Posted on 11/05/2023 6:54:26 AM PST by SunkenCiv
A very brief video because I want to tell you about this story I learned from William Jason Morgan's obituary. It's a lovely story about how the process of scientific discovery sometimes takes unexpected turns.
He looked for gravitational waves, but discovered something entirely different | 3:39
Sabine Hossenfelder | 1.03M subscribers | 232,486 views | October 19, 2023
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Transcript 0:00 · I need to tell you about this cute episode in the history of physics that I just recently learned 0:05 · about. It isn't' science news, but more like science olds, I guess, but it was news to me. 0:11 · This story plays out in the 1960s in the United States. Albert Einstein's 0:17 · theory of general relativity had become accepted, 0:20 · but it didn't attract a huge amount of attention because no one really knew what to do with it. 0:25 · One exception was the American physicist and astronomer Robert 0:29 · Dicke. He picked up on an idea by Paul Dirac, 0:33 · who had argued that the gravitational constant in Einstein's theory isn't constant. 0:39 · The gravitational constant is the big G in Einstein's Field Equations and it's 0:44 · the same as Newton's gravitational constant. If it was time-dependent, 0:49 · that'd change Einstein's theory and have observable consequences. 0:54 · Dicke developed this idea further with Carl Brans and it became known as Brans-Dicke theory. This 1:00 · Brans Dicke theory of gravity gives rise to a type of gravitational waves that do not exist 1:06 · in Einstein's theory. They're called scalar gravitational waves and they're concentric. 1:12 · Dicke now had the idea that such scalar gravitational waves could trigger earthquakes. 1:17 · And these earthquakes should be correlated with changes in the spinning rate of earth. This 1:23 · was a very distinct prediction and one that was testable. He set a student on the task. 1:29 · Dicke's idea was bunk, those funny gravitational waves were never found, 1:33 · and Brans-Dicke theory has by now been ruled out, but here's where things get interesting. 1:39 · The name of the student who he put on the topic was William Jason Morgan, 1:44 · who was at that time in his early 20s. He had studied physics, 1:48 · but now he had to learn a lot of geology. Scientists had noticed around 1900 or so 1:54 · that the shapes of the continents fit together and had probably broken apart 1:59 · from one big piece in the past. This had given rise to the idea of continental drift, 2:05 · but they didn't know how that worked or how it the plates drifted. Morgen keeps staring at images 2:11 · of earth and realizes that all that drifting can be described by spherical transpositions 2:17 · provided one also takes into account the oceans, not just the continental plates. 2:22 · Morgan wrote his PhD thesis on the search for those funky gravitational waves, 2:27 · but would go on to publish his theory of tectonic plates, and developed secondary ideas from this, 2:34 · like that earthquakes and volcanoes preferably happen where tectonic plates meet and so on. 2:40 · Basically, all you've ever heard about tectonic plates goes back to Morgan. 2:45 · Morgan just passed away some months ago at the age of 87. I learned about this in his 2:50 · obituary. I think this is an amazing story about how smartly pursuing a 2:55 · completely wrong idea led to groundbreaking scientific advances. Hope you liked it too! 3:03 · This video doesn't have a sponsor, so in my own mission I want to encourage you to check 3:08 · our new quiz app. We've developed this as the fastest and easiest way to learn. For just 2 and 3:14 · a half Euro a month you'll get access to *all features, collect points, appear in rankings, 3:20 · see instantly whether your answers were right or wrong, see the full transcript with links 3:25 · to references, and soon we'll also have some premium content. We'll use your support to 3:31 · further develop the app and make it accessible to other creators, so you're not just helping us. 3:37 · Thanks for watching.
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Why don't you knock it off with them gravitational waves?
(Awesome tagline!)
Some more accidental discoveries ...including the chocolate chip cookie:
“Can’t you say something positronic and radioactive for a change?”
Ha! :)
I always thought it was strange that scientists get credited with ‘‘discovering’ that the continents broke apart via tectonic shifts, when any 2nd grader can see that the western coasts of Europe and Africa fit perfectly into the eastern coasts of the Americas.
In 1960, when I pointing that out to my 2nd grade teacher, she said it was just a coincidence. I remember thinking; “teachers are dumb”.
HA! I wish I had a dollar for every time I thought that while in school.
“I always thought it was strange that scientists get credited with ‘‘discovering’ that the continents broke apart via tectonic shifts, when any 2nd grader can see that the western coasts of Europe and Africa fit perfectly into the eastern coasts of the Americas.”
It was proposed in 1586. A few years before you were born.
(He is of the same generation as Morgan, as am I. My 87th birthday was last Wednesday, I thought the sames as y'all regarding the coastline formation being the ruptre of a brittle sphere in this same time-frame, but had no interest in chasing it down, until obtained Walt Brown's textbook on it.)
“It was proposed in 1586.”
Was it a 2nd grader who proposed it in 1586?
“In 1960, when I pointing that out to my 2nd grade teacher, she said it was just a coincidence. I remember thinking; “teachers are dumb”.”
i pointed out the same thing in 8th grade science class around 1966, but the reaction from the science teacher was totally over the top ... she came unglued and started ranting that about “no scientific evidence” ... it was a life-changing experience for me, because even little ol’ me realized that “she doth protest too much”, and thereafter my default position was skepticism of anything claimed due to “authority” ...
[little then did i know of the Alfred Wegener, the German meteorologist, geophysicist and polar researcher, who in 1915 published ‘The Origin of Continents and Oceans’, which outlined his theory of Continental Drift, and was incessantly and continuously attacked by the “scientific” community until he was eventually proven right many decades after his death]
“Was it a 2nd grader who proposed it in 1586?”
first grader
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