[ExI] BBC Faster Than The Speed Of Light

[Anders Sandberg]

There is an interesting gap between 'what the science says' and what an 
interested layperson today can learn. The problems are: 1) a lot of 
cutting edge science is very hard to explain since it is so far from the 
scales where our intuitions and analogies make sense, 2) an awful lot of 
science is indeed worse than you think (c.f. Ioannidis et al., or apply 
the cognitive bias literature to science), 3) there is so many papers 
and studies out there that it is very hard for anyone to get a picture 
of what the real state is.

These problems have different weight in different domains. Plenty of 
physics and math is so far out that there is little hope to explain it 
even to an interested listener ("Fuckin' spin, how does it work?"), but 
at least the studied phenomena are fairly 'clean'. Not so in medicine 
and the social sciences, where the complex systems we investigate are 
highly individual and generalize badly - here 2 and 3 dominate. 
Sometimes you get specific biases, like methodology cults or inability 
to understand statistics in some subcommunities.

It is not that the science has become more uncertain. It is that we have 
more of it and recognize its uncertainty better. But that doesn't calm 
anybody.


Tomaz Kristan wrote:
> All those experiments which confirms the General Relativity - how 
> biased are they? What are procedures? Are they blind enough? Anybody 
> even cares?
Seems to be a little cottage industry coming up with weird alternatives 
to GR and then disproving them. But things like gravitational lensing, 
gravitational time dilation and frame dragging make GR decently solid. 
Procedures are fairly clearly described, one can check the math, and 
increasingly people have access to tools to do amateur checks - I read a 
while about a guy who was testing GR himself using his own atomic clock.


> I still remember the days, when the superluminal galaxies on a way out 
> of here were thought impossible. Now, they are on a daily menu at the 
> Hubble restaurant. And nobody gives a dam about. Somehow it is okay 
> with GR, since that is no real motion, only the space is inflating ... 
> inflationary.

Huh? They are typically relegated to the page in the astrophysics 
textbook where they explain how you get the appearance of superluminal 
motion. Are there anybody serious out there who honestly think they are 
superluminal?

And the "superluminal" aspects of spacetime expansion are not 
problematic in GR. Just check the math.

>
> Time to reconsider everything from the MM experiment on. This time 
> really hard.

The fun thing is that these days the MM experiment ought to be within 
the capacity of amateurs. Please do it.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute 
Oxford Martin School 
Faculty of Philosophy 
Oxford University