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Originally Posted by Hornblower
I'll second that. I have a lot of skill as a musician, and it enabled me to have a fine 32-year career with one of the world's premier military bands. Nevertheless I never was anywhere close to being qualified to give a solo recital in Carnegie Hall. ... I would consider breakthrough work in physics, of the sort worthy of a Nobel laureate, as being roughly analogous to making it to that stage as a musician.
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Cool. I found music too difficult, so I switched to physics and chemistry.
Breakthrough science is rare. All scientists dream of it; few get to bath in it. There was a fairly major (but largely unpublished) breakthrough in energetic chemistry when western scientist got their hands on what had been happening in the USSR. One of the direct results is much safer airbags.
Revolutionary changes are even more rare; but if you are looking for a comparison to musicianship, there really is none: Both Stravinski and Lennon were breakthrough musicians, but there is no 'more correct' musical score. Sometimes all that matters is that you can dance to it and it has a good beat.
Something is wrong with our physical understanding of the universe. What we are looking at here, is more like a very complex puzzle, and like all puzzles, you start with borders, work on the lines and note discontinuties. The model of the universe has a lot of pieces that don't fit - but is it because of the level of complexity, or is some of the framework assembled wrong?
I spent an evening plowing through Hipparcos papers, and this is the kind of observations that perk my interest:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/astro-p.../0412093v2.pdf
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Originally Posted by Soderblom et al 2004
The result obtained by Hipparcos for the Pleiades (van Leeuwen 1999) was a complete surprise, yielding a distance modulus of (m − M) = 5.37 ± 0.06 magnitude, to be compared to a modulus of 5.60 ± 0.04 from main sequence fitting (Pinsonneault et al. 1998). Taken at face value, the Hipparcos result means that stars in the Pleiades are about 0.23 magnitude fainter than otherwise similar stars of the solar neighborhood. This large discrepancy has forced a careful reexamination of the assumptions and input parameters of the stellar models, as well as a thorough study of the Hipparcos data itself and potential errors in it. The controversy has not been fully resolved in that builders of star models find that the changes in physics or input parameters needed to account for the Hipparcos distance are too radical to be reasonable while the Hipparcos team has resolutely defended the Hipparcos result...
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Two years later, the ESA scientist who reduced the Hipparcos data acknowledged substantial errors, and published corrected tables of Hipparcos positions and distances.
Why such a stunning error? Why did it take eight years to fix it? The Hipparcos team had
a great deal of confidence in their methodology - They used the tried-and-true 'great circle' as a reference, with multidimensional spline fits to patch together incontinuities. The method should have worked
if all of the physical parameters used to define local space are correct. It is possible Hipparcos ran into the same kind of Doppler surges Anderson found, or the path through space varied, or some combination of both?
The new Hipparcos data relys upon what all science must do when the underlying physics are not understood or too complex: Principle components, a variation upon finite element code, and statistics. We can do better.