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490 points Bostonian | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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devindotcom ◴[] No.42179087[source]
Every piece called out here is clearly labeled "opinion" - did they even read the normal news and analysis sections? Countless newspapers and outlets and actual scientific journals have opinion/editorial sections that are generally very well firewalled from the factual content. You could collect the worst hot takes from a few years of nearly any site with a dedicated opinion page and pretend that it has gone downhill. But that this the whole point of having a separate opinion section — so opinions have a place to go, and are not slipped into factual reporting. And many opinion pieces are submitted by others or solicited as a way to show a view that the newsroom doesn't or can't espouse.

Whether the EIC of SciAm overstepped with her own editorializing is probably not something we as outsiders can really say, given the complexities of running a newsroom. I would caution people against taking this superficial judgment too seriously.

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Nevermark ◴[] No.42182356[source]
Informed opinion, clearly labeled so, on interesting but non-controversial non-ideological topics can be great instigators of curiosity.

What might have come before the Big Bang?

Do quantum superpositions really collapse somehow based on some as yet uncharacterized law, or does our universe produce a web of alternate futures, still connected but where straightforward links are quickly statistically and irreversible obscured?

There is a science friendly basis for interesting opinions of particular experts, in areas of disagreement or inconclusive answers, when clearly labeled as opinion, whose opinion, and why that experts opinion is of special interest.

Also, opinion on the state of science education, funding or other science relevant non-scientific topics, with all due modesty of certainty makes good sense.

But injecting ideological opinions, and poorly or selectively reasoned ones, or unestablished conjectures falsely posed as scientific truth, into a format that claims to be representative of science based information, is a tragedy level disservice.

Not to mention, with respect to Scientific American in particular, a betrayal of many decades of higher standards, work and reputation.

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GoblinSlayer ◴[] No.42184685[source]
>What might have come before the Big Bang?

Singularity.

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suzzer99 ◴[] No.42185515[source]
'Singularity' is just a placeholder for 'we have no idea what's going on here'.
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GoblinSlayer ◴[] No.42186888[source]
Huh? AFAIK singularity is a dense object of zero size.
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suzzer99 ◴[] No.42187443[source]
Infinitely dense, which is a math term for "some other realm of existence that makes no sense in our physical world".
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GoblinSlayer ◴[] No.42191498[source]
It may not have all properties you want, but it can have properties appropriate to its state, makes perfect sense to me, why not. Also it's not infinite density, it's zero size, infinities don't exist. Mass is a property of inertial motion, singularity doesn't have inertial motion, thus no mass.
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1. Nevermark ◴[] No.42208996[source]
If taking infinite density and an infinitesimal point seriously resulted in a clear and consistent ability to model it, then it would be as you say.

But that isn't what happens. Division by zero and other mathematical breakdowns occur, meaning that whatever actually happens is not in fact the same laws operating in an extreme situation. The laws don't actually work.

This is further backed up by the fact that we have two models with which to model the "singularity". Quantum mechanics and general relativity. They both break down, but in inconsistent ways. So clearly our equations don't work in that situation.

In addition, both from theory and experiment, there is strong evidence that space and time have a minimal length, the Planck unit of space and time. You can't get mass on a point if that understanding is true, because it will always involve unit distance connections.

Finally, uncooperative singularities like these have been found in scientific models many times, and the result has always been that the addition or adjustment of our models resolved mathematical mayhem. The mayhem just indicated the models were incomplete for the situation.

A toy example is Newton's force of gravity between two masses, F = Gm1m2/d^2. The force being a constant times the product of masses divided by the square of their distances.

This model implies that at a distance of zero the force is infinite. Yet that creates mathematical problems, modeling problems, and we never see it happen.

That mess is easily cleaned up with the realization that as the distance between the centers of a mass of m1 and m2 falls under the radius of one or both, r1 and r2, the forces of any mass of m1 and m2 outside distance d now cancel out. So as the position of two masses converge, the force of gravity actually goes to zero, not infinity. Newton's Law was still a good model for non-relativistic gravity forces, but needed to take account of more information to work in that particular case without blowing in a "singularity".

TLDR; where math blows up you can't just accept the model as operating in an extreme situation, because the model generates incoherent, inconclusive, undefined and inconsistent results. But the problem isn't magical, mysterious, or evidence of something unknowable. It is just evidence that our math and models don't yet capture everthing relevant to the breakdown case. It is a clue pointing toward something more for us to learn.