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Bad Astronomy has an article about an astronomer who had observational data to suggest he had discovered a planet around another star and published his findings in a peer-reviewed journal. In 1855.
We now know, with further, more accurate observations, that no such planet exists there, and the offsets are the product of uncertainty in the telescopic observations that were, to be fair, done by eye.
But still, despite that, I must tip my hat to Jacob. He did his homework, made the best observations and calculations he could, expressed skepticism in his writing, and came up with what he thought was the best explanation. Mind you, again to be fair, this took a great deal of cleverness to dream up. Perhaps he had been influenced by the recent discovery of Neptune.
If anything, he was guilty of overconfidence in his own measurements. Still, technology eventually caught up with his imagination and we did start to find alien worlds. The field of exoplanet research is now a thriving one, which has moved beyond the simple discovery stage to one where we are beginning to physically categorize and model them.
Not so incidentally, we have since found planets orbiting other stars using the method Jacob pioneered in 1855. He may have been the first person ever to publish this idea, and for that he deserves acknowledgment.
This short video gives some more information and context of the man and his (unfortunately erroneous) discovery. The original paper is also freely available.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday December 12 2016, @04:53PM
The enemy of science everywhere: when you don't know how much experimental error your observations are getting, or how much statistical certainty to identify to require to validate your hypothesis. It continues to undermine a lot of science today, and often results in accidental p-hacking.
That's the big lesson here, nothing to do with astronomy. You've got to know what you don't know or your experiment is going to be fraught with problems.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday December 12 2016, @05:57PM
That's the big lesson here
I don't know that that's really a "lesson" here, since the science of statistics, including error calculations, was still in its infancy at this time. Astronomers were making do with cruder methods to try to estimate error, and Jacob's work was doing what he could at the time.
It's noteworthy that this whole thing happened within a couple decades after the first clear measurements of stellar parallax, which had been hypothesized since the late 1500s at least, but which took centuries to actually locate and measure, due to both imprecision in equipment and then due to the inadequacy of statistical error measures of the day. Also notably, Friedrich Bessel -- who was one of the first to make a successful measurement of parallax -- was also one of the people to suggest perturbations in Sirius may be caused by a "dark body" before Jacob's work here (and which Jacob explicitly alludes to)... in 1862, the "dark" Sirius companion was shown to be a white dwarf star.
So, with crude statistical methods and the idea of unseen "dark" bodies and stellar companions in the air, Jacob's hypothesis seemed at least a reasonable idea.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 12 2016, @08:09PM
There's a philosophical discussion: how can you know what you don't know?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday December 12 2016, @08:18PM
There's a philosophical discussion: how can you know what you don't know?
To quote Donald Rumsfeld [wikipedia.org]:
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.
The quantification of scientific error is about the process of trying to put boundaries on the "known unknowns." There is of course always the possibility of "unknown unknowns" though, which can obviously lead people astray in science. But just because one doesn't know something for certain, it doesn't follow that you can't know anything about the parameters of that unknown or that one can't quantify it somewhat based on statistical features of the data.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 12 2016, @08:39PM
Last time I heard the "unknown unknowns" bit, it was being applied to early space travel. Known unknowns, like the maximum intensity of solar flares, can at least be characterized and predicted with some level of certainty. Unknown unknowns, like - well - anything you say will sound absurd until it actually happens, those are the most dangerous aspect of true exploration.
True scientific exploration is a journey into the realm of unknown unknowns. "Science" that stays in a comfortable place where most or all of the unknowns are actually known and partly characterized, that's bordering on engineering. Both are well worth pursuing.
All people, scientists and consumers of scientific output, need to keep in mind that results from true scientific exploration can be reversed just as easily as dogmatic opinion. The comfortable engineering-like science is building up stronger foundations of experience based knowledge, when it's not being overly biased by outside influences.
Just calling something "Science" doesn't make it a better foundation for decision making, you also need to know what kind of science you are dealing with - and that's not always an easy thing to determine.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday December 12 2016, @08:27PM
Ah, but even if you don't realize it there's a lot you don't know that you know you don't know.
It wouldn't be hard for you to list trivial facts that are easy to find out that you don't know:
How wide is your left foot? At the ball? At the heel? What's its volume?
How wide is the Nile River? What's the flowrate at the delta? What country owns what share of the water rights?
Who was king when the Collosus of Rhodes was built? How much copper is in it? How much did it cost at the time?
Now, I asked several related questions in each category of unknown, because the last question is one where the answers to the previous questions could establish theoretical boundaries on getting the right answer. Where being able to approximate through existing knowledge could help prevent you from making a mistake in determining the answer to the final question.
That's an essential tool in science. In practice, we often treat those unknowns through a process of experimental control, letting them vary as other independent variables to determine the magnitude of the effect. If you can't identify everything the current best theories suggest might introduce error to your tests, you don't even have a hypothesis.