Honestly, Doctor, everywhere I go these days I am pursued by science and it's not fair because I gave all that up when I was sixteen and failed my exams! But it won't leave me alone; if it isn't neutrinos whizzing past me faster than the speed of light then its news that the universe is expanding at an even faster rate than first thought. It's giving me a headache and on top of that I'm back into all that wave/particle duality stuff, and really, Doctor, I don't care, I mean, I'm not prejudiced, if these, er, thingies want to swing both sides of the street, it's OK with me. What goes on in the privacy of a scientific laboratory is their business not mine provided they don't frighten the horses!
Alright, I'll calm down and try and explain. As I indicated a few posts back I have returned to The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a superb primer for science dummies attempting (Health Warning: Do Not Try This Alone!) to grapple with the craziness of quantum mechanics. I have reached the dreaded 'two slit experiment' which, I recall from 30 years ago, blew my mind then and has done so again today. Being a lifetime party-pooper, I will attempt to summarise it for anyone who has enjoyed an untroubled life so far, after all,why should I suffer on my own?
Back in 1802, some science swat shone a lamp at a wall into which were cut two slits. He measured the results that appeared on a back wall behind the slitted one. He found that if he kept one slit shut the result, unsurprisingly, was a well-defined square of light on the 'receiving' wall. If he opened both slits, the result was a pattern of bright, semi-bright and dark stripes because the waves of light having passed through two slits they then interfered with each other on the far side, either re-inforcing each other, or cancelling each other out, or half and half, depending on their state when they collided. Again, that's perfectly normal, the swats call it refraction and you can see it operating if you throw two pebbles into a pond and watch the ripples when they meet.
So, that was that, it had been proved without any doubt that energy (light) went about its business in waves and God was in His heaven and all was well with the world - end of story. But this is science and there is never any end to it! Nearly a hundred years later, in marched Herr Prof. Planck who, instead of planning WWI, had been interfering with little particles called electrons which surround the central core of an atom. He found that if you gave them a dose of energy (say, heat) they became very, er, energetic and would glow (with light, that is, not pleasure, do behave yourselves!) but as the heat was removed and they calmed down they would give back the energy they had received in the form of light. Very decent of them, you might think, but Planck noticed, to his personal irritation, I gather, that when they gave back their light it came in the form of specifically-sized quantities, not in continuous waves! I assume that Planck then suffered with a headache of his own because now it looked as though light was not a wave after all but a series of quanta, or particles, a bit like a stream of bullets. They called these light particles - photons.
So the science swats then went back to the double slit experiment. They checked that if you switched on a light source with first one slit open, then two slits open, the results of the old experiment repeated itself. However, if you used the latest gadgetry which allowed you to fire photons one at a time something very strange happened. If you kept one slit shut and fired a photon through the other slit, you could mark the exact place it hit on the photon-sensitive plate at the rear. You could do this several times and each time the photon would hit exactly the same place. But then, without altering anything else, if you opened the second slit and pulled the trigger you would know, by comparison with the plates used in the wave defraction experiment, that the photon would hit one of the dark (non-light) areas. However, when the plate was checked it was found that the photon had, so to speak, altered course and hit somewhere else in a bright area where it was 'allowed' to hit! The question then arose, and with it my headache, how did the bloody photon 'know' that the second slit was open so that it could alter its trajectory?
Answers on a postcard, please, to the Royal Society, not me because I'm off to take a paracetamol and have a lie down! However, I can give you a clue. Apparently, and it's obvious really (he muttered, giggling, as he played with his yo-yo), light is both a wave and a particle, all at the same time, and which is which depends entirely on how you look at it! In other words, there is no objective reality, we make 'reality' when and how we look at things. (Sorry, how's your head . . . ?)
Now for some good scientific news! You will remember - you better or else! - that a few posts back I drew attention to the rather obvious and mundane fact that Al Gore is a lying liar. He recently took over a TV station for a long dissertation on his fanatical beliefs concerning CO2 and global warming. In his film there was one particular experiment that was shown in which two jars, each containing thermometers, were heated. One jar had normal air in it, the other was filled with CO2. The film then 'showed' the CO2 thermometer racing up like a rocket in comparison to the other. The incomparable Anthony Watts of Watt's Up With That? put that particular film sequence through a forensic grinder and showed without doubt that huge chunks of it were 'photoshopped', or, faked, as we might call it! However, Watts has now gone even further and, in the very finest traditions of good science, has attempted to replicate Gore's experiment. Without, of course, any help from the programme makers he has managed to buy exactly the same kit that was used and, following their assertion that:
You can replicate this effect yourself in a simple lab experiment
that is exactly what he tried to do because, as Al Gore himself said,
The deniers claim that it’s some kind of hoax and that the global scientific community is lying to people,” he said. “It’s not a hoax, it’s high school physics.
The dismal, from Gore's point of view, result is summed up by Watts:
Thus, the experiment as designed by Mr. Gore does not show the greenhouse effect as we know it in our atmosphere, it does show how heat transfer works and differences in heat transfer rates with different substances, but nothing else.
Anthony Watts closes his deconstruction of Gore's non-science thus:
Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 experiment is falsified [my emphasis] , and could not work given the equipment he specified. If they actually tried to perform the experiment themselves, perhaps this is why they had to resort to stagecraft in the studio to fake the temperature rise on the split screen thermometers.
The experiment as presented by Al Gore and Bill Nye “the science guy” is a failure, and not representative of the greenhouse effect related to CO2 in our atmosphere. The video as presented, is not only faked in post production, the premise is also false and could never work with the equipment they demonstrated. Even with superior measurement equipment it doesn’t work, but more importantly, it couldn’t work as advertised.
"Falsified"! Key word, that! Absolutely deadly when used in a scientific context. As soon as I read it my eyes flickered towards the various volumes of Karl Popper's work on my bookshelf but I dare not re-open any of them lest my headache turns into a migraine! Please read Watts's piece, and if you have children, let them read it, too, because it is a perfect example of the scientific method in action.
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