From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:53:26 -0400 (CLT)
In the shower this morning I was trying to think how I would answer if someone asked for advice about investing in Steorn (the company claiming to have invented a perpetual motion machine). I think the first thing to do is be completely open and admit that there are no certainties. We do not - as many people have commented - know everything. There is always room for the unexpected. But if I am dealing with a businessman - someone with money to invest - that's OK. That's normal life. What is important is the risk and likely return. Now the likely return on free energy has the possibility to be huge. So if you have money to throw away, it might seem like a no-brainer: the loss won't hurt, so there's nothing to lose. And there's no real answer to that, except that if you've got so much money that you really can throw it away - that money is essentially meaningless - then what do you need more for? Leaving that more moral argument aside, the scenario where physics can help is where the money isn't free; where you want to make an intelligent call on the risks involved. So we're reduced to a question something like: why do I, armed with an understanding of human nature that is, I guess, average, and an understanding of physics that is pretty damn good think the chances that this is a scam much more likely than the chances this is a scientific breakthrough? I want to start with just the human nature side of things. As a baseline we can look at the relative number of scams and scientific breathroughs. If true, this would be a monumental, earth shattering, mind blowing scientific breakthrough. The kind of thing that happens once a century, say. That's pretty rare. In contrast, people are always scamming. I get spam email every day from people that make money by lying. And it doesn't even have to be intentional. People get things wrong by mistake even more often. This weekend I will be working on my kitchen because the guy I paid to check it against official standards gave me the wrong advice. This is normal life. The baseline, before we get to any details of physics, is that there's already a strong bias towards human falibility. People screw up and straight down lie all the time. In contrast, scientific revolutions come once or twice a century. So if someone makes amazing claims they're probably wrong. It's a pity - we'd all like free energy - but that's life. But still, can we do better? Can we say whether this particular scientific claim is more or less likely than any other? I think we can, and I think the conclusion is that Steorn's claim is particularly unlikely. To justify that, at last, I need to talk about physics. The argument I will use is that physics is much more interconnected (holisitic) than most people believe. That means that there's a relatively well defined body of "common sense physics" that is extremely stable. This explains not just why Steorn's claim is likely wrong, but also why physicists end up having to do extremely complicated, expensive experiments to make new discoveries. And since that seems like I am a physicist arguing that physicists should be given lots of money then I'll finish with a pesonal comment arguing that, instead, it means physics is largely no longer worth investing in. It's a frustrating fact of modern life that "science" is criticised for being too narrow minded. "Science" is contrasted with more "holistic" approaches which inter-connect many different aspects of complex systems. This is frustrating because, on a very basic level, physics *is* holistic. And for many physicists this is a beautiful, "deep" result that says something amazing about nature, and which makes the subject so interesting. What do I mean about physics being holistic? I mean that the explanations physics gives for the way the world works tend to repeat and inter-connect. So phenomena that seem completely unconnected are, in fact, closely related. The reason why this is overlooked is easy to understand, but somewhat paradoxical: the relationships become clearer and simpler as you use more and more maths. For some strange reason, mathematics seems to be a natural language for describing the world. This is unfortunate, because it means that important ideas about our environment are best expressed in a language that few people speak well. Imagine you are walking around a mountain, following a narrow, rambling goat's trail. The trail goes up and down, switches back on itself, winds around rocks, cuts through streams. You doggedly keep walking - eventually you get back to where you started. So, after folling this complex, difficult path, you come back to where you first began. What is more obvious than the following fact: where you started, and where you finished, which are at the same place, have the same height. That is so obvious it sounds as though I am not saying anything. Of course you are at the same height - it's the same place. And yet. In words, that is a nice story. In maths, in physics, it can be made into a much more general rule. The same maths that "proves" something so obvious about walking round a mountain is the same maths that says that Steorn cannot make energy by moving magnets. You can perhaps see how the ideas carry across: instead of describing the person, you describe the movement of the magnet; two magnets pulling towards each other is described by the same maths as running downhill. This is the power of physics: that it connects something as intuitively obvious as walking around a mountain with moving magnets in Steorn's secret technology. Please don't think that my argument against Steorn stops here. My case is more subtle. Let's review what we are trying to do. We're trying to get a handle on how likely it is that Steorn's claims are a likely breakthrough. Obviously, any breakthrough is going to seem wild and crazy. If it didn't it wouldn't be a breakthrough! In other words, if there is a breakthrough, then something changes in what I just said. Somehow the maths has to change so that moving magnets is not the same as walking round a mountain. So what we need to ask ourselves is: how is the maths likely to change? Given that breakthroughs do occur, what do they look like? If we are going to have a scientific revolution, can we predict where it will happen? One way to understand physics is to compare it to language. If you're reading this, you understand English. But you understand some words better than others. Words like "shoe" or "run" are easy. It would be hard to imagine a world in which you had misunderstood the meaning of "shoe". Compare that with, say, the word "secular". Yesterday I was reading a paper on the "Secular Evolution of Galaxies". The title made no sense to me - I thought "secular" was something to do with being independent of religion. Turns out it can also mean "long term". I'm just stating the obvious - some words are "plain" and some are "fancy". If someone told you that you had misunderstood a fancy word, well, no surprise. Why is this? It's because the fancy words are rare. You use the plain workds every day. Everyone uses them. Everyone is clear on what they mean. But the fancy words are used less frequently and so are more uncertain. The same thing works in the language of maths and physics. There's plain old physics and fancy new physics. And just like in language the fancy parts are where change is most likely. So we need to find some way of separating "plain" and "fancy" physics. If Steorn are claiming a breakthrough in fancy physics then we are more likely to give them credence. A change to plain, old, well-understood physics, however, seems less likely. Plain physics is everyday physics. It's what I called, earlier, "common sense physics". This "basic" physics is pretty solid, boring stuff, and it covers a lot of ground. That's because we've been doing physics for a long time. The common phenomena are well understood. New ideas are pushed towards the edges, to extreme conditions. But, you might say, is this true of revolutions? Aren't revolutions important because they change plain old physics as well? The answer, surprisingly, is "no". Plain old, common-sense physics has stayed pretty much the same through the last three revolutions in physics (special relativity, quantum mechanics, general relativity). It turns out that even when we get a major revolution, the central core of "everyday physics" stays pretty much the same. Sure, the fine details change slightly, but the changes are really, really small. Take special relativity for example. It's amazingly cool, but it only really changes anything when you're moving at near the speed of light. So, for example, special relativity predicts that when I move my watch will get out of time. But the change is tiny in everyday life: if I get in my car and drive down the road my watch "loses" around a millionth of a millionth of a second every hour. That's nothing. In practical terms that just doesn't matter. So special relativity - which was a huge revolution in physics - had very little impact on plain old common-sense physics. And the same is likely to be true for future revolutions, because we already understand the boring stuff very well indeed. That doesn't mean that special relativity is not important. Through devices like atomic bombs it can affect us all. But the very nature of atomic bombs is extreme - they are hot and noisy and generally unpleasant to be near when they go bang. They do not fit into a plastic box in a museum for a nice demonstration. And this is common knowledge amongst physicists. This is why researchers, who are all trying like crazy to find something new, are so obsessed with extreme conditions. Instead of doing experiments with strings and rules, like I remember from school, they build huge atom smashing devices. It's not because they want to waste money - it's because fancy physics is where the new stuff will be found. Another extreme is the very small. But, again, "extreme" is the important factor - we're not talking "small as a button" (or, in the case of Steorn, "jeweller's bearings", but so small that complex machines are needed as an interface. Machines requiring technology and expertise that aren't common to web developers (Steorn's original business). So the case against Steorn is that it's just not crazy enough. They don't require thousands of cubic metres of some strange gas, or huge energy sources, or strange particles - just a bunch of magnets. That's the kind of revolution we had 150 years ago. We've already done that - the ground is bare, exhausted. Finally, the corollary of all this is clear enough: it's unlikely that revolutionary advances in physics will affect us much. At least not in an every-day kind of way. Nothing like electric lighting did, for example. Instead, any "products" are likely to be extreme - a new way of killing us all, perhaps. ---------- I wrote the above a while ago, but never posted it. Today I was reminded when I stumbled across this - http://dispatchesfromthefuture.com/2007/07/first_glimpse_of_an_orbo.html - which is kind-of pathetic in its ordinariness.