Funny how exact we’ve become in some ways while we have grown inexact in others. Take sports, for example. When NCAA and Olympic swimmers reach a pool wall, they reach for a “touch pad,” an electronic timer invented by Professor William Parkinson, a physicist at the U. of Michigan. We know not only who wins, but also by seemingly incontrovertible timers the split-second differences that separate the finishes. The timer produced a tie for the Gold Medal in Rio De Janeiro as Simone Manuel and Penny Oleksiak reached the wall at the same hundredth of a second, finishing the 100-meter freestyle in 52.70 seconds. Hundredths of a second, not dependent on some judge’s twitching stopwatch finger! Parkinson invented the touch pad in the late 1950s, and the Olympic Committee adopted its use for the 1968 Games in Mexico City.
Indisputable judging of racing winners wasn’t just a product of a twentieth-century physics professor. It dates to 1881 and a “photo finish” of a horse race in Plainfield, NJ, captured by photographer Ernest Marks and to the 1937 invention of the strip camera by Lorenzo del Riccio. The camera’s single vertical slit replaced the traditional horizontal shutter, giving a view of the finish line at different times. To a twenty-first century sports fan, such technology is a bit crude by comparison to the instant video replay and computer-generated trajectory of a ball that tennis players can use in an appeal of a line judge’s ruling.
Yes, we’ve become very exact in some ways. In American football, we know whether or not a player’s heel touched the sideline or whether or not—unless the camera view is blocked—a player crossed the goal line or fumbled an instant before his knee touched the ground. The precision of our measurements has led to emotional ups and downs as rulings by judges, umpires, and referees have been overturned. Ty Cobb might be turning over in his grave at the thought of an umpire’s favorable call being overturned by officials looking at camera images from angles no umpire could know from a single vantage point. Exactitude! Yet, as we have discovered on the football field and in other sports venues, we still sometimes have our view blocked by a chance object, angle, or player. The only guarantee against inexactitude would be ubiquitous cameras, but they would have to be as omnipresent as molecules in our atmosphere, replacing the very space, objects, actions, and players we want to time or measure.
Replays even serve in solving crimes and assigning blame for car accidents. We want all this exactitude whenever we believe they support our position. In contrast, we say, “The camera doesn’t tell the whole story, when we dispute its images. And unlike the process in fencing, football, and other sports, there’s no limit to how many times we can dispute the “exact” images in legal matters. In matters of behaviors and results that influence the economic status and the health of individuals, we leave room for dispute. And that seems reasonable because the circumstances in the “real world” are so complex and geographically widespread that no system can video or time all incidents. Nor would we probably want the exactitude of an Olympic swimming meet or football game, the latter with cameras positioned on the ground, in the press boxes, and hanging from overhead wires.
Why? Or, rather, why not?
Maybe we prefer to exist under the cover of inexactitude that comforts us like one of those fuzzy, warm stuffed animals or blankets advertised each winter. Too much precision makes our lives finalized, as though our contract with the Cosmos has numerous lines of fine print. But does anyone really desire accountability and final judgment on matters that could remain open? “Scientists and lawyers,” you say. Yet, surety and judgments in science and law have been found to be erroneous because of formerly unknown perspectives and evidence that later surfaced under reviews of the original circumstances, objects, and actions. In the judicial system, for example, persons once found guilty have had their convictions overturned because the “exact” information used to convict was later found to be inexact, blatantly false, fudged, or simply viewed from a different angle.
And in science? Is assumed exactitude the reason that Dr. Ivar Giaever, Nobel laureate, resigned from the American Physical Society, an organization that said the matter concerning climate change was “incontrovertible.” The APS used incontrovertible, a term it would probably reject if it were applied to any of a host of hypotheses and theories centered on the physical world. Giaever suggested that a global average temperature is currently impossible to measure because, if we can put the matter in sports terms, we can’t have “touch plates” and recorders everywhere. If a 0.8 degree Celsius is the supposed temperature change, Giaever sees that as remarkable on two grounds: How did we get to such exactitude? And why is that 0.8 degree not an indication of a normal fluctuation in an atmosphere with its supposed and quantified changes from the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when the planet was most likely much warmer than it is today, to the Medieval Warming Period (PETM) thousands of years after the last big ice melt, through the Little Ice Age hundreds of years ago? How exact are our measurements? How ubiquitous? And on what basis do we judge that a rise of 2 degrees Celsius the IPCC says would be “devastating” to the planet? Two degrees is only a fraction of the PETM’s estimated “excess” temperature.* But “excess” over what?** Two degrees warmer than the Little Ice Age? Two warmer than the Medieval Warm Period? Two warmer than the PETM? Two warmer than Snowball Earth 650 million years ago when glaciation occurred near the Equator?
If we see a rise in carbon dioxide and a rise of 0.8 degree Celsius over about 150 years, do we also see both in terms of 55 million years or even in terms of the millennium since the Vikings found Greenland a rather pleasant place to settle? Moraine State Park in western Pennsylvania is so-named because it has debris left when a giant glacier melted. The residents of Meadowcroft Rock Shelter about 50 miles southwest of that ice sheet probably burned wood 15,000 years ago. Did their fires produce sufficient carbon dioxide to warm Earth to the post-ice period, most likely an interglacial period like the almost dozen previous interglacials, in which we now reside? Could they have foreseen the melting of the great glacier? No one, fortunately or unfortunately, can look back to the present from the perspective of the present—even an instant replay isn’t “instant.” Its only upon seeing the replay that we know with more or less exactitude dependent upon number and position of recorders what happened “during the play.” In looking at a replay, sports commentators are historians. And fans, in looking at the same replay, can see differently depending on their affinities for a team or player.
Just throwing this out there: What if the corn belts and wheat belts move into Canada? What if the tropics move into the subtropics? What if the rains move into the deserts and the semiarid areas move into former humid zones? As with any meet, match, or game, there will be fans who will cheer and who will boo when the pool wall, sideline, base, goal line, or temperature line will be shown to have been reached, crossed, or not crossed.
Funny how we play with exactitude. We sometimes want it; sometimes, don’t. And we do so in the context of judging one another and one another’s perspectives. So, don’t look for any resolution to the question about climate change that isn’t based on fuzzy warm comfortable feelings until we, probably about a millennium hence, see the replay.
*There are many sources that give estimates of PETM temperatures, but see, for example, https://www.britannica.com/science/Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-Maximum
**Consider what my plumber once related. Upon fixing a temperature control for a refrigerator, he was asked by the owner, “Can you make it twice as cold?”
Indisputable judging of racing winners wasn’t just a product of a twentieth-century physics professor. It dates to 1881 and a “photo finish” of a horse race in Plainfield, NJ, captured by photographer Ernest Marks and to the 1937 invention of the strip camera by Lorenzo del Riccio. The camera’s single vertical slit replaced the traditional horizontal shutter, giving a view of the finish line at different times. To a twenty-first century sports fan, such technology is a bit crude by comparison to the instant video replay and computer-generated trajectory of a ball that tennis players can use in an appeal of a line judge’s ruling.
Yes, we’ve become very exact in some ways. In American football, we know whether or not a player’s heel touched the sideline or whether or not—unless the camera view is blocked—a player crossed the goal line or fumbled an instant before his knee touched the ground. The precision of our measurements has led to emotional ups and downs as rulings by judges, umpires, and referees have been overturned. Ty Cobb might be turning over in his grave at the thought of an umpire’s favorable call being overturned by officials looking at camera images from angles no umpire could know from a single vantage point. Exactitude! Yet, as we have discovered on the football field and in other sports venues, we still sometimes have our view blocked by a chance object, angle, or player. The only guarantee against inexactitude would be ubiquitous cameras, but they would have to be as omnipresent as molecules in our atmosphere, replacing the very space, objects, actions, and players we want to time or measure.
Replays even serve in solving crimes and assigning blame for car accidents. We want all this exactitude whenever we believe they support our position. In contrast, we say, “The camera doesn’t tell the whole story, when we dispute its images. And unlike the process in fencing, football, and other sports, there’s no limit to how many times we can dispute the “exact” images in legal matters. In matters of behaviors and results that influence the economic status and the health of individuals, we leave room for dispute. And that seems reasonable because the circumstances in the “real world” are so complex and geographically widespread that no system can video or time all incidents. Nor would we probably want the exactitude of an Olympic swimming meet or football game, the latter with cameras positioned on the ground, in the press boxes, and hanging from overhead wires.
Why? Or, rather, why not?
Maybe we prefer to exist under the cover of inexactitude that comforts us like one of those fuzzy, warm stuffed animals or blankets advertised each winter. Too much precision makes our lives finalized, as though our contract with the Cosmos has numerous lines of fine print. But does anyone really desire accountability and final judgment on matters that could remain open? “Scientists and lawyers,” you say. Yet, surety and judgments in science and law have been found to be erroneous because of formerly unknown perspectives and evidence that later surfaced under reviews of the original circumstances, objects, and actions. In the judicial system, for example, persons once found guilty have had their convictions overturned because the “exact” information used to convict was later found to be inexact, blatantly false, fudged, or simply viewed from a different angle.
And in science? Is assumed exactitude the reason that Dr. Ivar Giaever, Nobel laureate, resigned from the American Physical Society, an organization that said the matter concerning climate change was “incontrovertible.” The APS used incontrovertible, a term it would probably reject if it were applied to any of a host of hypotheses and theories centered on the physical world. Giaever suggested that a global average temperature is currently impossible to measure because, if we can put the matter in sports terms, we can’t have “touch plates” and recorders everywhere. If a 0.8 degree Celsius is the supposed temperature change, Giaever sees that as remarkable on two grounds: How did we get to such exactitude? And why is that 0.8 degree not an indication of a normal fluctuation in an atmosphere with its supposed and quantified changes from the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when the planet was most likely much warmer than it is today, to the Medieval Warming Period (PETM) thousands of years after the last big ice melt, through the Little Ice Age hundreds of years ago? How exact are our measurements? How ubiquitous? And on what basis do we judge that a rise of 2 degrees Celsius the IPCC says would be “devastating” to the planet? Two degrees is only a fraction of the PETM’s estimated “excess” temperature.* But “excess” over what?** Two degrees warmer than the Little Ice Age? Two warmer than the Medieval Warm Period? Two warmer than the PETM? Two warmer than Snowball Earth 650 million years ago when glaciation occurred near the Equator?
If we see a rise in carbon dioxide and a rise of 0.8 degree Celsius over about 150 years, do we also see both in terms of 55 million years or even in terms of the millennium since the Vikings found Greenland a rather pleasant place to settle? Moraine State Park in western Pennsylvania is so-named because it has debris left when a giant glacier melted. The residents of Meadowcroft Rock Shelter about 50 miles southwest of that ice sheet probably burned wood 15,000 years ago. Did their fires produce sufficient carbon dioxide to warm Earth to the post-ice period, most likely an interglacial period like the almost dozen previous interglacials, in which we now reside? Could they have foreseen the melting of the great glacier? No one, fortunately or unfortunately, can look back to the present from the perspective of the present—even an instant replay isn’t “instant.” Its only upon seeing the replay that we know with more or less exactitude dependent upon number and position of recorders what happened “during the play.” In looking at a replay, sports commentators are historians. And fans, in looking at the same replay, can see differently depending on their affinities for a team or player.
Just throwing this out there: What if the corn belts and wheat belts move into Canada? What if the tropics move into the subtropics? What if the rains move into the deserts and the semiarid areas move into former humid zones? As with any meet, match, or game, there will be fans who will cheer and who will boo when the pool wall, sideline, base, goal line, or temperature line will be shown to have been reached, crossed, or not crossed.
Funny how we play with exactitude. We sometimes want it; sometimes, don’t. And we do so in the context of judging one another and one another’s perspectives. So, don’t look for any resolution to the question about climate change that isn’t based on fuzzy warm comfortable feelings until we, probably about a millennium hence, see the replay.
*There are many sources that give estimates of PETM temperatures, but see, for example, https://www.britannica.com/science/Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-Maximum
**Consider what my plumber once related. Upon fixing a temperature control for a refrigerator, he was asked by the owner, “Can you make it twice as cold?”
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