Things Are Often Not What They Seem — an Allegory from Science (Applicable to Politics) about Jumping to Conclusions Based on Too Little Information

© 2011 Peter Free

 

16 September 2011

 

 

Forgetting our perennial ignorance leads to opinionated expressions of certainty where there should be none

 

First, a premise:

 

Science is the only discipline that forces truth on us as the sole measure of its worth.

 

Second, an inference:

 

The practice of science serves as a morality play.

 

It repeatedly exposes why we, as individuals and human institutions, should become more comfortable with uncertainty.

 

The scientific method’s “search and corroborate” paradigm exemplifies why we should be less passionate about our poorly-researched opinions, particularly when those are expressed in regard to obviously fact-uncertain ground.

 

Third, an observation about the anti-factual state of American culture:

 

American politics and our consumerist culture are virtually the opposite of science.

 

Both exhibit magical thinking and deliberate blindness to facts.

 

As a result, our culture founders, when battered by economic and geopolitical Realities.

 

 

Science’s investigation of the chemical composition of a humble asteroid illustrates (a) why seeing should not necessarily be believing and (b) the value of actively digging for truth

 

Here is an allegory from the astronomical sciences:

 

Astronomers had a problem. They knew that meteorites start out as parts of bigger rocks in space, mostly asteroids. But when they compared the spectral colors of asteroids [seen from Earth] with those of the most common kind of meteorite that falls to Earth, they couldn't find a match.

 

Now Japanese researchers have found the answer in the first bits of asteroid returned to Earth by a spacecraft [named “Hayabusa”].

 

Dissecting the samples, they have nailed the source of Earth's most common meteorites and gotten to the root of astronomers' color problem. The blast of the solar wind and perhaps other “space weathering” processes, it turns out, altered the spectral color of the most common type of asteroids in the inner asteroid belt—the “S types”—and masked their true nature.

 

[The researchers] were looking for “nanoblobs” that are opaque and about the same size as the wavelength of light so they could scatter light and make Itokawa look redder, at least to the supersensitive eye of a spectrometer. That sort of reddening is what misled the astronomers.

 

© 2011 Richard A. Kerr, Hayabusa Gets to the Bottom of Deceptive Asteroid Cloaking, Science 333(6046): 1081 (26 August 2011)

 

 

Related Citation

 

The following research article — documenting the chemical composition of the recovered asteroid fragment — demonstrates that the spectral colors of S-type asteroids, seen from a distance, have indeed been misleading:

 

Tomoki Nakamura, Takaaki Noguchi, Masahiko Tanaka, Michael E. Zolensky, Makoto Kimura, Akira Tsuchiyama, Aiko Nakato, Toshihiro Ogami, Hatsumi Ishida, Masayuki Uesugi, Toru Yada, Kei Shirai, Akio Fujimura, Ryuji Okazaki, Scott A. Sandford, Yukihiro Ishibashi, Masanao Abe, Tatsuaki Okada, Munetaka Ueno, Toshifumi Mukai, Makoto Yoshikawa, and Junichiro Kawaguchi, Itokawa Dust Particles: A Direct Link Between S-Type Asteroids and Ordinary Chondrites, Science 333(6046): 1113-1116 (26 August 2011)

 

 

Explaining the asteroid-politics allegory

 

Premises

 

Complexity is not only skin deep.

 

We only recognize Reality when we look for it.

 

If we don’t look, we won’t see.

 

Premises, as illustrated by the asteroid example

 

(1) Like most of Life, complexity in the asteroid example was not only skin deep.

 

There were two layers of solar wind “burn” on or near the surface of the asteroid sample.  Both potentially contributed to the camouflaging shift in spectral radiation, as interpreted from a distance.

 

The top layer was comprised of iron-sulfide nano-sized blobs.  The layer below it was composed of metallic iron nano-blobs.  Each, being chemically different, presumably had different effects on spectral emission.

 

(2) We only recognize Reality, when we look for it.

 

Researchers in that asteroid example had to recognize:

 

(i) that what they were seeing from a distance was not accurate,

 

(ii) that the solar wind-affected chemistry of the near-surface layers of the asteroid sample had altered the asteroid’s spectral emission (as seen from Earth),

 

and

 

(iii) that they would have to determine the contribution of each chemically altered layer toward the overall shift in spectral emission wavelength.

 

(3) If we don’t look, we won’t see.

 

If Japan had not launched its Hayabusa satellite to grab a sample of the Itokawa asteroid, we would not know what the research team discovered about it.

 

If we don’t investigate Reality, we are not going to see it.

 

 

The moral? — Closed minds and political passions are enemies of accurate understanding

 

If our culture continues on in the irrational and incurious way it is, we are not going see, or do, anything that has much relationship to what is real.

 

Spectral radiation and hot air often do not represent what they claim to.