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The man behind the sphere, Freeman Dyson, is dead at 96:
Freeman Dyson, a physicist whose interests often took him to the edge of science fiction, has died at the age of 96. Dyson is probably best known for his idea of eponymous spheres that would allow civilizations to capture all the energy radiating off a star. But his contributions ranged from fundamental physics to the practicalities of using nuclear weapons for war and peace. And he remained intellectually active into his 90s, although he wandered into the wrong side of science when it came to climate change.
Degrees? Who needs 'em?
It's difficult to find anything that summarizes a career so broad, but a sense of his intellectual energy comes from his educational history. Dyson was a graduate student in physics when he managed to unify two competing ideas about quantum electrodynamics, placing an entire field on a solid theoretical foundation. Rather than writing that up as his thesis, he simply moved on to other interests. He didn't get a doctorate until the honorary ones started arriving later in his career. His contributions were considered so important that he kept getting faculty jobs regardless.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday February 29 2020, @04:01AM (8 children)
No alien megastructures found in time for him to see it. Tabby's Star [wikipedia.org] looks like a bust.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Touché) by barbara hudson on Saturday February 29 2020, @04:28AM (3 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @04:49AM (2 children)
We need a new mod, an "ouch" mod, or a "totally inappropriate" mod. Perhaps, a "dead war criminal" mod.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @08:58AM (1 child)
It's called touche.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @10:17PM
No, touche is tasked with so much here, that it makes ambiguous. Touche to me means that there was a good come-back line -- usually a funny one or a sarcastic one. Rarely do I think we use it to mean "good point". Anyway, to make it try to mean more than that makes it less useful in the long run.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday February 29 2020, @05:12AM (3 children)
Lots of interesting quotes [wikiquote.org], including this one:
Too bad the arsetechnica author elevates himself over an acknowledged master.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Saturday February 29 2020, @05:22AM (2 children)
I think this is how falsifiability [britannica.com] is described. It also helps in the office and in documentation, when being wrong can be confirmed and/or corrected, but being vague devolves to "miscommunications", leading to long email chains that people forget the initial point of after keeping up with them for ~5 replies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @09:01AM (1 child)
The only strange thing is that you think this is abnormal. This is the normal state of human affairs. Any deviation from it is a rare, and productive, event.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 01 2020, @03:18PM
Telling someone else what they think, doesn't make them think that way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @05:10AM (7 children)
Smart dude right? But his thoughts on climate change are irrelevant? Maybe he saw something the dogma beaters did not.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @05:28AM (4 children)
If he did he'd have explained it clearly, the way he explained physics to his students.
No, he simply subjectively wasn't convinced. If he had a good argument against climate change, or had meaningful insight backed up with data, he'd have shared it. He liked to share information (see: teaching, publishing but not seeking degrees, etc). So he wasn't convinced. Given 10x studies with 95% CI, one should expect 1 in (.05)^10 "good" scientists to doubt the result, ie about 0.1%. So he was in that 0.1% - and he himself would have said that what matters is the argument not who argues it.
And he'd have been pissed at "Dyson says so, so it must be" just as he'd be pissed if Dyson were replaced with the name of a climate scientist who claims anthropogenic climate change is real.
In other words, yes, "his thoughts on climate change are irrelevant" insomuch as it is expected that some good scientists will have such thoughts, and insomuch as he never developed any results based on data. And he'd have been among the first to say that his thoughts, without data, were of no consequence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @05:32AM
PS - see https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/06/12/the-question-of-global-warming/?pagination=false [nybooks.com] for Dyson's thoughts. They're not wrong per se; they're just insubstantiable. We don't have genetically modified orgs that do what he suggests, for example.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday February 29 2020, @06:22PM (2 children)
Seriously, we get this same crap ever time someone knowledgeable has a contrary opinion on the subject of climate change. Where else do you get convenient delivery of studies when the results of the studies are needed for political purposes (like the flawed "hockey stick" paper which purports to show that climate hasn't be as warm as it was in the year 1999 for thousands of years)? Argument from obfuscation (here's 700 pages which somewhere proves the issues you have doubts about)? Institutionalized propaganda like "climate change" for global warming, and "climate denier" for anyone who doesn't drink the kool aid? Textbook confirmation and observation bias (extreme weather and blaming everything on climate change)? And money - tens of billions of dollars in funding with another order of magnitude more for climate change-dependent projects (on the same order of magnitude as fossil fuel profits, let us note)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2020, @07:58AM (1 child)
More likely, he heard shitty arguments like that one (discounting someone's argument through mere assertion)
What? That's not "assertion", that's demonstrating that we should expect persons with his conclusions, among intellectually honest and capable persons. Where did I assert that he's wrong? I did assert that he doesn't have a proof - and then in the PS followup, I linked to his subjectively argued explanation of why he wasn't convinced of anthropogenic climate change. You know, the primary data?
To reiterate: what he published was his insightful but subjective opinions, and not novel data or analysis with a clear proof.
Good for you for picking on climate arguments which are flawed. But you've clearly got "a side" which you're defending here, and not being an honest and fair participant in the discussion.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 01 2020, @02:43PM
How much again does it cost to accumulate primary data? There is a profound dishonesty here where one side is allowed to carry an argument just because they received considerable funding to collect some data (not, let us note some evidence). The whole point of presenting research and its data in papers and such is so that people who aren't primary data collectors can evaluate the research for themselves. You can choose to ignore those evaluations, but that's not scientifically relevant.
And so do you clearly. I don't consider that "not being an honest and fair participant in the discussion" at all. To remain somehow purely unbiased forever is to ignore reality. What I consider dishonest and unfair is using imaginary and unrealistic standards of science to prejudge criticism of climate research.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Bot on Saturday February 29 2020, @07:30AM (1 child)
> But his thoughts on climate change are irrelevant?
Yes they are. Leave speculation on models to kids and scientists. Climate change is about carbon quotes and laws and taxes which can topple corps as big as auto makers. The future financial landscape depend on it. So let the grownups work.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @04:20PM
You nailed it. The models are not 'there'. They change with the weather (hehe). But the important part is it is now about money. Not helping us.
Biggest change in years for 'climate change' the price of NG went below the price of coal. Adding taxes and derivatives will distort the market. Around 2010 when prices of oil were hitting 150 a barrel. That nearly 60% of the market was just in speculation. Not in real goods traded. Once the money guys wrung out what they could from that market the whole thing collapsed like the ponzi scheme it was. One whole country thought they could build a socialist empire upon it. That did not work either.
Is there some sort of 'change' happening. You bet. Is it anything like the models. Not really. They can not really tell me the global model 3 days out. Yet somehow magically they can nail the weather 30 years from now? Pull the other one.
So let the grownups work.
Having worked now with some of these 'grownups'. They are not anything close. It is bro's all the way down. They will suck your wallet dry and drive off in their fancy 100k car.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @07:19AM (24 children)
Dyson never denied rising CO2 levels, or that they caused warming temperatures. What he denied was that the result of this would necessarily be bad for humanity, or that if it was, that the conventional knee-jerk responses are the right way to address it. He denied the politics, not the science.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @09:05AM
Look you've gotta die one day and it may as well be in a massive tidal wave when Greenland falls off it's perch.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday February 29 2020, @10:07AM (22 children)
That the effects will be bad is an economic conclusion anyway, not a scientific one. Economics is not science. At most, Dyson was on "the wrong side of" current economic thinking. Not that it's known which side is right and which one wrong until the future happens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @10:34AM (1 child)
> Not that it's known which side is right and which one wrong until the future happens.
Although history does prove socialism was wrong. But apart from that we don't know which is right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2020, @08:00AM
Poor Norwegians and Swedes, huh? *eyeroll*
You sound like a foolish USA'ian, conflating centrally planned authoritarian communism with socialism.
Anyways.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 01 2020, @04:09AM (9 children)
Why not? My view is that economics rather has the same problems that climatology has right now for the same reasons - massive conflicts of interest because there's a lot of money at stake.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday March 01 2020, @07:53AM (8 children)
Economics is too dependent on human behavior, which is always changing. It's basically group psychology for how people relate to money and work. That's why the economics Nobel Prize is not a real one, and sponsored by some bank.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 01 2020, @02:58PM (7 children)
Sorry, you're not even wrong. First, it can be applied to completely non-human systems like carrion feeding or pollination, or to systems that are technically human, but have no human actors directly in the system like high frequency trading.
Second, even when we apply it to human systems with human behavior, it's not about the behavior, it's about the function of economic systems (like their ability to distribute resources), and the dynamics of the system (like what behaviors are rewarded or the system's propensity for breaking down) - both which are objective features of the system and hence, something that can be targeted by scientific study. Human behavior is just the present preferences and quirks of the actors in the system. It doesn't matter to the economics of the system what the behavior happens to be. Even when those behaviors lead to large scale dysfunctions like market crashes, the dynanmics are still part of the standard economics of the system.
Except when it's not, of course.
Just like the Nobel Prizes for Literature and Peace?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday March 02 2020, @12:59AM (6 children)
What fundamental results has economics given us? That Nobel Prize is closer to the peace and literature ones than the scientific Prizes. That it exists at all is an attempt to give academic gravitas to the subject. The marketing does not impress serious people.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 02 2020, @03:45AM (4 children)
Supply and demand, markets, TANSTAAFL, betting and speculation infrastructure, and macroeconomic measures of a society's economy come to mind.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday March 02 2020, @04:19AM (3 children)
"supply and demand" is just counting. Trivialities are insights now? The rest is mumbo-jumbo. Markets have existed for thousands of years. There is little innovation.
Compare the enormous technological progress produced by real science to the never-ending political bickering produced by the "soft sciences" like economics.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 02 2020, @04:36AM (2 children)
One can say the same about any science and be just as wrong. Supply and demand is an important observation about the dynamics of trade.
Only if you aren't paying attention. High frequency trading, for a glaring counterexample, is far from those ancient markets.
Political bickering like the greatest improvement in the human condition ever?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday March 02 2020, @04:46AM (1 child)
Supply and demand is trivial compared to Maxwell's equations or DNA or the periodic table.
High frequency trading is the same thing as normal trading but faster and with computers. It's like during the dot-com boom when things were called great because they used the internet.
Those improvements you see are not because some economist had a good idea. They are organic developments.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 02 2020, @05:14AM
Those phenomena you just mentioned are trivial in comparison to human behavior. Does that make them not science now?
Just like nuclear war is the same thing as normal war, but faster? One enormous difference is the "with computers". Where's the human behavior excuse now for de-scientizing economics? Another is that it's so fast now that relativistic effects like light speed constraints come into place. If they speed the trading up much more (say about two to three more order of magnitude than current state of the art), then the market will have to be physically located on a single chip.
Except, of course, when they are. The Black-Scholes-Merton model [wikipedia.org] (which incidentally is comparable in complexity with the Maxwell equations or the Periodic Table) and the variety of pricing/valuation techniques for derivative securities are all due to three economists having a good idea.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 02 2020, @04:30AM
Of course, that's false. Look [nobelprize.org] at what the prizes are awarded for:
Notice how the problem described in the Economic Sciences prize is solving a problem using the scientific approach, just like it is for Physics, Chemistry, or Physiology or Medicine. It's not a discovery unlike most of the present year's other scientific prizes, but it is solving a problem like the Chemistry example. The Literature prize is for a work of human experience. The Peace Prize is for mitigating an ongoing conflict between countries.
It's tiresome to get these weird pseudoscience criticisms - even if the field of economics really were strictly a study of human behavior as you claim (which it is not), you still have the matter that human behavior, contrary to assertion, can be scientifically characterized just like any other observable phenomena in the universe.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday March 01 2020, @05:07AM (9 children)
Economics is an area where science is sometimes crowded out of academia in favour of something politically correct.
What fields are immune, however? There's even a politically correct physics, though it hasn't caught on very widely yet, /Fortuna gratias/.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday March 01 2020, @08:42AM (8 children)
A quote from Dyson:
According to that view, science seeks fundamental truths. I disagree with the "why" question, but that's a separate issue.
Economics depends on ever-changing human behavior. Such a subject, which is built on shifting sands, will never deliver fundamental truths. It is not enough to apply the scientific method to call what you're doing science.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday March 01 2020, @02:33PM (7 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethology
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday March 01 2020, @05:28PM (6 children)
Ethology can be science, sure. Am I wandering into a trap here?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday March 01 2020, @05:59PM (5 children)
Are humans not animals?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday March 01 2020, @07:28PM (4 children)
Humans are animals, but much of human behavior goes beyond animal instincts. To call someone an animal is to attribute unusual primal behavior to them. There are unchanging instincts, but once those are modulated by higher brain function which depends on culture, everything is in flux.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday March 02 2020, @05:10AM (3 children)
It is simply to classify them correctly.
Animal-Mammal-Primate-Ape-Hominid.
Human behavior is just one subset of animal behavior.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday March 02 2020, @05:44AM (2 children)
I disagree, but this is probably a dead end.
My other point, with khallow above could be summarized as:. Humans would be doing just as well today if economics didn't exist as an academic discipline. Maybe even better. Unless you dislike technology, the same can't be said for real sciences like physics, biology / medicine, or chemistry. That speaks to a fundamental difference.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday March 02 2020, @02:35PM (1 child)
https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday March 02 2020, @08:41PM
I studied a few semesters of economics long ago, and don't need that lesson.I'm writing the academic subject off, because its contribution to humanity is not discernible. Yet, its contribution to political noise is easy to detect.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @05:08PM
Freeman Dyson was head and shoulders above most scientists, let alone random soylent and arstechnica dipshits. He studied climate models 50 or 60 years ago, when global warming bullshit wasn't even a gleam in the religious climate imbeciles' eyes. He knew the subject much better than mostx knew it became a religion to most people, knew that CO2 is just a one small factor that the assholes can model so they hold on to that one, not to million others the lousy bullshitting modelers can't account for, like for example, fuckong water vapoer in the atmosphere. Knew that CO2 would green the planet with plants and that peippe live easier in warmer climate,and that the climate is a, to quote an old IPCC report that the dipshits buried, a "dynamic nonlinear complex system and prediction of climate is not possible." So the assholish Arstechnica dipshits can swallow his miserly intelligence quotient and pathetic scientific kbowledge because compared to Dyson the guy is a flea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiKfWdXXfIs [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmy0tXcNTPs [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kSnd8t4ceQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Saturday February 29 2020, @06:31PM
Condo lances to his family. The world has lost a great man.
He was one of those geniuses that you only see a few times a century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson [wikipedia.org]
He was the man in charge of the original Project Orion [wikipedia.org]
Footage of some testing on the concept https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Sv5y6iHUM [youtube.com]
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @09:56PM
Once upon a time the con men would claim to be backed by G_d. Now they claim science instead. Dyson, like any real scientist, was skeptical of the con. The snark only proves the idiocy of the author.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2020, @03:06AM (1 child)
* runs *
(Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday March 01 2020, @05:10AM
I am disappoint.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?