The Twitter #weirdscifacts from April 25 – May 8 are below the fold!
ResearchBlogging editor’s selections: snails do it anti-chirally, the Tasmanian fish mystery, and an amateur impact hypothesis
"Dr. SkySkull" selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars. Late posting of editor's selections this week -- life's…
The Giant’s Shoulders #26, “Fools, failures and frauds” edition, is out!
Hear ye, hear ye -- the 26th edition of The Giant's Shoulders, labeled the "Fools, failures and frauds" special edition, is available for perusal at Neurotic Physiology! In this edition…
Tolman goes silly for similitude! (1914)
This post is for the special “fools, failures and frauds” edition of The Giant’s Shoulders.
The early 20th century was clearly an exciting time to be a physicist. In 1905, Einstein published his special theory of relativity, radically revising human concepts of space and time. In the same year, and the same issue of the Annalen der Physik, Einstein really sparked the “quantum revolution” with his explanation of the photoelectric effect, an explanation that would scramble existing preconceptions of the nature of light and matter and would eventually shake the deterministic foundations of physical theory.
By the teen years of the 1900s, it must have seemed to many physicists that no idea was too crazy to possibly be true! Furthermore, the simplicity and elegance of Einstein’s relativity must have suggested to scientists that the secrets of the universe remaining to be discovered would be of the same sort of “beautifully obvious” form.
One researcher who was seduced by this sort of thinking was Richard C. Tolman. In 1914, he published a paper on a new physical principle that he referred to as “the principle of similitude”. In Tolman’s own words, his principle represented a new form of “relativity of size”, which “provides a very simple and general method for obtaining conclusions as to the form of functional relations connecting physical magnitudes.”
Tolman’s theory was bold, it was powerful… and it didn’t really work out. It is a great example of a failed theory, and even more fascinating because its proponent was no crackpot, and its insights turned out to have some practical use in the end. There’s even a whiff of a conspiracy surrounding similitude, which I will describe at the end of the post!
This post is closely related to the idea of dimensions in physics; if you’re not familiar with this concept, check my earlier post here.
The Scientist and the Anarchist – Part II
The following guest post by Eric Michael Johnson is part of the Primate Diaries in Exile blog tour. You can follow other stops on this tour through his RSS feed…
Weird science facts, April 11-April 24
The Twitter #weirdscifacts from April 11 – April 24 are below the fold!
Right-wing refutations of relativity really, really wrong!
Back when I first started my blog, I spent a lot more time dealing with crazy people who are convinced that Einstein’s theories of relativity are wrong (see here, here and here). More recently, I haven’t spent a lot of time on the crazy train, but I have been meaning to get back to my long-neglected series of posts explaining relativity.
Enter Conservapedia, the right-wing version of Wikipedia intended to combat the liberal bias in reality! Over the past day, Twitter has been abuzz with tweets¹ on the Conservapedia page on “Counterexamples to relativity“, provides a list of 24 “points” that attempt to show the weakness of Einstein’s crazy ideas!
In my mind, perhaps the most despicable sort of denialism or crankery, however, is that which is based on some sort of political or religious ideology. This is clearly what is going on here, and the author relies on a familiar form of rhetorical trickery known as the “Gish Gallop“: throw as many claims out there as possible, regardless of their validity, with the realization that most people will be swayed by the amount of “evidence”, and not look too closely at the details.
Looking at the “evidence”, it is clear that there isn’t a single point made that isn’t misleading, incoherent, or simply dishonest. A person reading the Conservapedia post will be measurably more ignorant afterwards, and I get the distinct impression that this is what the author intended.
But never fear, dear reader! I’m here to go through the list of some of the most entertaining assertions, and explain why they’re nonsense. Why bother, you ask? For one thing, entertainment. For another, there’s always a chance that someone may come across the Conservapedia entry and look for some sort of counterbalance… someone should write one!
One caveat: I can’t guarantee that the list I present will match the list on the Conservapedia page. I saved the tweeted list, but after all the internet attention, it was reduced to four points. Soon afterwards, it reverted to the original list again. There’s no guarantee that it will remain in its current form, though…
ResearchBlogging editor’s selections: Chemistry extravaganza!
"Dr. SkySkull" selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars. This week's set of editor's selections is a "chemistry…
Manly Wade Wellman’s Who Fears the Devil?
For those who are new to Skulls in the Stars, my other major topic — other than science — is “weird fiction”, often but not exclusively of the late 1800s/early 1900s. “Weird fiction” is a term that broadly describes any sort of tale that includes some aspect of the unreal: horror, science fiction, fantasy, and things that are genuinely unclassifiable.
I like to argue that there are threads that tie weird fiction and science blogging together — weird fiction has historically drawn upon the science of its time to fuel its ideas and give them a plausible feel. Weird visionary H.P. Lovecraft used the then modern theories of relativity and quantum mechanics to craft a new type of cosmic horror, and was knowledegable enough about science to write an astronomy column for his local paper. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), a science fiction utopian novel, introduces robots, ray guns, the equivalent of jetpacks — and justifies it using direct quotations of Michael Faraday!
However, I also review weird fiction on the blog because I adore the genre and blogging gives me a motivation and an excuse to delve into rare, neglected and forgotten works that are truly wonderful.
One of those truly wonderful books is the collection of stories about “John the Balladeer”, titled Who Fears the Devil? (1963), by Manly Wade Wellman. I’ve been aware of this collection for some time, but waited to read it until the release of Paizo Press’ new edition in February of this year:
This isn’t my first encounter with Wellman’s work, however; I previously reviewed Wellman’s sublimely silly and naive novella Giants From Eternity, which featured history’s greatest scientists resurrected to do battle with an alien invader! This isn’t even my first encounter with “John the Balladeer”: I also blogged about Wellman’s series of five novels featuring the character; you can read the description of those books here.
What can I say about John the Balladeer, also known as “Silver John”? He is an Appalachian mountain man and wanderer who travels the wilds of the South meeting folks, learning new songs, and performing to pay his way. The wilderness of Wellman’s imagination is a dangerous land populated with the fearsome creatures of Southern folklore, and Who Fears the Devil? is a collection of tales in which John faces off against supernatural evil using only his wits, his brawn, his goodness, and his silver-stringed guitar!
These are some of the most beautiful and I dare say inspiring stories I’ve ever read. There has never been another character quite like Silver John, and I venture to say there will never be again. Let’s take a closer look at Wellman and the stories of ‘Devil…
Archives are up!
I put in a little extra time this evening and managed to figure out how to transfer my blog archives over to the new site here! Everything seems to be…