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Oh, I hope there wasn't a significant
miscommunication in the invitation for this particular talk,
I'm going to give it another one later on - the keynote
address.
I was asked for the first to make some
brief remarks as inspiration to young Korean scientists.
I'm not sure, wasn't sure how to do that,
so here's my best shot at it and it really has very little
to do with
quantum technology, but here are my inspirational
thoughts.
A long time ago, actually my whole life, I have been an
experimental physicist.
Have had the distinct privilege of
literally being able to talk to God even though I'm an
atheist. In a physics laboratory, I am able to ask carefully
posed mathematically-based questions and correspondingly
observe universal truth.
To do so I make careful measurements of natural phenomena.
In the physics laboratory, I once settled the debate between
Einstein and Schrodinger on one hand, Niels Bohr and
John
von Neumann on the other.
In a laboratory, I asked a simple
question: which one of these two groups was right? And which
one was wrong?
I didn't know ahead of time what answer I would get. I just
knew I could get an answer.
Nonetheless, I found real truth.
For the answer. I assert that real truth
can only be found by observing natural phenomena. By
carefully observing natural phenomena.
Good science is always based on good experiments. Good
observations always overrule purely speculative theory.
Sloppy experiments, on the other hand, are frequently
counterproductive and provide scientific disinformation.
That is why good scientists repeat each
other's experiments carefully.
For inspiration to young scientists, I would suggest that
today is an opportune moment for careful observations of
nature.
Why? The current world I observe is
literally awash, saturated, with pseudoscience, with bad
science, with scientific misinformation and disinformation,
and what I will call "techno-cons."
Techno-cons are the application of
scientific disinformation for opportunistic purposes.
Non-science business managers, politicians, politically
appointed lab directors and the like are very easily snowed
by scientific disinformation. Sometimes they participate in
its origination.
The purpose is to try to inspire you as
young scientists to observe nature directly so that you too
can determine real truth.
Use the information gained from carefully
performed experiments and research to stop the spread of
scientific misinformation, disinformation and techno-cons.
Well-educated scientists can help solve the world's problems
by acting as scientific fact-checkers. A fact-checker's most
common problem, unfortunately, is determining what is true
and what is not.
The world is awash with someone else's
perception of truth as an alternative to real truth.
Perception of truth frequently differs significantly from
real truth. Moreover, given sufficient promotion and
advertising, perception of truth becomes truth.
Its promotion by commercial enterprise Is
called marketing, commonly used in the furtherance of
political, commercial, or various opportunistic ends by its
promoters. When promotion is done by government or political
groups, it's called spin or propaganda.
To such a promoter, perception of truth is truth. If you can
sell it, it must be true. If you can't sell it, it must be
false.
Perception of truth is also malleable. If
you can sell it, if you want to sell it, and you can't sell
it, that's easy. You change it. You can change truth. You
can claim false observations if necessary.
My favorite in this act is ChatGPT.
It's very good at doing
exactly that.
It has lots of man-made pseudoscience to copy
and manipulate and emulate. It can lie and cheat even better
than its human mentors whose writings are abundant in
literature.
In literature, you will observe there's
far more fiction than there is nonfiction.
Pseudoscience is science fiction.
Unfortunately, neither computers nor human fact-checkers
can, in general, tell fact from fiction. Or science from
science fiction or from pseudoscience.
If Starship Enterprise can fly faster than the speed of
light, it's gotta be possible, right? All you need is
dilithium crystals, right? Wrong...
Real truth is not malleable.
It can only be found by making careful
observations. Well-tested laws of physics and observational
data are important guides to allow you to distinguish truth
from perception of truth.
Now I am not alone in observing the dangerous proliferation
of pseudoscience. Recently, The Nobel Foundation has formed
a new panel to address the issue called the International
Panel on Information Environment.
They plan to model it after the UN's
International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.
I think personally that they are making a big mistake in
that effort because in my opinion
the IPCC is one of the
worst sources of dangerous misinformation.
What I'm about to recommend is in
furtherance of that, of the aims of that panel.
In the past, we scientists act, have acted, as referees for
journal article peer review. And we have peer-reviewed each
other's work, so as just to prevent the proliferation of
scientific misinformation.
That process recently seems to have
broken down. Somehow it needs to be reenergized.
During my career as a scientist, I have frequently been
asked to referee lots of scientific journal articles. Here I
will offer a few pieces of advice.
First, very importantly,
your work should be based on careful observations of nature.
You must try hard and recognize what I
will call an elephant in the room hiding in plain sight. Ask
very simple questions.
I found an elephant in the room that I
will be describing in my keynote address in quantum
mechanics.
I have a second elephant in the room that I have recently
discovered regarding climate change. I believe that climate
change is not a crisis.
Real truth could be found if and only if you learn to
recognize and use good science. It's especially true when
real truth is politically incorrect and does not reflect
political, business aims, or desires of leaders.
Even the scientific community can
sometimes become diluted by pseudoscience.
Recall, if you want pseudoscience to be true, just simply
spin it and it becomes true. Importantly, a referee must
know and use mathematically based physics. A good scientist
must also know how to derive and solve differential
equations.
That was the first thing I learned as an
undergraduate at Caltech.
Follow the teaching of Sir Isaac Newton. He found that the
world is governed by differential equations. He had to
invent calculus to do it but he did it.
A referee must
correctly identify the dominant processes. That's the
starting point.
The best way to do this is with order of
magnitude estimates of the various conceivable processes.
One of my examples I can give later, I don't have time to do
it though regarding
climate change, the dominant process I
believe, has been misidentified by factors of 200...!
So if you're off by a factor of one
hundred, two hundred, your process is way too small to be
important. It's the big one - big numbers matter, little
numbers can be neglected.
Sometimes people will promote new ideas that are off by
factors of 1,000,000. They just simply haven't run the
numbers themselves. The most pathetic part of all this is
that they don't know that they need to know how to do that.
Their lack of scientific knowledge allows
science, pseudoscience, to promote what I will refer to as
techno-cons,
political opportunistic aims...
Techo-cons are readily unmasked and identified if you simply
apply order of magnitude calculations. Very importantly, a
referee must apply good calculus-based statistical methods
along with good common sense.
I would also like you to consider methods
used by two of my former associates at University of
California, Berkeley, Nobel laureates.
When they were shown data, a group of
data points and told,
"Look, the trend is obvious."
Luis Alvarez, Nobel laureate,
would look at it and say,
"Flattest line I ever saw."
Charlie Townes would look at it
and say,
"I don't see in the data what you're
telling me I'm supposed to see."
Beware...
If you're doing good science, it may
lead you into politically incorrect areas.
If you're a good scientist, you will
follow them.
I have several I won't have time to
discuss, but I can confidently say there is no real
climate crisis and that climate change does not cause
extreme weather events..."
Thank you...
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