Gravitational Waves And Discovering Cause

Question for the physicists here:
“A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.” (from the New York Times) This means sound that occurred over a billion years ago made it across the galaxy and we recorded it?

How could sound from a billion years ago be measured accurately when clapping hands in a control room causes a blip? Nothing interfered with the sound in a billion years? I have a difficult time understanding how everything can change but then when we look at quantum mechanics and space/time, nothing changes even over billions of years. Why is that so? What makes the sound immutable across time, but everything else changes?

Sheri, the Gray Lady’s use of “sound” to describe a wave, with the accompanying term “chirp” is what might charitably be called poetic license. Sound is a longitudinal wave and requires a medium (i.e. other than vacuum) to propagate. And the point of the source being a billion years distant on our time line just means that the wave propagates with the speed of light–if you travelled on the wave, it would appear stationary to you, and the time would be infinitesimally small. Go to
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/tdil.html
and it will show you the effects of time dilation graphically.

P.S. Briggs, you’ve written a fine article on this–stole my thunder; I was going to post and still may about this and Wigner’s “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing the natural world.”

FAH and Beowulf–many thanks for your comments about the history of this. My physics was in magnetic resonance, so I didn’t get into the heavy stuff.

Briggs,
“Proving cause comes when we understand the true nature or essence of things involved.”
Is this an insight or just a banal tautology? How do you determine the true nature or essence of things? I have this uncharitable image of you standing behind Becquerel as he puzzles over the fogged photographic plates and uranium salts and criticizing him for coming to unwarranted conclusions. Unworthy of me I know. A good review of the black hole chirping is here:

http://motls.blogspot.ca/2016/02/ligo-discovers-black-hole-merger-12.html#more

and here

http://motls.blogspot.ca/2016/02/ligo-wows-bh-masses-3629-to-62-suns-51.html#more

It explains the sound analogy as well.

This article and the Nancy Cartwright’s were refreshing. Needless to say why.

Joy, please tell me why. I can not get any useful content from the Nancy Cartwright article. I see only vague enuendo and breathless claims that lead to nowhere — no examples or evidence is presented.

I will tomorrow.

I would also like to thank you, you know, for the Grendel thing.

… if you travelled on the wave, it would appear stationary to you, and the time would be infinitesimally small,

which partially explains the popularity of surfing.

I think I may be beginning to understand what Briggs’ discussions on cause and effect are trying to say but I am concerned about how useful a point it might be. As I understand the point, linking an effect to something that we can say “caused” it is more difficult than many lay people, scientists, and mathematicians may be using as a working definition of cause and effect. Further, technical procedures people use to allege cause and effect may not in fact be sufficient to maintain that a “cause” and effect relationship exists. Certainly there are many examples where a cause and effect relationship has been proposed when none actually existed.

But it seems he goes further. So much so that I think he has essentially proposed that there is no such thing as cause and effect, unless one postulates a cause or causes that are impossible to determine physically.

Let’s take an example. Suppose we have a lump of iron of 2 kg of mass and it is in deep space, very far from any other objects. Now suppose we measure its velocity and determine its velocity to be 10 meters per second in a direction we define as the X direction, and define the position at which we ended the measurement as x = 0. Now we arrange to zoom ahead of it, or have an assistant far out in front of its current position in the direction of its motion. In 10 seconds we have our assistant measure the position of the lump exactly (within some specified error bounds) 10 seconds from the time we measured the velocity originally. (We could worry about synchronizing clocks and passing information back and forth, but let’s just say we accept some specific level of measurement error.) Now our assistant will measure the position of the lump to be 100 meters in the x direction. There are a couple of cause and effect claims we might make. 1) The velocity of the lump at time zero “caused” its position to be different in the future or 2) its velocity of 10 m/s +- delta at time zero “caused” its position to be 100 m/s +-delta 10 seconds into the future. Both of these cause and effect statements would be based on our previous observations or assumptions about how object motion changes or not as a function of some list of known factors (eg. Newton).
The question to ask Briggs here is does this demonstrate that the velocity at x = 0 and t = 0, coupled with complementary information about nearby matter (none), charge (none), etc. allow someone to say that the velocity “caused” the later position to be what it was? As I understand the Briggs position, his answer would be no. He may say that the Newtonian hypotheses and complementary information could “explain” the future position, but it would say nothing about what “caused” it. In this view, no physical theory (and possibly mathematical result) would ever be able to say anything about “cause” and effect. This seems to be because we can also think of other possible causes, such as the lump started at x =0 v=10, but then disappeared into an alternate universe where it spent an hour moving about, only to jump back at exactly the point in space and time at which we measured it (or the points at which we observed it along the way) and in the alternate universe it was manipulated by some principles or intelligence to make it look like it was explained by Newton et. al. Or it might be that it was interacting in some way, very hard to measure, with all the rest of the universe in just the right way to maintain its momentum constant. (There is a so-called Mach’s principle that hypothesizes this “cause” for local effects.) Under these conditions for ruling out possible “causes” and effects, alternative causes for any events we choose to connect in that way can never be ruled out.
This seems to say that there is no way ever to determine cause and effect, except by hypothesis, essentially a supernatural hypothesis, or at least super-physical. This strikes me as ruling out any working standard for what we demand of an experiment or observation to establish cause and effect. Which essentially means there is no such thing as cause and effect in the physical world. Another way of saying that is that we will never know what “causes” things, we can only know what set of rules “explains” the results of some experiments.

Another line of thought might maintain that the velocity we measured at x = 0 was actually “caused” by the ensemble of quantum mechanical states of the constituent particles of the lump and that ensemble spread the existence over all of space (or space-time if we wished) and when we measured at time t = 10, we simply collapsed all those individual possible states into the one that looked like it was “caused” by the initial lump velocity we measured (collapsed) at t = 0. Or more, that there might be a large number of alternate universes occupied by a large number of possible states for the lump and we just measured two of them, one at t = 0 the other at t = 10 and there was some chance, or probability, or likelihood, or whatever uncertainty about what we would measure.

So the question to ask is: can anyone give one concrete example of a real physical experiment that has been or could be done that would demonstrate “cause” and effect? (Consistent with the Briggs position on cause and effect) Is there a way to articulate the probability that such an experiment demonstrated “cause” and effect, especially since we could likely generate as many possible other “causes” as we had time to spend? If the answer is no, then it may be that the restriction of what constitutes a “cause” is so severe as to rule out the notion of cause and effect for any practical purpose.

The situation reminds me a bit of conversations I have had in the past with people who believe in a literal interpretation of (pick your favorite) creation account. Some people maintain that the age of the universe is some short period of time (say a few thousand or hundred thousand years). When one points out that observations of stars and galaxies indicate they are all moving away from each other at a certain rate and that extrapolating that backwards gives one a rough estimate of when they may have started out as on the order of a few billions of years, the reply is that the universe was created a short time ago, but the astronomical objects were created just so that they appear to have all emanated from some more central earlier position. Similarly, if one points out that isotopic dating of materials on earth suggests that the age of the earth is some large number of years, the reply is that the earth was created with an isotopic composition just so that it appears to be that old. In this way the cause of every observation can be hypothesized to be just so as to appear as if current states were “caused” by the physical phenomena. The end result is that there is literally no way to distinguish between possible “causes” simply in terms of explanatory power.

Dear FAH,

Something Matt wrote previously may help you understand him re cause. I’m going to go about citing Matt a bit differently (using contiguous parts of his own paragraph), as I also have my own pedagogical purpose.

Here’s the first contiguous part of Matt’s paragraph.

Knowledge of cause is the grasping of essence, of the natures and substantial forms of the objects under consideration. None of these things are material in themselves, but are universals above and beyond the material world.

So, yes, Matt says that there is always some other, maybe even an infinite number, of explanations that fits the ‘materials’ (the facts as we have observed them). Matt has taken to using the ‘one banana’ idea (one group ate one more banana than the other group) to illustrate the point. Which you also see is correct. There always are alternative explanations to our observations.

As an aside, this is why Matt says that ‘hypothesis’ ‘testing’ is silly and stupid. Come on, he says, ONE hypothesis — ONE??? — which we just ‘know’ is the real and true possible cause over against all the others, which is then compared via ‘statistics’ (with the scare quotes) to a ‘hypothesis’ that — and this may even be an even more meaningful distinction that Matt makes — compared to a ‘null hypothesis’ that says that our observed differences, which we clearly see, are literally, and I mean literally, due to NOTHING AT ALL.

Since SOMETHING clearly caused the observed differences, the ‘null hypothesis’ is ridiculous and fallacious on its face, on its back, and on its side.

So how do we EVER come to know the cause of a thing? Here is where, dear FAH, you may come to understand what even Matt does not: BOTH Plato, and then his pupil Aristotle, saw, as Matt writes:

Thus to come to knowledge of cause is to understand universals

And here we get to an absolutely fundamental difference between Plato and Aristotle. Plato DENIED that we could somehow ‘touch’, access, these universals. We CANNOT “come to knowledge of cause,” because we cannot, EVER, “understand universals.”

Plato’s ‘Forms’ are FOREVER beyond our ken. We only have some small intuition of the Forms because, somehow, we ‘fell’ from the world of universals, and so, we yet retain a forever-inarticulate (but actual) sort of ‘memory’, an intuition, of their existence.

So for Plato, all we could ever arrive at is ‘likely accounts.’ Plato also asserted that tying our accounts to Number was a good way to judge which accounts were more ‘likely’ — because Number seems to have the greatest similarity — is ‘closest’, as it were — to the Forms.

So: for Plato, an individual scientist can confidently presume the existence of the Forms, the real causes of things, can accept that there can be such a thing as likely accounts, and accept that tying these accounts to Number is desirable where possible, but — here’s the key point — HE COULD NOT REMAIN A PLATONIST if he ever, ever, thought that he could have any more than a completely in-articulable, forever vague ‘intuition’ of the Forms themselves.

In short, a scientist, it seems to me, can be fully a scientist, and a Platonist. But to be a Platonist, he MUST deny even the possibility of Aristotle’s fundamental assertion — that we CAN have access to the Forms themselves, and thus truly understand cause.

However (which is perennially confusing to me) Matt persistently represents Aristotle’s position on this most fundamental matter as the only possible one:

Thus to come to knowledge of cause is to understand universals, which we get through a form of induction. Induction is the immaterial “movement” from finite particularities to an infinite generality and is such that only rational creatures can accomplish it.

To say it again, Plato would say that it is obvious that rational creatures — or any creatures — can NEVER accomplish an “immaterial ‘movement’ from finite particularities to an infinite generality.”

I’m not saying that Matt is incorrect, exactly. I’m merely saying that Matt’s discussion of Cause is that of a confirmed Aristotelian.

And I wish you, dear FAH, to understand that Plato, as well as Aristotle, has an account of these metaphysical matters.

Dear William:
I liked the first post of yours I saw, and I was intrigued by (and ordered) your book on Statistics, since the interpretation and pedagogy of statistics is one of my hobby-horses. I subscribed to your blog, but I was flooded by posts that were all over the place. I was about to discontinue my subscription.

Then I saw your post on the LIGO experiment (detection of gravitational waves), and I was impressed by its accuracy and honesty. That is, whatever
your social, political, religious, or ideological ideas might be (eg, creationist vs anti-creationist—this is only a shot in the dark), you were very careful not to prostitute scientific explanation to ideological agenda, as many unfortunately do, and turn it into patronizing or dishonest “scientific explanation.” Bravo! If the two of us were in a lifeboat with few provisions, I wouldn’t have to look at my back!

John K, thank you very much for your incisive comments, with which, for the most part, I agree. Roger Penrose is a Platonist (perhaps because he is more a mathematician than a physicist) and I tend to follow him.

You’re saying, if I understand you correctly, that there is a reality (i.e. universal forms?) underlying what we can quantitate and frame in science, and that we will never be able to understand completely this reality. This is very much what Bernard d’Espagnat says about quantum mechanics–there it overlays a “veiled reality” that is not penetrable.

What is interesting is that general relativity and quantum mechanics have both been tested to the full experimentally, without any violations of the general theories being found. Yet relativity and quantum mechanics are not consonant–there are different assumptions in each about what measurements are all about. So that is a puzzlement.

One way of determining whether you have a causal factor is to turn that factor on and off and see if the effect turns on and off. Not always possible, of course. Sometimes you can tune it up and down and see if the effect increases or decreases. Again, not always. But it is usually a useful marker of causation vs. correlation.

Cartwright’s observations are basic: most scientific laws, even in physics are based on idealizations: perfectly elastic collisions, perfect vacuums, ideal gasses, point-masses, and the like. So two bodies fall at the same rate if we imagine them falling in a perfect vacuum, rather than an atmosphere or a swimming pool. Otherwise, rocks and leaves do not fall at the same rate.

All this works well enough in physics and chemistry, although the uncertainties due to all the “ceteris” not actually being “paribus.” Ivar Ekeland noted in Mathematics and the unexpected that in calculating the path of a seven ball cannon in billiards would require taking into account the gravitational attractions of the spectators.

But it also accounts for why this works less well in biology (where the matter is animate) and hardly at all in the “soft sciences” (where the subject matter can talk back. Two sodium atoms are essentially alike; two petunias never are.

JohnK
Thank you for your discussion. It clarifies for me the context in which cause is considered here. In particular, the focus seems to be on metaphysics rather than the world in which most of my thought resides, which is doggedly physical. Physics has evolved a great deal from the time of Aristotle and Plato, I think. The view I am content to spend my thoughts within is that a thing within the mental construct is defined by its measurement and is only defined if it can be measured. For something to be a valid (which really means useful within the discipline, not intrinsically good, bad, or indifferent) concept, it must be able to be measured quantitatively by any observer and any observer who performs the same measurement of that concept under the same conditions should get a quantitatively identical result. At least any observer who is not perversely trying to mis-define the measurement prescription. So it seems that I was looking for a connection of the discussion of “causes” to strictly physical considerations, which was not intended.

I looked at the links you provided and they helped a great deal. First it seems to me that the notion that Briggs discusses of “cause” is intrinsically methaphysical, not physical. So that dealing with concepts that are “immaterial”, “universal”, “forms”, “particularities”, etc. immediately places the conceptual framework outside of the realm of the measureable physical world. The concept of “form” for example seems impossible to describe in terms of a quantitative measurement that multiple observers could perform and achieve the same result for the same “form”. That is perfectly reasonable I suppose within the realm of metaphysics, although I have no real background in metaphysics.

If one deliberately removes metaphysics from consideration and focuses strictly on physics, I thought that Briggs’s discussions might relate to a practical framework for assessing cause and effect within the realm of physics, or chemistry or biology. It seems to me that rather than the words “cause and effect” in this context something like explanatory power might work, but that seems to have problems also. For example, physical scientists might have the results of some measurements, say they measure y as a function of some number of xsubi variables. By brute force, they can (and often do) simply perform a multivariate regression of the y’s on the x’s including perhaps first order interaction terms and get an expression with some number of regression constants. It may turn out that the residuals of the fit are small in some sense compared to the magnitudes of the quantities concerned so that any measurement that was a part of the set is quite close to the value calculated from the fit parameters. Not so much in physics, but in other disciplines people frequently say that the variance of the measurements is “explained” by the model (the model being the regressed expression), which if one wanted to one could call a theory. The problem with cause and effect comes in when someone tries to use those words with respect to the x’s and the y’s based on such a simplistic analysis. Many math techniques address taking sets of points out, examining subsets, fiddling with transforms, etc. but it seems nothing helps except more measurements, preferably with greater control of conditions, as Ye Olde suggests.

It is a bit clearer if one considers tests of a theory. From what I gather about the notion of cause and effect considered here, meaning the metaphysical focus, cause and effect as discussed here is irrelevant to a physical theory. For example, relativity was proposed around the turn of the last century. It is based on just a couple of hypotheses about how the distribution of matter and energy results in (I hesitate to use the word “cause”) dynamic measurements. As time progressed various testing experiments were devised and then performed, generally with increasing accuracy over time as techniques improved. The measurement of gravitational waves discussed here is one such. As the results built up, the difference between the predictions of the theory and the results of experiments shrank considerably so that now many of the tests agree with the theory to parts in 10^10 or more and all but the most trivial consistent alternative physical (but not metaphysical) theories are ruled out. What it seems Briggs is saying is that such agreement of a theory with experiments is irrelevant to the notion of cause, because cause is intrinsically concerned with concepts for which measurement are impossible. That would mean the statement that some experimental result is “caused” by one of the aspects of the theory, for example the equivalence principle, would not be a useful statement. Not wrong, just not useful or applicable. It seems to suggest that the more apt expression would be that the theory “explains” the measurements.

Then the practical question becomes, what is different about the way relativity “explains” the relevant measurements versus the way the brute force multivariate regression “explains” those hypothetical x and y above measurements. If the notion of “cause and effect” as discussed in terms of forms and particularities is ruled out because it is intrinsically about non-measureable quantities, then what is the most useful way to describe the relationship between a theory and experimental results.

The martian box example seems simply a case in which the most effective measurements had not yet been devised and performed to find a sufficiently explanatory theory, from a physical perspective. Much like atomic structure was not understood until Rutherford did his scattering experiments. An incomplete or inadequate theory will often fail to explain experimental results. But from the physical perspective, it is not attributed to the “cause” being something immaterial or ethereal (i.e. intrinsically not measureable) but rather simply not yet measured or defined.

The other place cause and effect appears in physical theories is what is usually called causality. The notion is that an event has associated with it a set of other events which can (but not necessarily will) cause it and a complement of that set, which is the set of events that cannot cause it. The measurement of the caused event is somehow, via a theory, explained by summing in some well-defined way the interactions between the events that can cause it and the caused event, quantitatively. In this context the causality propagates from the causing events to the caused event by a set of rules that comprise whatever theory is under consideration. The effects of the various forces are described and measured in this way. For example, if the period of a pulsed signal from an astronomical source is some magnitude, say 0.04 seconds, then it is common to consider that the physical size of the matter and energy distribution of the source has to be commensurate to the maximum speed at which causality can propagate, which so far seems to be the speed of light. If the size was larger than that, then physical effects could not propagate fast enough to “cause” the measured variation of the signal. For example, the first pulsar discovered, PSR B1919+21, had a period of 0.04 seconds and was at first nicknamed LGM-1 (for Little Green Men 1) entertaining the notion that it was an alien signal because it seemed hard to envision a stellar source small enough to produce such a short signal. Our sun has a radius of about 2.3 light seconds and the energy coming from the pulsar indicated much more output than our sun produces from an object about 1/50 the size. The causality argument forced the conclusion that the object had to be about much smaller than our sun but putting out much more energy than the standard stars of that size that we knew about would put out. It was a quandary how to explain the signal without invoking LGMs. But this difficulty was based on the notion of cause and effect and trying to determine how so much energy could be produced from so small an object. The causality argument led to the identification of candidate objects to “explain” the measurements, the result being the neutron star and a Nobel for Hewish
.
So it seems cause and effect is not absent from physical considerations, but it is strictly confined to the relationships between measureable quantities. This appears to be a little different and somewhat more restricted than the notions entertained here.

Where is the matching GRB? And no neutrinos? Also, how does a black hole of those masses form? Let alone two together?

Andyd,
Very astute observation. Right now the identification of the source of the signal detected is based on 1) its coincident detection by widely separated detectors which indicates it is not a local spurious noise source and 2) the shape of the signal agrees with (is well “explained” by) numerical calculations of the output of a black hole collision with very specific size limits on the objects. Based on the sensitivity of LIGO there should be more such things collected over time, which will help scope the frequency of occurrence of black hole pairs and collisions, which have only been based on theory to date. One thing lacking so far, that will be very nice when it occurs, is matching up the source of the GW signal with something detected with other means, such as an optical, x-ray, or gamma telescope. That will ice the cake. The most studied object in the sky, SN 1054, otherwise known as the Crab Nebula, is the primo example of that icing. Measuring the velocities of the expanding gas clouds via Doppler shifts gives an expansion velocity and evolving that back in time says it should have exploded about 1000 AD and bingo! Chinese observers recorded a bright object in 1054 that appeared on July 4 of that year at just the right place in the sky and lasted for a couple of years. Even more cool, the object at the center was identified via radio astronomy as a 33 millisecond pulsar with characteristics well explained by a neutron star of a particular mass which fit with theoretical calculations of supernovae from stars of an appropriate mass. The combination of multiple observations allowed a detailed and consistent understanding of supernova. One could say it linked a lot of causes and effects, but maybe it is safer to say here that the theory just had a lot of ‘splaining to do.

John K,

As an aside, this is why Matt says that ‘hypothesis’ ‘testing’ is silly and stupid. Come on, he says, ONE hypothesis — ONE??? — which we just ‘know’ is the real and true possible cause over against all the other

Actually, the impetus behind Hypothesis Testing wasn’t a bad idea. Yes, it DOES test the hypothesis but in this fashion: if X cause Y then there must be a correlation between X and Y so if there is NO correlation then the hypothesis that there is a causal relationship between X and Y can be eliminated. IOW: a quick check.

One of the problem is that, over time, this has been perverted to imply the reverse, namely, that any correlation, proves cause (despite saying the opposite). Compounding the problem is there is almost always some correlation in any given data set. Anymore, no one seems to go beyond the QAD test if the press releases are any indication.

As for cause and effect, all that “cause” really means is that (for X causes Y), a change in X implies a change in Y but not the reverse outside of mutual causation. Other than that, “cause” really has no meaning except perhaps as a way to organize an analysis.

When I toured the Hanford LIGO I learned that at the end of each arm of the detector there is a large (several ton) carefully suspended rest mass to which a mirror is affixed. The mono laser splits and travels down each of the orthogonal arms. The rest masses move albeit ever so slightly when a gravity wave passes through them. The back up detector on the east coast allows triangulation. Simple. Right?

It only took 100 years since the prediction to detect an event which occurred over a billion years ago around the time that muticellular organisims began to evolve. It’s taken a long long time for that miniscule ripple to arrive here. For sure it’s not alone.

Nancy Cartwright is worth listening to.

So is Ernst Mach:

The goal which it (physical science) has set itself is the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts.

When the human mind, with its limited powers, attempts to mirror in itself the rich life of the world, of which it itself is only a small part, and which it can never hope to exhaust, it has every reason for proceeding economically.

In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.

In mentally separating a body from the changeable environment in which it moves, what we really do is to extricate a group of sensations on which our thoughts are fastened and which is of relatively greater stability than the others, from the stream of all our sensations.

Suppose we were to attribute to nature the property of producing like effects in like circumstances; just these like circumstances we should not know how to find. Nature exists once only. Our schematic mental imitation alone produces like events.

Scotian, The (September 15) Article was refreshing given the current state, in my view, of physics and science with respect to how it is normally represented by repetitive regurgitation of the subject by the likes of Brian Cox. Science reporters normally boast certainty and fact where there is theory.
YOS,
“Two sodium atoms are essentially alike; two petunias never are.” for now anyway.

Cartwright’s observations are not new. She happens to be reminding people who don’t want to be reminded about the state of science and the nature of theory. Perhaps she ought to publish in the mainstream media YOS I don’t think she was writing for you.

JohnK, There’s a lot to be said for black and white, measurement, definition if you can get it.
“…a thing within the mental construct is defined by its measurement and is only defined if it can be measured. For something to be a valid (which really means useful within the discipline, not intrinsically good, bad, or indifferent) concept, it must be able to be measured quantitatively by any observer and any observer who performs the same measurement of that concept under the same conditions should get a quantitatively identical result.”

‘would’ get a quantitively identical result” if they could hold everything els still and if they could measure.
How would you measure pain?
You can’t.
“intrinsically good, bad or indifferent”? what else is there.

A comment on Jim S.
I too believe in the simplest explanation of physical phenomena. Or even bird watching. Ockham’s razor?
Now why would anyone think that gravity waves would be manifest in electro-magnetic waves? When the first two protons were created and repulsed from each other (a strong force) at that same time gravity waves were created (a weak force). We will never detect them with two stationary disks. The correct experiment would be three disks: Arranged so that two on the extremities move in some fashion relative to the fixed disk between them. Then we could measure (the art of physics) the various consequences on the middle disk: Contraction, heat, movement(?), emissions (?). Who knows? Perhaps the emission and absorption of neutrinos?
Much appreciation to FAH on the metaphysics of experience.

Joy, I’m not familiar with Brian Cox but this statement by Cartwright “This 400-year-old image of the governance of nature is today being undermined by exciting new modes of understanding across the sciences …” is not exactly humble or lacking in certainty.

“… physics and science with respect to how it is normally represented by repetitive regurgitation of the subject …”
It is what it is. Should it be different each time?

“Cartwright’s observations are not new.”
She claims that they are. See my opening quotation above.