For most of my career I have viewed confusion as a good thing. It means there’s something I haven’t understood, that there’s something new to learn. I always found that exciting.
Science is often portrayed as being ‘certain’ but, in fact, what draws most (research) scientists in, is not certainty but uncertainty; it’s the thrill of figuring something new out, however small.
Anomalies, stuff that doesn’t fit, are our drugs of choice and we’re always looking for the next fix.
Most of the time we’re adding ornamentation to an already magnificent edifice that seems stable and certain, but occasionally an Einstein will pop up and exploit those anomalies to bring the palace down and to re-build an even more magnificent structure.
What is “certainty” in science?
There are, it turns out, quite a few things we can be ‘certain’ of. Let me explain.
One of the examples you learn when doing introductory physics is that of the pendulum. You use Newton’s laws to figure out the motion of the pendulum bob. You will draw pictures like the following
and work out the components of the force along the string and perpendicular to it. The force here is provided by gravity which is acting straight down. The ‘straight down’ force can be thought of as being ‘made up’ of two separate forces; one acting along the string and one acting perpendicular to it. This is the beauty of vectors. Each component (the along and perpendicular) has its own equation of motion - and you can solve the resultant system to figure out the ‘period’ of oscillation, T.
This T is just the time it takes, when you pull back the pendulum bob a bit and let go, for the bob to return to its starting position.
When you do the math1, you find that it depends on the length of the string, L, and also another constant, g, which is the acceleration due to gravity (at the location of the pendulum).
We can rearrange the terms algebraically so that g is on the left. This gives us
This means that we can measure g by using a pendulum and measuring its length and its period. Many millions of tedious hours have been spent by students across the world doing this very thing.
What you get is a number for g that’s in the region of 10 metres per second squared (it’s just the second that is squared).
Doesn’t matter what school or college you’re in, wherever in the world you are, you’ll get (roughly) the same value for this constant.
There are lots of other equations that feature g, describing things that aren’t pendulums. We can use those equations in the same way. Get the ‘g’ on one side of the equation and measure the stuff on the other side of the equation.
Doesn’t matter what system we use (a pendulum or something else), when we try to measure g we get the same value popping out.
This degree of consistency across a wide range of really quite different experiments gives us a lot of certainty that there really is this important constant we call g and that it has a particular value (which we get closer and closer to as our experiments become ‘better’).
Our understanding of the ‘forces’ involved has changed a bit, though. In the Newtonian scheme we have a massive object (the earth) pulling the smaller object towards it2. In the Einstein scheme of things the massive object bends the spacetime around itself and the smaller object follows the ‘shortest path’, the geodesic, in this warped spacetime.
The change in our perspective on what gravity “is”, however, does not alter the fact that very different experiments give the same answers when measuring this g.
Data, unless fraudulent, is never wrong. We might have designed a crappy experiment, or the equipment we use might be going a bit doo-lally - but there’s always going to be a reason for why the data is what it is. Figuring out all of the reasons for why a particular data set is what it is, is where the action is, really.
In physics experiments the general rule is to try to control as many variables as you can (all of them would be nice) and just let one vary, so you can observe the effect of just that one variable.
Nice. Clean. Easy.
At least in principle.
In the nice, easy and, oh so tedious, pendulum experiment described above you’d vary the length of the pendulum, L, and measure the associated period, T. You would plot a graph of T squared against L (the variable) - both things you can measure - and the gradient of that graph will give you a value for g.
Experimental physicists spend a lot of time, and have considerable expertise, in designing experiments and conducting experiments to eliminate as many sources of confusion and error as they can.
I’m a theorist and my experimental colleagues at the industrial research lab where I worked had to put ‘restraining orders’ on me so that I wouldn’t get within a certain distance of their labs - stuff seemed to spontaneously stop working whenever I entered a lab. I still remember with some degree of shame when I pointed to, and touched, a particular piece of equipment on the lab bench (it was a particular kind of optical polarization controller). I had just ruined the last week’s worth of work my colleague had put in calibrating that sensitive bit of kit.
If looks could kill . . .
Us theoreticians rely on these hugely talented experimentalists to turn our fevered imaginings, our delirious scribbles, into solid, concrete evidence by generating the highest quality data they are able to.
So, you can understand a bit, perhaps, why I’m so thoroughly disgusted with the piss-poor excuse for ‘scientists’ who signed off on things like “death within 28 days of a positive PCR test is a covid death”.
The collection of shitty data is antithetical to science.
Where was the outcry from the scientific ‘community’?
It was data - it was telling us something. It wasn’t ‘wrong’ - but by using this ‘definition’ these scientific shower of shites, and those who didn’t speak against it, have confounded things beyond our capability to unravel.
It created confusion, and not the good sort of confusion, where utmost clarity was both necessary and warranted.
I’ve never been so ashamed of being a scientist as I have over the last 3 years. I feel it is, now, more a badge of shame than anything else.
That many governments and their official departments of health and statistics have refused to make available to all the data they have collected is also, for me, a cardinal sin.
It’s like an experimental physicist claiming a particular result without publishing the data upon which that result rested.
You cannot trust, and nor should you, any system that is explicitly built upon a lack of transparency.
Trusting our governments, these days, is like trusting Ghislaine Maxwell to safeguard your kids.
It has probably always been thus, but it has become much more obvious over the last 3 years.
It is probably the only thing that is actually transparent in this whole covid farce. It is now utterly transparent how feckless, how unworthy of our trust, our governments actually are.
Confusion when you have good data to work with is great - you stand a chance of figuring something new out.
Confusion caused by crappy data is not good. Not good at all.
In the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi
This isn’t the confusion you’re looking for
The only question remains is whether this confusion was deliberate, or whether the politicians and scientists were just really, really, really, really, shit at their jobs.
These equations are approximations that are reasonably accurate when you only displace the pendulum through a small angle. We’ve also ignored any effects of ‘damping’ - a pendulum does not swing back and forth for ever.
Strictly speaking, the earth and the small object are exerting equal, but opposite, forces upon one another. This equal and opposite force from the small object doesn’t have much impact on the earth, though.
Over Here: Your last sentence/question has one answer: Yes, deliberate. Next task: Prove it.
This is an infection which has metastasized beyond science, or perhaps science is its latest target. When Fauci told us he’d actually lied to us about masks but it was for the most ethical of reasons, the same people who don’t mind having their emotions manipulated by video clips and activist journalists nodded appreciatively at his high morals. This worldview is profoundly misanthropic: if given the honest facts, most people will not come up with the “right” answer, so we must give them the “facts” that will ensure they do. Leagues away, really, from what you would have us understand about that pendulum.