In the last week, The IoP's Physics Web has posted two news updates that fall into the category of "regrettable physics," here defined as "the sort of work that makes Daniel Davies say mean things about physicists." I'm talking here about the application of physics concepts to fields where they're neither immediately relevant nor particularly wanted.
The first gets bonus black marks for the title "Physicists Make Religion Crystal Clear" (which, I realize, isn't the fault of the authors, but really...). This reports on forthcoming work applying solid-state models to the growth of world religions:
According to Ausloos, the number of adherents to a specific religion appears to follow a "growth-death law" that also describes how the size of crystalline regions grow and shrink in some materials. One striking similarity to crystallization is that religions can appear almost spontaneously in a process that is similar to the nucleation of crystals - with a popular leader often fulfilling the role of a nucleation point. A recent example of the spontaneous nucleation of a religion is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), which was founded about 175 years ago in the US by Joseph Smith and now has nearly 13 million members worldwide.
The growth and demise of a religion can also be affected by phenomena such as mass conversions or genocide that affect entire groups -- rather than the interactions between individuals. Ausloos describes these influences as "external fields", in analogy to externally-applied electric fields or temperature gradients that can affect the crystallization process.
I don't know which is worse, here: the implicit comparison between Joseph Smith and a microscopic piece of crud floating in a solution that's about to crystallize, or the casual way that "genocide" gets tossed into that second paragraph. They're both pretty dreadful, but I think I have to go with modelling genocide as an "external field," because, of course, the Albigensian Crusade is a well-know solution of Maxwell's Equations.
The second, "May the Best Man Win," applies physics techniques to sports, and completely misses the point:
Every true sports fan will know how disappointing it is if your team fails to win the league. But the feeling is made even worse if it is an underdog that clinches the title at the end of the season. This unpredictability is epitomized by American Major League Baseball, where an astonishing 44% of games have been won by the supposedly weaker team over the past century.
Now, however, Eli Ben-Naim and Nick Hengartner from the Los Alamos National Laboratory suggest the method of determining the best team can have a significant impact on the result. The physicists decided to model the apparent "randomness" in sports games by creating their own set of N teams, each with a precisely known ability. They then assumed that there would always be a certain probability that the higher seeded team would win.
Through statistical analysis, the physicists found that in normal league play, in which each team plays every other team once, a total of N3 games would be required to guarantee that the best team ultimately wins. Applying this result to the 20-strong English Premier League, a whopping 8000 games would be needed to identify the genuine champions, rather than the 380 that the teams currently face.
No, no, no. This is just wrong-- the whole point of sports is that they're not fair. The "best" team doesn't always win, and that's why we watch. There's a reason that every sports movie ever made features a plucky underdog triumphing against the odds-- that's what sports fans are looking for.
The real glory of an event like the NCAA basketball tournament is the chance for an upset-- for Hampton to beat Iowa State as a 15 seed, for George Mason to reach the Final Four, for Villanova to knock off Georgetown by playing the perfect game. That's what's made college basketball's champioship into the month-long sports juggernaut that it is. People love to see underdogs win, which is why single-elimination tournaments are so great-- see also the Super Bowl, another gigantic single-game championship, that works because in one game, the underdog always has a shot.
The point is not to set up a system that guarantees the "correct" result-- the point is to set up a system that gives the fans what they want. Which means the underdog needs to have a shot.
I've spent years struggling against the stereotype of physicists as nerdy little guys who get picked last for everything, and these guys come along and prove to the world that they just don't understand sports... Some days, I'm embarassed for my profession.
Physicists are far from the only ones to engage in this sort of inappropriate application, of course: as this Crooked Timber post reminds us, economists are the real kings of this, followed closely by "evolutionary psychologists." But highly public physics work in this vein undermines my moral standing to make fun of economists and evolutionary psychologists, and I wish they would stop.
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Not only that but this line
" This unpredictability is epitomized by American Major League Baseball, where an astonishing 44% of games have been won by the supposedly weaker team over the past century."
makes me think these folks haven't taken much of any math based science or competed in anything (not just sports). Only 44% for the underdog? Thats sounds normal, the "better" team wins most of the time. The other way around would certainly be surprising. So the "bad" teams have an average record of 71-91. Why is that surprising to anybody? Is this article some kind of parody?
Thanks for pointing to the posts at Crooked Timber. They have confirmed my personal feeling about the tendency of us, physicists, for arrogance. The most arrogant people I know are physicists (but then, I don't know any politicians or high priests).
I hope I won't become such an arrogant fool myself.
As a fan of Leicester City (who last time they made the English Premiership got dumped out with the then worst performance in that leagues' history), any way they can skew the league so that the "better" team doesn't win that often is good for me...
I think you are engaging in a critique best described as 'Argumentum Ad Sacred Cow'. IOW you are not critiquing the validity of their models but that they are modeling it at all. That kind of "don't you dare analyze that" is something I expect from political hacks like William Proxmire with his ill-informed 'Golden Fleece' awards rather than scientists.
If you have a reason to believe their models are incorrect rather than just 'offensive', state your reasons. But don't whine about people applying reasonable scientific methodology to topics you would just rather they did not.
Doing research without bothering to check what are the established facts about a phenomenon is not "reasonable scientific methodology".
I don't think that's why "we" watch. Most people think that the underdog that won the title actually had the right spirit, synergy, what have you and they did deserve the title where the favorite were a bunch of highly paid, complacent slackers. The idea is to herald a champion that shows all the good qualities.
In reality we delude ourselves. As this research demonstrates, chance plays a huge role in such competitions and messes with our notion of who the underdog really was. Yes, upsets are entertaining, but only if you were cheering for the underdog.
Ok. You potentially have an objection. Now, what specific facts did they fail to check that affect their conclusions? Note: Objecting that fans don't want balanced teams isn't a fact. It's an assertion requiring evidence. And even if it were a fact, it doesn't appear to change their conclusions regarding team strength ratings.
So what specific facts did they fail to take into account and how do those facts affect the validity of their conclusions?
I was referring to the post at Crooked Timber.
In the USA, where Football means something different, we had this weekend one of the greatest college football games I've ever seen in my life. Extreme underdog Boise State won 43 to 42 in overtime to 7-time national champion Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl. They concluded with several consecutive plays that might well have come from a Hollywood script, trick plays, highly risky.
I had a Physicist friend over (for the record: Dr. George Hockney, formerly at femiLab, now at JPL) and we were repeatedly screaming with amazement.
I reject any model which denies such games, or the fun they can produce.
Oh, and the guy who scored the winning play (a 2-point conversion) then got down on his knee and proposed to a cheerleader girlfriend who, in the heat of the moment, accepted his proposal. Pure Hollywood happy ending!
There is some good math in sports analysis, such as (google it) "The Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball." Baseball and Cricket have the most mathematical apparatus hanging from them, and thus probably the most mathematicians as rabid fans. Also google "Sabermetrics." Bill James defined sabermetrics as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball."
Also Google: "Physics of Baseball."
Oh, and yesterday, the college football team ranked #2 (Florida Gators) kicked the stuffing out of the team ranked #1 (Ohio State Buckeyes) by a startling 41-14 final score. The underdog won by such a huge margin that it turned upseide-down and became almost boring again.
As Damon Runyon wrote: "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."
Pace Benjamin Franz, I think pointing out that a model is obviously stupid is always a valid observation to make about a model.
Power laws are the sign that no one knows what is really going on, so all they're doing is fitting a curve. Another associated physicist tendency is extrapolation far far far outside the region where the curve (or observed symmetry) is known to approximate the data.
It's sort of what one would expect, given that the foundations of physics are based on matching mathematics to experimentally observed symmetries rather than on a model of what is actually going on in those mysterious little particle thangs.
Everything is linear to first order, even on a log-log plot.
Carl: since those particles are considered elementary, physicist do not expect to see a lot of what is going on inside them.
#4: You're right - the problem isn't with their model, but the fact that they are modeling it at all. Their model essentially provides no new insights, and only serves to confirm what we already know - the team that is "better" on paper doesn't always emerge at the top in a competitive season of finite length. We all already knew that. As Chad says, that's why we watch the games, and that's why they play them - the "better" team doesn't always win, and the enjoyment comes from watching (or playing) the actual competition.
They propose a method of constructing a league schedule such that the "best" team will emerge at the top, but real-world constraints (money, largely, but also for a human sense of "fairness") ensure that such a schedule could never be constructed. So what the hell is the point? I guess it's nice to know that such a schedule _could_ be constructed, but it never will be. Even then, their model really can't _guarantee_ that the "best" team will emerge at the top, only that the probability that it doesn't can be made arbitrarily small. Interestingly enough, their proposed schedule looks very similar to what exists currently - a preliminary round (or more) followed by a championship round vs. a regular season followed by playoffs. There are some differences, of course, but it seems to me that we've already hit on a near optimal solution.
Ultimately, even they state in their paper that because there must be a finite number of games you can never guarantee that the "best" team will win. What this says to me is that physicsweb.org got the whole point of the article wrong in their news story.
Quick question for Prof. Orzel: any idea why trackbacks may not be showing up? (I posted a blog entry about this article a few days ago but I just noticed that the trackback hasn't yet shown up - but the error could be on my end.)