New Results Contradict Long-Held Chemistry Dogma 316
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have found that the long-held belief that only the outer, valence, electrons of an atom interact may be false. Computer simulations have shown that at pressures like those in the center of the Earth the inner, core, electrons of lithium also interact."
Poor choice of words (Score:4, Insightful)
Dogma?
If it was dogma the priests of chemistry would be denying the evidence and punishing its discoverers.
That's the difference between science and religion. For science, new information enlarges our understanding of the world. For religion, new information only threatens sanctified prejudices.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding
Right. That's called the scientific method.
It's kinda the whole point. Do what you can with what you have where you are, and when you find out how you're wrong you adapt.
Goes against chemistry dogma? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? For science I rather find the more we understand, the more we realize we don't understand.
This is true. But this also increases our understanding, not decreases it. known unknowns > unknown unknowns.
Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding.
To a degree, yes. But a new theory doesn't usually completely obviate the old one. Newtons F=MA still works for the vast majority of the time for things us humans are likely to come into contact with, it just begins to break down as you approach the speed of light. Special relativity only becomes relevant in special cases.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? For science I rather find the more we understand, the more we realize we don't understand. Science is full of unexplained holes that theories postulate answers for. 500+ years ago scientists thought the earth was flat. Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding. My 2 cents.
There was a brief period after the loss of Greek natural philosophy from ~500 to ~1000 CE that some (but not all) Western natural philosophers thought the Earth was flat. Other than that, the only time that some prominent Western natural philosophers thought the Earth was flat was prior to Socrates. On the other hand, Chinese philosophers believed the Earth was flat until the 17th century.
It is important to note that Platonic and Aristotelian natural philosophy had a significant effect on people believing that the Earth was a sphere. It is not an understatement to say that Aristotelian cosmology and its derivatives were the dominant cosmologies over the last 2,500 years of human history. And those forms of cosmology cannot work without a spherical Earth.
This entire flat-Earth argument was invented in the 19th century to try to make it look like our ancestors were idiots during the "Dark Ages." It has been discredited many times. I strongly suggest you read this entry [wikipedia.org] as well as studying Aristotelian cosmology (and how medieval scholars and clergy interpreted it) to understand how many of ancestors thought about the universe.
"It leans far left and toward science" (Score:5, Insightful)
For supposedly trying to be neutral, a lot more posts negative of religion or the right get modded up.
Who promised you "neutrality"? Good posts that are negative of religion or the right are just easier to write. You see more of them modded up because more of them are posted.
Instead of whining that everyone is biased, why don't you just mod up posts you agree with if you don't like it, or start writing posts "positive of religion or the right" that are actually insightful or interesting?
Not news. (Score:4, Insightful)
Chemistry's rules exist because they functionally explain chemistry in an accessible manner. Physicists have known that there are more accurate models for a while. Unfortunately, these models are too complex to be useful to someone trying to synthesize a chemical. If this has any significant applications, we will still be seeing classical chemistry for at least a century to come (barring the singularity.)
I mean, it's been almost a century since relativity and quantum mechanics came on the scene, but for the majority of engineering tasks, they remain useless. Between processors hitting the atomic scale and more probes hitting the atmosphere, that may change. However, I don't see chemistry getting to the point where we even begin to see practical chemistry that doesn't rely on classical models. The new ones are simply to complex to use.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. Columbus took the smallest available estimate of the size of the earth, and the largest available estimate of the size of Asia, and decided he could just barely sail there. It's the same kind of cherrypicking of favorable data that got us into Iraq.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, i'm not sure where you were going with all of that.
In any field where we cannot be reasonably certain of the tests we're doing let alone the results, it's going to involve a lot of conjecture. The scientists who refuse to say "We just don't know" are on the path to dogmatic thought not scientific thought. I would expect any field on the fringe of our knowledge to involve a lot of uncertainty and a lot of people being shown wrong....constantly. If they weren't being shown to be wrong constantly, that'd be about as likely as coding a huge project on the fly once with no debugging and have it work the first compile.
I don't see how that aspect of human nature has any bearing on the scientific method though.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:5, Insightful)
Good points. You don't really have "dogmas" in science, just hypotheses and results that you better not question because then you might piss off someone, lose you grants and be blackballed in peer reviews.
Sadly, the peer review system does not shield scientists from flaring egos and grant sucking. It's a great system where it works, and surely beats the old ways of taunting competitors with results they couldn't reproduce as was the case during the Renaissance. But it still breaks sometimes when seniority, ego and money are involved.
And of course, politics now play a role. Take something that should be as neutral as cosmology, namely, climate study. Now it's tainted with politics. That's rather disquieting.
The motto of the Royal Society -- the 500-year old British academy of sciences -- is "Nullius in Verba", meaning you are not compelled by the word of someone else, only by truth. I wish it were the case.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:2, Insightful)
So let me get this straight... In a large enough sample group, all hypotheses are wrong? I don't buy that.
The trouble I keep seeing with most new, Large Format Science (as opposed to opperant, small-format math) is interpritation. Application of one, possible correct thesis to another, possibly wrong thesis. Does this disprove both? No. But how do we know which is correct? Further testing.
Granted, the Zen approach of admitting you know nothing as a path to enlightenment doesn't really work for most scientists, but why does it need to? By your argument, we should simply start by questioning every fundamental concept before every new test. To me, that sounds like reinventing the wheel for the sake of driving to the grocery store.
Funding is so limited lately that any wasted time can severely set back your chances of further funding - this relates to both bad results and wasted resources testing. So if you're not going in with the purpose of re-evaluating accepted ideas, likely your sponsors will be ticked off. Similarely, for the argument elsewhere on the thread; this applkies to all funding, regardless of source, although private sector is a LOT more tight-fisted than government, which does unfortunately play a big part in testing methodology.
It's a sad truth, but there just isn't time to re-evaluate every rule and law. Much as it might be tempting to say it's needed - and new advances could be applied to testing old results - it's not likely to happen until emergant results contradict specific arguments enough to make people sit up and notice.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:3, Insightful)
Easy: he thought they were Indians, he said they were Indians, and nobody else had a direct look at them until much later. As the modern disputants of anthropocentric climate change have shown, all it takes it a little doubt or misinformation (intentional or not) to muddy the waters for a long time. And while the scientists are scratching their heads and giving him the benefit of the doubt, ordinary people become convinced of the easier-to-grasp "fact": rather than there being a giant landmass nobody had any clue about, it seemed more likely that some eggheads had simply miscalculated the circumference of the earth. Heh, stupid eggheads.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:2, Insightful)
What counter-theory to evolution exists (I've heard of some claims that hardly qualify as hypothesises and fail badly on the no-needless-latent-factors requirement but no theories)? What reason is there for a counter-theory? Why bother looking for something when there is no need for it? If you find evidence that really doesn't fit into evolution THEN you look for a theory that would explain the additional evidence too, before then you don't even have a clue which direction you should go into.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not so much anti-science as it is pro-electric-universe, which is a theory favoured by a bunch of kooks.
Re:For the avoidance of doubt (Score:3, Insightful)
When crazies say God / Science / cowboy neal made me do it, chances are they're just crazy (except maybe the cowboy neal part). We should treat them as crazies and not their respective religion, science, or nealism.
Religion, much like science has done a lot for humanity. Don't forget the early humanism movement which came from the church methodically explored science as a means of understanding their religion.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:1, Insightful)
Scientists and even people here on /. rant on about magnetic fields out there in space without mentioning the phenomena that is responsible for the production of magnetic fields i.e. ELECTRIC CURRENTS
What I see in the electric universe detractors is the blatant technique of IGNORING the connection between electric current and magnetism. Also they ignore much of the ongoing research into plasma physics, much of which explains, without any leaps of faith, what we observe in the universe(such as the displays of polar planetary nebula such as Eta Carinae).
What I also see is two groups of extremists, one proposing they have the explanation for all phenomena and the other saying "rubbish!" but offering a universe model consisting of disconnected phenomena. As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if some electric universe proponents are electrical engineers, they are called kooks for a reason. But most are just kooks. Anyway, I would rather learn about electrical engineering from electrical engineers, and cosmology from cosmologists.
Electric universe-proponents are not interested in science. What they are interested in is to prove that there exists a conspiracy against them, by established scientists. Which is true. Established scientists dislike people who lie.
Ridiculous. People who care enough about science to bother ridiculing electric universe proponents generally know about "F=qv x B".
That might be the usual case when rational people debate things for which no objective solution can be found, such as whether it's best to be purely communist, or purely free-market idealist. In science however, we have objective truth. Either you are right, or you are wrong. And most of the time, the kooks are wrong. Especially when they spend more of their time complaining about conspiracies against them than creating useful theories.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:4, Insightful)
If science weren't dogmatic, there would be organizations and grants who would say "yeah we don't really think this Electric Universe idea is true, but let's devise ways to put it to the test anyway".
That is because there is nothing to test. It's up to the electric universe people to come up with actual, verifiable experiments. But they don't do that, they just make vague claims and complain about conspiracies against them.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:3, Insightful)
Science is no more true than religion. They are both flawed perspectives that have proven useful, which is why continue to exist. But none of it is the real truth. They're like tools in a toolbox, and you grab for them when you've got a problem to solve, and sometimes they don't work, so you try to improve them so they will work, then use em for a purpose and stick em back in the toolbox for later. That's it, that's all.
sound barrier, science (Score:1, Insightful)
At one time they thought the sound barrier was impenetrable too!
Actually, the "sound barrier" was considered to be a problem of engineering difficulty and not a fundamental "speed limit" imposed by nature. As an aircraft approaches Mach 1, a formerly inconsequential drag effect called wave drag begins to increase faster with velocity than parasitic drag. Aerodynamicists of the late war- and early post-war period knew about this from theoretical development and actual data from high-speed testing. It is difficult to design an aircraft that has good flight characteristics in subsonic, transonic, and supersonic drag regimes, but even though it had never been done before (never been "proven" if you like), engineering studies showed that it was possible in principle.
But these engineering studies revealed another big problem (given contemporaneous technology): it would require a *way* more powerful engine to overcome wave drag than was either available in the first-generation jets or their descendents. The dissemination of both German jet and rocket technology changed this outlook; the Bell X-1 was a rocket plane. (Remember; the German V-2 reached 3500mph during its development and deployment in 1944, and was still supersonic when it hit the ground at half that speed.) It wasn't until the huge advance of the General Electric J-57 (and the Pratt & Whitney J-79) during the 1950s that routine supersonic flight (of aircraft, anyway) became practicable.
So the "sound barrier" was just thought of as an engineering problem that was "barrier"-like because the design problems were hard and nobody thought there were going to be suitably powerful engines in the forseeable future. It was never thought of as a barrier imposed by nature; that is a popular misconception held by people who are unfamiliar with the subject matter, which is most people.
I know I've encountered this on the web before, but I don't have a link presently. The book "Mach 1 and Beyond" by Larry Reithmaier is very light on the pertinent aerodynamics, but does describe the history correctly (for the most part).
The speed of light is a different kind of "barrier" altogether; examining nature through observation and experiment indicates that the speed of light in vacuum is a bound of nature. If you have mass, you cannot go from sub- to superluminal or vice versa. This is an observation of how nature works, not a "mere theory" in the creationists' pejorative, popular understanding. Further, we know by Bell's theorem that relativity and quantum theory do not create a paradox (the so-called "EPR paradox). Saying "Scientists sure are stoo-pid" or "Scientists sure are arrogant" is just so much hot air from the relativity deniers who 1) don't understand relativity theory, and 2) think that a naive and/or intuitive understanding of nature must be right, uh, just because!. Humanity has tried intuition for a long time on a lot of things, and with physics, it just didn't pan out.
I find the whole "everything that can be discovered has been discovered" attitude of certain sects of the scientific community equally exhausting and detrimental to scientific progress.
It is presumptuous, naive and cocksure of you to assert that "certain sects" ("cosmology", perhaps??) are wrong, you're right, and above all ignorant to assert that that they (cosmologists, of course) claim already to have discovered everything that can be discovered.
A relativity-denying rant might have been intellectually defensible as late as the 1880s, when people started reallizing the problems in reconciling electromagnetism and the Lorentz transformation with a "luminiferous ether", or even as late as about 1915-1920 (because Even though Einstein had made elegant sense of it, this elegant sense could still have been in conflict with nature itself, and the tests were about to be made). Similarly for quantum mechanics and the standard model.
But that is no longer a reasonable posit