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Discussion (15 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1) Their four measurement configurations disagreed with each other, so they used a subjective Bayesian "dark uncertainty" to heavily weight their favorite method. This effectively hides an undiscovered hardware bug behind a statistical trick.
2) The electrostatic servo method consistently yielded lower readings than the purely mechanical method. They left this unexplained, missing that high-frequency cable dielectric losses could easily cause this exact offset.
3) They discovered residual vacuum gas causes thermal torques, which they corrected by mathematically extrapolating to a zero-pressure state. But this math assumes a perfectly static room temperature gradient, which they admit fluctuated whenever room airflow changed.
4) To fix density flaws in the copper masses, they rotated them in a clever way to average out horizontal gradients. However, they completely ignored vertical density gradients, which is a huge leap of faith for cast metal.
5) Their camera sensor had sub-pixel non-linearities. Instead of empirically mapping this out by simply dithering the laser alignment, they just slapped an enormous, inflated statistical penalty onto their error budget.
6) The entire point of this replication was to explain why the original international experiment was such a massive outlier. They found a few minor measurement bugs, but the vast majority of the original error remains completely unexplained.
There’s an important gap here between science as practiced and science communication.
Working scientists will absolutely admit their ignorance, shaky foundations, etc. This is especially important in astronomy and cosmology, as the field is relatively young and experiments are impossible, outside of those that nature has already done for us. (Both evolutionary biology and linguistics have similar problems but cosmology has it especially hard.)
This, however, is a losing strategy for communication. Most people equate confidence with credibility (and by high school we’ve beat children down enough that they do so as well), so if you do not sound confident people will not listen to you. (I could pontificate on how this is one of the greatest societal ills of our time, science or no science, but I won’t.) Even outside social situations, most people frankly cannot deal with holding a position and simultaneously not being confident in it, and absolutely cannot deal with holding an entire network of mutually-supporting positions and different degrees of confidence in each, while also having multiple alternatives with different degrees of plausibility for some of them. (This is somewhat more advanced than the programmer’s skill of relying on a deep stack of supporting services and debugging tools while keeping in mind that any given subset of them could be lying, which I’m sure you’re aware is also fairly difficult to communicate the experience of.)
Then there’s the active (if not always successful) effort towards never ever reasoning backwards from things you would prefer to be true or that would make the world nicer for you. (The “History Plots” section[1] of the biennial Review of Particle Physics is there solely as an admonishment never to go with the herd. And that’s for things that have no implications for anybody’s worldview, morality, or livelihood!) It is very uncomfortable to genuinely not know where you are going and also not be able to aim anywhere in particular. (It might among other things imply that the entirety of your life’s work only serves to seal off a dead end and you might not even live long enough to learn that. And either way you’re consigning yourself to a very lonely sort of life if you veer away from the mainstream.)
On the flip side from the vagueness, there’s the experience of doing everything you can to break something and failing, of your forefathers doing the same at their most imaginative and still failing. (The aforementioned RPP has pages and pages of tests for frickin’ energy conservation, without which most of physics and engineering just falls apart. And cosmologists can only dream of doing the same on the scales that are relevant to them, and indeed they do keep things like “modified Newtonian dynamics” around. Note that time invariance [as much as there is such a thing in general relativity] is energy conservation [ditto].) It is a sort of confidence that few others have justifiably had in their lives. (Few other things will infuriate a physicist more than offhand quoting a number with six significant digits. They know—in some cases from direct experience—that this sort of precision takes generations. And a well-established theory needs multiple times the effort.)
So when, say, a cosmologist says that cosmic inflation is a bit of a speculative crapshoot but probably true, the Big Bang is likely true, general relativity they’re fairly sure is true but it sure would be nice to find some cracks, the Standard Model is true despite everybody doing their level best to break it because the foundational issues are quite serious, the mass of a free electron is nearly certain, and the inability to surpass the speed of light is pretty much absolute—this is a dynamic range of confidence that none of us can adequately feel. Now take one of those statements in isolation and try to make your listener understand what the apparent equivocation in it really means.
(I do not believe the typical theist in a debate is on more than an advanced amateur level in all of this.)
Then you get into the cursed philosophical issues, like the (weak) anthropic principle (a class of “why” questions don’t and can’t actually have much of a meaningful answer) or nonexceptionalism in cosmology (it is possible that everything we can or will ever be able to see around us is in fact wildly atypical as a great cosmic joke, but if so we couldn’t ever know enough to join in and any science we do would be completely meaningless, so we might as well proceed on the assumption that it is not, and happily enough it’s been working out thus far.)
[1] https://pdg.lbl.gov/2025/reviews/rpp2025-rev-history-plots.p...
You might be confusing the established big bang with the more speculative cosmic inflation model. They're very closely related.
Many laypersons have absolutely no conception of how accurate those "failing" models were.
A good example is Newtonian physics. Strictly speaking it is a failing model, after all, under certain conditions and if you look very closely ot falls apart. Yet, every bridge you ever walked on and the most precise mechanical watches ever made were all only calculated using newtonian physics. It is still accurate enough for most tasks on earth.
A model can still be useful despite its limitations, you just need to know those. People who are like "Ha! It is not accurate!" often have their own mental models of the world which are magnitudes worse, miss key bits or get other parts completely wrong (despite clear evidence to the opposite). As if a morbidly obese person for whom even walking presents a challenge made fun of an Olympic silver medalist for only getting second place. "Ha! You didn't get it 100% right so now my fringe theory that fails to even explain the most basic observations must be seen as equally valid!"
So if you say it fails, consider how many digits after the comma it was accurate before it failed and how many digits your own theory would manage.
> The Big Bang is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. .. A wide range of empirical evidence strongly favors the Big Bang event, which is now widely accepted. ...
> The Big Bang models offer a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundances of the light elements, the cosmic microwave background, large-scale structure, and Hubble's law.
> Precise modern models of the Big Bang appeal to various exotic physical phenomena that have not been observed in terrestrial laboratory experiments or incorporated into the Standard Model of particle physics. Of these features, dark matter is currently the subject of most active laboratory investigations. ... Viable, quantitative explanations for such phenomena are still being sought. These are unsolved problems in physics.