them are teens or young adults and improve over time.
I suspect many of them are teens or young adults and improve over time
Given my experience with crackpots from my time as a cosmology grad student, my money is more on retired old men, in particular engineers.
Either way, it's always voices from the sidelines who try to tell actual scientists how to do their job.
"Confirmed" is often just used as "found significant supporting evidence for", since there's no actual "true" confirmation of any theory.
Not in any very important sense no. The existing big bang theory made a big headline prediction and that prediction turned out to be correct, the theory is confirmed in this respect.
Later experiments might see some details in the measured result the theory didn't get right, but this doesn't invalidate the theory at the coarse level because at that precision the new measurements still agree with the old predictions: the theory is still confirmed in the sense that its predictions roughly match measurements.
Occasionally it happens that a new measurement of some detail comes up with a result that the existing theory cannot be easily modified to accommodate: only this represents a true challenge in the sense that if some competing theory easily explains the new result along with all the old ones that will then become the "correct" one.
Without this other competitor, a theory found to not accommodate the latest experimental results will be kept on indefinitely as the correct and confirmed one, but only used within clearly delimited context.
Hasn't the big bang basically been disproven as a theory?
Hasn't the big bang basically been disproven as a theory?
No. That isn't to say that there aren't issues with it. Notably that it explains many of the observable qualities of the universe today with high accuracy, with our current instruments.
Due to some inconsistencies with what is observed across great distance (and time) and the need to violate a number of principles (thermodynamics and speed of light) during the inflation, there are other theories[1]. It is recognized that the BB theory has serious problems that cannot be empirically tested.
Therefore, the theory holds as long as it continues to be useful in describing our local space.
[1] I prefer the idea of a localized small bang as opposed to a universal big bang
The speed of light is not violated with inflation. Space can expand faster than the speed of light without matter needing to travel faster than speed of light.
Do you information on localized small bang theory? I thought that the way the Big Bang avoids being a black hole is by having gravity pull in all directions (isotropy). Wouldn’t a local bang just be a black hole?
The original Big Bang theory is considered incorrect. The addition of "inflation" makes it compatible with current evidence, and we still colloquially call that theory the "Big Bang" theory, so... no, it's not been disproven.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/blinking-white-guy
You'll have to provide more context for why you say that.
He was the VP of research at Bell Labs during my postdoc 30+ years ago. Imposing in stature both as a scientist and as a person. RIP.
Would that have been in the late 80s-90s? I wonder how Bell Labs was doing then, after the AT&T breakup.
Looks like people there had much fun: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/labscam.html
Yes. I was there from late 1990 to late 1993. The Labs were struggling to adjust after the breakup which was many years before. AT&T had Bell Labs, the Regional Bell Operating Companies had BellCore. Both were paid by taxing business orgs who were struggling to compete with MCI, Sprint, and other communication companies that did no research. None of the business orgs liked paying the tax and wanted results to show for whatever they did pay.
Penzias had put Bell Labs on notice that it would have to get more applied while still maintaining the research excellence. There wasn't much direction on how to do both. The philosophy regarding any problem was, "You're smart, figure it out." Additionally, he felt the future was in software so the physical and materials science orgs where I resided felt the pinch that much harder.
Nevertheless, my management pressed the case for physical sciences hard and at often substantial personal and professional cost. The postdocs were well shielded from all this. No matter what was playing out at the higher levels, the doors stayed open and just about everyone was up for a discussion of whatever was on our minds. Go in with a middlin' idea, come out with three better ones.
RIP Arno. Here's the video and write up of the gag Dennis Ritchie and Rob Pike pulled on him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxMKuv0A6z4
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/labscam.html
Edit: just wanted to say the hum of the universe dulled a little bit with his passing
Yes Arno was very interesting! Gonna read up more on the Big Bang and his work now, thanks!
Rob Pike's post about Arno on Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@robpike/111803732223395172
The title could be about Cosmic Microwave Background radiation instead of talking about Big Bang Theory. Yes, he and Wilson discovered it.
In early 1960s statistical evidence from radio astronomy ruled out the steady-state model.
Read in plaintext: https://trimread.org/articles/209/text
Cool page, but would like the header to remain in the article.
How do you confirm a theory?
I went to one of his lectures in Atlanta in the early 1980s. I wasn't sure what to expect, but he was very interesting and approachable. Wonderful stories and explanation of his research, and afterwards he just sat on the stage and a bunch of us Ga Tech geeks surrounded him and we had an impromptu Q&A session. Very memorable experience.
RIP Arno
We cannot confirm Big Bang theory until we figure out inflation more.
It's clear by the title an athiest wrote this.
Why couldn't god have created the big bang? Science has nothing to do with religion.
A scientific theory cannot really be "confirmed." The word choice is suspect. The Big Bang Theory is consistent with many properties of the known universe, but cannot adequately explain others. Claiming it is the ground truth takes a leap of faith, which however small compared to religion, requires a measure of faith as implied.
What does that have to do with atheism? You don't think that people who believe in God sometimes makes mistakes when picking words?
It begs the question as to whether the author of the title actually believes the Big Bang is confirmed from a scientific point of view. That would suggest an atheistic belief.
You're conflating confirmation with some type of irrefutable proof which is both pedantic and plain wrong.
The job of people who write titles like this is to be very pedantic about word choice. I’ll have to disagree with you on this being a “plain wrong” interpretation of the given wording.
It's not the job of the people who write titles to be pedantic although it is reasonable of them to expect most readers to know the difference between confirmation and absolute proof. The problem here is not with the title.
If they were targeting an adequately scientifically trained audience, sure. I don’t think they are.
That doesn't have much to do with it, you're just mistaken about the (fairly common) usage 'confirms theory'.
The Bible states that God created light, stars and earth in seven days; on day 3 He created the earth, on day 4 the stars. That seems rather incompatible with the big bang theory.
Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents, definitely not flamewar tangents, and especially definitely not religious flamewar tangents. That's the last thing we need here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The semantics of the title seem off and written by a non-scientist. A scientific theory cannot be proven, so the significant word choice of “confirm” is poor.
Why not? Are you making some oblique reference to Popperian refutationalism or is your point just that it’s very difficult to 100% prove something, so often it’s more a matter of a significant updating of priors? If it’s the latter, using “proof” doesn’t seem like the worst shorthand to me. Anything more involved would go over the head of the average nytimes reader.
Evidence of [x] is not proof of [x], but in this specific case the claim is particularly unreasonable.
Because while a cosmic microwave background radiation is something that would be expected from a Big Bang, its actual reality is weird and contradicted previous expectations. It has to do with casual connectivity. "A" can only possibly influence "B" if A could reach B at the speed of light. But the relative homogeneity of our universe is suggestive that parts of the universe which should not be casually connected, are causally connected.
So this discovery quickly led to the invention of cosmic inflation [1] whereby the early expansion of the universe is said to have dramatically accelerated well beyond the speed of light, and then slowed down - in order to enable these regions of space to become causally connected. No possible means or mechanism have been suggested, so it remains nothing but a rather inelegant hack to try to make what we observe fit a preexisting hypothesis that it largely contradicted.
As experiments to try to provide supporting evidence for inflation have also turned up negative, it's also becoming one of those contemporary model driven hypotheses that requires ever more exotic physics to even make it possible, as each failed prediction gets assimilated into the model to make it keep fitting what we see. Just add more epicycles. [2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Motivati...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_hypothesis
I assumed the average New York Times reader is above average in intellect and could appreciate an irrefutable word choice, like “advanced” in place of “confirmed.” I could be wrong.
Yes, journalists aren't scientists.
Shame that instead of highlighting one of the many great things that this man did, they use incorrect phraseology to claim he did something he didn’t do.
Yes, that's why the title doesn't say "Physicist proves Big Bang theory"
What does it means to confirm a theory?
It's unscientific nonsense.
What are you all on about? This phrase is used all the time in science.
Since Karl Popper we take science to be the development of falsifiable theories and experimentation to show them to be false (therefore ruled out) or not-false, therefore still theories. We don't say that General Relativity is proven -- we say that it is in agreement with all experiments carried out so far.
One does not 'confirm' the Big Bang theory. One finds evidence that does not disprove it. Or one finds evidence that does disprove it, then someone (possibly the same person or persons) elaborates a variant of that theory, or a whole sale replacement of it.
Note the prominence of the need for falsifiability in the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
https://www.google.com/search?q=karl+popper+falsification+qu...
So, yes, speaking of how a Nobel physicist "confirmed" the Big Bang [theory] is unscientific nonsense. What should one expect though? It's a headline in the New York Times, not Nature!
My above comment is at -3, which normally I'd not care about, but collective ignorance of what the scientific method is is a bit depressing.
You're acting like the people posting here don't know that about theories. Language works within contexts, and the context for "confirm" in science reporting tends to be finding strong supporting evidence. Since the discovery of the CMB ruled out a large chunk of the other theories and left the Big Bang as the leading candidate, it obviously fits the finding strong supporting evidence case.
We see similar titles every once in a while when someone does a new kind of test for relativity too.
"confirms theory" I know it's valid, but it sounds weird
I agree. Makes me think someone over-spiced the headline
How is it valid? "Conforms" to theory would be OK. "Tends to confirm" would be OK. "Fails to disprove" would be OK. We don't "confirm" theories. We don't "prove" theories.
Tired light forever!!!