My borther uses models at work, him being a hydrogeologist.
I can hear him becoming acerbic over the phone every time I point out that 1) "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy" and that the same goes for models for the same reasons, and B) SiSo as a factor is hidden by using a model, meaning that any errors be they ever so small tends to become cascade-failures further donw the causal chain of events starting with the model.
My wife's grandfather has the perfect example, though this was around 1995 or so and he was angry about young chemists and biologists using the given MOL estimated and written on the bottle by the manufacturer. He demonstrated several times that when dealing with certain processes (he was a professor of biomedicine, cellular "stuff" and so on) you can't round off the MOL at say the 10th decimal point- an error of ppm can be huge given certain substances and their effect on/in the body.
You need to know the exact amount. Then it got technical and my jaw started slacking off, and it's been almost 30 years.
Point is, no-one would dare venture up into the Eifel tower, had Eifel used a "good enough" model for the tensile strength of the materials used, torque, wind effects, et c. You can't build anything like that by rounding.
As for physics, well our 7th-9th grade (age 13-16) teachers killed any interest stone cold. "Read pages ## in the book, then fill out the corresponding questionnaire".
-"Miss, I don't understand this thing with Ohm and resistances?"
-"Read the pages in the book again".
Not to mention that those of us who forged ahead were told to sit back, do nothing and wait for the class to catch up. Differentiating kids in compulsory school by IQ, skill, ambiton, ability and so on was illegal and being better than the average was seenwith suspicion by many - and still is. Not tall poppy-syndrome so much as nail what sticks out gets hammered down-syndrome.
Anyway, when I saw it read"jiggly" I thought it was going to be about the canadian shop class teacher.
To be fair, I did spend a bit of time wondering how I could work the RCMP (the Royal Canadian Mounted Prosthetic) into the piece, but eventually decided against it.
Ah, f**k, I’m just going to back to bed after reading through that piece. 0500hrs is way too early for my jiggly brain to wrap itself around all those x,y,z’s! 😵💫😵💫
I failed at becoming a physics major in college, when I got to the quantum course. I used to think it was because I wasn't smart enough to understand stuff like Hamiltonian equations (or whatever the heck they were called -- this was almost 50 years ago). But thanks to you, I now understand that it was because physics is a white supremacist thing, and I was unconsciously rejecting all those colonial imperialist ideas. What a relief!
But seriously, I am looking forward to your essay about quantum. I still try to understand it from time to time, and fail each time. I have come to think of it as a way to predict stuff at a subatomic level, but it makes no intuitive sense to me. In other words, the "why" of it all is too much for my poor little brain to understand.
I'm an engineer, and greatly enjoyed this trip back to high school physics classes. Your presentation was much more engaging than anything that was ever put to me back in the day!
I did actually get 3/4 of the way through a long piece on QM, but Substack managed to lose it (everything except the title got deleted). I have no idea how that happened because usually the pieces are (automatically) saved very frequently during the writing, and I've never had that problem before.
I remember starting my Numerical Analysis course at uni thinking "this is going to be boring". But it turned out to be one of the most interesting courses - some really fascinating (and very ingenious) techniques have been developed to get numerical approximations - and yes, deal with accumulation of errors.
I found it fun - even though I never went down a computational physics route.
If you think about it, numerical modeling is just one instance of hypothesis testing, and the error term is a measure of just how far off the mark your hypothesis is. Continually working to reduce the size of the error term is, a little metaphorically speaking, what science and everyday human thinking are all about. These days, of course, a whole lot of human effort seems to be going into increasing the magnitude of the error term instead of reducing it.
Excellent! Since you mentioned packing paper: there are physicists researching the physics of crumpled paper, which is both very complex (there are local and global effects, no chance of modeling this with a single differential equation) and very relevant (finding cheaper and more effective ways of protecting goods for transport is a billion-dollar market).
In this and the previous post, you have alluded to climate model predictions having a record that is “not great,” or “crap.”
Could you give some examples of what you have in mind?
Obviously you aren’t talking about weather forecasts (I pray), but I’m also hoping for more than “But back in the 1970s they said we were in a new ice age!”. And there are vastly more media reports of “science says hurricanes are getting worse,” than instances of scientists actually saying that.
Still, this isn’t meant to be a gotcha. I just want to know what you’re referring to, since by your own account, you haven’t been following climate science closely.
You make a fair point here Kapok - more than fair.
It ought to be a 'gotcha' because I did lump covid and climate models together in an incautious way!
I probably should have said that "it is my current understanding that climate models are also a bit crap" - or some such thing.
There's no specific thing here - just a general sense of this claim being made, and I haven't seen any adequate refutation of it. I do recall reading a piece a while back which talked about there being 2 main huge climate models (I think it was 2 - no longer sure I remember this at all correctly) and how they needed continual tweaking to keep them in step with the data.
In one sense, I would expect a degree of tweaking being necessary - after all, there are going to unpredictable events (like volcanic eruptions) that will have a climate impact.
However, I think I'm right in saying that these models are not robust (in the sense of being very accurate) at making long-term predictions. Yet, the **policy** decisions are being made to avoid a 'future' that is said to be going to occur on a timescale longer than the predictive capability of the models. That's worrying (if this perception of mine is right).
If you do go ahead and study more about climate science on a professional scientist’s level over the coming year, I hope you’ll check in with us about what you learn.
It’s also fun to read and write about the scoundrels devouring resources and destroying society in the name of saving the world, which I think pretty much describes where mainstream environmentalism has landed, but please keep in mind the distinction between that and real climate science. Although without doubt the agenda feeds back into the science, resulting in much corruption, I think it is an error to fail to distinguish between the two.
My borther uses models at work, him being a hydrogeologist.
I can hear him becoming acerbic over the phone every time I point out that 1) "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy" and that the same goes for models for the same reasons, and B) SiSo as a factor is hidden by using a model, meaning that any errors be they ever so small tends to become cascade-failures further donw the causal chain of events starting with the model.
My wife's grandfather has the perfect example, though this was around 1995 or so and he was angry about young chemists and biologists using the given MOL estimated and written on the bottle by the manufacturer. He demonstrated several times that when dealing with certain processes (he was a professor of biomedicine, cellular "stuff" and so on) you can't round off the MOL at say the 10th decimal point- an error of ppm can be huge given certain substances and their effect on/in the body.
You need to know the exact amount. Then it got technical and my jaw started slacking off, and it's been almost 30 years.
Point is, no-one would dare venture up into the Eifel tower, had Eifel used a "good enough" model for the tensile strength of the materials used, torque, wind effects, et c. You can't build anything like that by rounding.
As for physics, well our 7th-9th grade (age 13-16) teachers killed any interest stone cold. "Read pages ## in the book, then fill out the corresponding questionnaire".
-"Miss, I don't understand this thing with Ohm and resistances?"
-"Read the pages in the book again".
Not to mention that those of us who forged ahead were told to sit back, do nothing and wait for the class to catch up. Differentiating kids in compulsory school by IQ, skill, ambiton, ability and so on was illegal and being better than the average was seenwith suspicion by many - and still is. Not tall poppy-syndrome so much as nail what sticks out gets hammered down-syndrome.
Anyway, when I saw it read"jiggly" I thought it was going to be about the canadian shop class teacher.
To be fair, I did spend a bit of time wondering how I could work the RCMP (the Royal Canadian Mounted Prosthetic) into the piece, but eventually decided against it.
Ah, f**k, I’m just going to back to bed after reading through that piece. 0500hrs is way too early for my jiggly brain to wrap itself around all those x,y,z’s! 😵💫😵💫
lol
It's not everyone's cup of tea, that's for sure
Sorry for the brain ache!
Thank you for this, well done.
I failed at becoming a physics major in college, when I got to the quantum course. I used to think it was because I wasn't smart enough to understand stuff like Hamiltonian equations (or whatever the heck they were called -- this was almost 50 years ago). But thanks to you, I now understand that it was because physics is a white supremacist thing, and I was unconsciously rejecting all those colonial imperialist ideas. What a relief!
But seriously, I am looking forward to your essay about quantum. I still try to understand it from time to time, and fail each time. I have come to think of it as a way to predict stuff at a subatomic level, but it makes no intuitive sense to me. In other words, the "why" of it all is too much for my poor little brain to understand.
QM is a weird one - I loved it precisely for that reason. It was like a puzzle waiting to be solved.
I still don't understand QM, but now I don't understand it to a deeper level than I didn't understand it at uni.
I'm an engineer, and greatly enjoyed this trip back to high school physics classes. Your presentation was much more engaging than anything that was ever put to me back in the day!
I'm looking forward to the QM post.
Thanks
I did actually get 3/4 of the way through a long piece on QM, but Substack managed to lose it (everything except the title got deleted). I have no idea how that happened because usually the pieces are (automatically) saved very frequently during the writing, and I've never had that problem before.
All those error terms: that's where all the fun comes from.
I remember starting my Numerical Analysis course at uni thinking "this is going to be boring". But it turned out to be one of the most interesting courses - some really fascinating (and very ingenious) techniques have been developed to get numerical approximations - and yes, deal with accumulation of errors.
I found it fun - even though I never went down a computational physics route.
If you think about it, numerical modeling is just one instance of hypothesis testing, and the error term is a measure of just how far off the mark your hypothesis is. Continually working to reduce the size of the error term is, a little metaphorically speaking, what science and everyday human thinking are all about. These days, of course, a whole lot of human effort seems to be going into increasing the magnitude of the error term instead of reducing it.
Excellent! Since you mentioned packing paper: there are physicists researching the physics of crumpled paper, which is both very complex (there are local and global effects, no chance of modeling this with a single differential equation) and very relevant (finding cheaper and more effective ways of protecting goods for transport is a billion-dollar market).
In this and the previous post, you have alluded to climate model predictions having a record that is “not great,” or “crap.”
Could you give some examples of what you have in mind?
Obviously you aren’t talking about weather forecasts (I pray), but I’m also hoping for more than “But back in the 1970s they said we were in a new ice age!”. And there are vastly more media reports of “science says hurricanes are getting worse,” than instances of scientists actually saying that.
Still, this isn’t meant to be a gotcha. I just want to know what you’re referring to, since by your own account, you haven’t been following climate science closely.
You make a fair point here Kapok - more than fair.
It ought to be a 'gotcha' because I did lump covid and climate models together in an incautious way!
I probably should have said that "it is my current understanding that climate models are also a bit crap" - or some such thing.
There's no specific thing here - just a general sense of this claim being made, and I haven't seen any adequate refutation of it. I do recall reading a piece a while back which talked about there being 2 main huge climate models (I think it was 2 - no longer sure I remember this at all correctly) and how they needed continual tweaking to keep them in step with the data.
In one sense, I would expect a degree of tweaking being necessary - after all, there are going to unpredictable events (like volcanic eruptions) that will have a climate impact.
However, I think I'm right in saying that these models are not robust (in the sense of being very accurate) at making long-term predictions. Yet, the **policy** decisions are being made to avoid a 'future' that is said to be going to occur on a timescale longer than the predictive capability of the models. That's worrying (if this perception of mine is right).
Your reply is very much appreciated.
If you do go ahead and study more about climate science on a professional scientist’s level over the coming year, I hope you’ll check in with us about what you learn.
It’s also fun to read and write about the scoundrels devouring resources and destroying society in the name of saving the world, which I think pretty much describes where mainstream environmentalism has landed, but please keep in mind the distinction between that and real climate science. Although without doubt the agenda feeds back into the science, resulting in much corruption, I think it is an error to fail to distinguish between the two.