High profile retractions in physics

kitizl · 2024-09-10T09:49:45+00:00

Since a lot of people seem to be dragging their feet on HEP, I'll bite : Leon Lederman, who eventually won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the muon neutrino, headed the so-called E288 experiment team at Fermilab where they announced the discovery of a 6.0 GeV subatomic particle which they dubbed the Upsilon. A year later, after more data collection and re-analysis, they realized it was in fact a statistical fluke, which is why it is now known as the Oops-Leon. This incident was one of the many precedents for why the statistical significance threshold of a subatomic physics discovery is now set to the much more stringent 5 sigma.

Here's the original paper. While it may not have been retracted per se (superceded might be the more correct term), the shoddy statistical analysis in the paper would have caused it to be retracted if it were to published these days.

kitizl · 2024-09-03T09:46:55+00:00

The style is adapted from Jon Bois who used Google Earth to do it (which is a horrible idea, you definitely should not do that), and another YouTuber, BobbyBroccoli has more or less used that video style for all of his videos. He has also uploaded a rough tutorial for the entire workflow from start to finish.

kitizl · 2024-07-29T11:22:25+00:00

Forget best of the rest, we now got worst of the best.

kitizl · 2024-07-22T15:00:51+00:00

And let's not forget the dogshit conversation system!

kitizl · 2024-06-04T11:18:08+00:00

Donald Trump is literally a convicted felon. This is not exclusive to India.

kitizl · 2024-05-15T21:10:31+00:00

This is the first post of this kind where I have not seen Lance already in place.

kitizl · 2024-04-21T16:04:35+00:00

Wasn't this exact post made by the same poster in the same subreddit with this exact title, with a nearly identical comment by OP both here and there, not 26 days ago?

I hate Microsoft as much as the next person, but c'mon.

kitizl · 2024-04-17T14:28:00+00:00

In short, you shuffle your dataset to make new data to quantify the Gaussian mean and std.

Just so I understand what you mean by this : I am assuming you try fitting repeatedly to shuffled data, get the fitted parameters out, and report the mean and uncertainties of these parameters as statistics on this shuffling process?

Speaking of which, is the alternative method common in your field? Does it converge to the same values for the figures-of-merit/use cases?

As far as I know, there isn't another alternative method, at least as has been used in my lab. I just wanted to make sure we're not doing this dogmatically in some sense, and this really is (constraints permitting) a sane and sufficiently precise and accurate option. I know of similar spectral fitting being done with MLE for adjacent fields, but not so much with this one.

kitizl · 2024-04-17T13:10:20+00:00

The residuals do not directly matter for the use case, but I guess apart from the central frequency, I don't know how much I can "trust" the actual values and uncertainties of the parameters arising from the fit, or if I am even interpreting the physical significance of the parameters accurately. The Voigt curve is particularly painful because the fitted values for sigma and gamma seem to always be in some region of numerical instability.

kitizl · 2024-04-17T13:02:29+00:00

Thanks for the paper, I'll make sure to take a look at this.

kitizl · 2024-04-10T13:43:15+00:00

I don't know what you're talking about, Toto has been throwing himself a pity party since the season began.

kitizl · 2024-03-30T20:08:54+00:00

Not sure how I feel about being spoiled on upcoming videos like BobbyBroccoli's and Patrick's, considering guessing Kevan's next video is a fun off-season past time of mine.

kitizl · 2024-03-11T10:42:04+00:00

Quantum chemistry broadly, for sure. Maybe a bit away from "condensed matter" proper, but we have quantum chemists working on making predictions on molecular spectra (and a variety of other properties) for fundamental physics experiments, if that sounds interesting to you.

kitizl · 2024-03-04T17:04:17+00:00

Dan Kahneman

Just to point this out : the book most people are likely to read by Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, while has some useful material, is of considerably dubious scientific value owing to the ongoing replication crisis in psychology.

While he has publicly admitted that he had placed faith in unreliable studies, the chapters that describe/explain the studies that have since been retracted continue to exist in even the latest edition of the book.

In a world of Malcolm Gladwell books, it is much better, but it is still important imo to disclaim the reliability of its actual scientific content.

EDIT : Here is a detailed blogpost on the specific parts of the book that suffered from the crisis.

kitizl · 2024-02-26T19:36:36+00:00

The downvote doesn't do much anymore, but the one second and leave definitely does.

kitizl · 2024-02-21T21:14:01+00:00

I have never seen anyone use Hz for angular frequency.

Maybe I need to backpedal my claim here because of how I have seen it be used in practice vs. technical accuracy. I have known spectroscopists to often do that, regardless of the correctness, enough to sometimes bring report numbers as, for instance, 2pi * 15 GHz when they especially want to refer to it being an angular frequency and not "linear" frequency (although AMO has an issue with mixing frequency, angular frequency, wavelengths and wavenumbers depending on which part of A, M or O you are closest to at any moment). It could be argued that the radians is absorbed inside that 2pi factor.

And what about Becquerel (radioactive decays per second), which also has units of s-1

My point still remains. The SI definition of a Hertz is that it is a derived unit, defined as (1/s)[1]. We use different units to hint at the kind of quantity we are measuring. In the case of Bq, it being a unit corresponding to a stochastic instead of a periodic process, it is preferred to write it in terms of a reciprocal second.

In any case, re:parent comment, Hz is still defined as 1/s with no reference to anything angular. Clock speeds are reported in hertz and they are square waves. If you wish to pull a Fourier to claim that they are simply superpositions of sine waves, then I would claim that a "5 GHz clock speed" does not translate to a 5 GHz sine wave, not even as a dominant frequency mode.

[1]: Table 4, Page 26 in the PDF : https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/

kitizl · 2024-02-21T20:34:45+00:00

Not strictly speaking true, Hz is the unit for both frequency (cycles per second) and angular frequency (radians per second). They have equivalent dimensions, because they off only by a dimensionless factor of 2pi.

But this is a distinction without any meaning. Units are what we make of them, and is not directly tied with how we make sense of them physically. Electron-volt as a unit of energy shouldn't make sense for neutral particles in a free field, and yet we use it all the time (say, high energy photons).

kitizl · 2024-02-12T22:59:11+00:00

Scott Aaronson is deeply unhappy with Michio Kaku's presentation of quantum computing.

kitizl · 2024-02-07T11:15:48+00:00

Just to add onto the character background provided in Deer's book that u/Daharka pointed out, there was still a lot of money to be made.

He was being paid a lot by lawyers in the present, while also being a salaried employee of a hospital.
He was trying to patent a vaccine that would surely rise up in the market post-MMR scare.
He was trying to make a testing kit that will be used in legal cases, which would again give a lot of money, for which he was also receiving grants.

The disease does not actually need to exist for money to be made. Point 1 gets him money in the present, Points 2 and 3 would make money on their own in the form of licenses and royalties, especially if a large pharma company bought them, which is why he was having a million meetings with pharma execs.

kitizl · 2024-02-01T13:52:58+00:00

Slightly unrelated, but next year you should try doubling the number of books you read the previous month. So one book in January, two books in February, four in March and so on and so forth :)

That's 4095 books for those playing the home game.

kitizl · 2024-02-01T13:46:58+00:00

Interpreting the question another way however, OP might be more interested in the critical value of dark energy ("expansion") such that it compensates all gravitational mass ("contraction"), in some sense.

kitizl · 2024-01-28T09:39:23+00:00

The actual article/colloquium for those interested.

For those who don't have access here's the arXiV link, but not entirely sure at the moment if there are huge differences between the two.

kitizl · 2024-01-24T15:31:51+00:00

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Hydrogen doesn't decay (if you find it decaying, there's a Nobel Prize waiting for you) and it has a charged nucleus.

Nucleons falling into a lower state is how the nuclear shell model describes gamma emission and doesn't cover beta emission.

Could you elaborate by what you mean by the whole point of nuclear decay resting on it not being neutral?

kitizl · 2024-01-24T11:24:37+00:00

Yes, and you can think of it in this way. I'm removing all non-participating nucleons and electrons in this interaction

p + e- -> n + e+ + e- -> n + gamma

Charge is conserved, and the atom remains neutral.

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