Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2021 January 26

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January 26

What's so funny in this lengthy equation?

What's so funny in this lengthy equation? be/qMMgsjnI1is?t=586 Video Rizosome (talk) 08:07, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Link that works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=586&v=qMMgsjnI1is. Personally I see nothing particularly funny, but perhaps the humour nerve of the panelists was tickled by the unexpected complexity hidden in the seemingly simple formula $(i\!\!\not {\!\partial }-m)\psi =0$ being revealed to stand for $\left(\beta mc^{2}+c\left(\sum _{n{=}1}^{3}\alpha _{n}p_{n}\right)\right)\psi (x,t)=i\hbar {\frac {\partial \psi (x,t)}{\partial t}}.$ As one of the panel members ironically remarks, "Very helpful." Neither of these formulas is self-explanatory; you have to know what the various names stand for.  --Lambiam 12:22, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Okay, here we go:

<complex explanation>

"I don't get it"

"Let me explain it to you"

<even more complex explanation>

"Oh. Very helpful" --Khajidha (talk) 15:18, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

An alternative explanation for the laughter is, perhaps, that the panelists were not at all familiar with the notation in the first presented, concise and deceptively simple form – what with its slashed partial $\not {\!\partial }$ – but were all quite familiar with the Dirac equation in its extended formulation.  --Lambiam 16:12, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Courtesy link: Dirac equation#Mathematical formulation -- ToE 15:21, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

The audience has an expectation that the speaker will attempt to explain something unfamiliar or confusing in terms of other things that are more familiar and easier to understand. The speaker instead explains it in terms of a larger number of things that are even less familiar and harder to understand than the original thing. This is an incongruity that is resolved by realizing that the audience isn't actually expected to understand the math of the Dirac equation. It's also similar to Feynman's quip that "But I really can’t do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you’re more familiar with, because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else that you’re more familiar with" [1]. Feynman goes deeper into the reasons why he doesn't try to give the expected explanation of the unfamiliar in terms of more familiar things. --Amble (talk) 19:48, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

One of the hard problems of quantum mechanics that frustrates the casual students is that there's an expectation built up in students (a fine expectation, to be fair, and one that is expected and not because the students did anything wrong) that physics is largely observable using the objects lying around us. For the most part, classical mechanics is. If I want to demonstrate Newton's laws, or Hooke's spring law, or even classical electrodynamics like Ohm's law, I only need some basic objects. Roll a ball down a board, tie a string on a weight, hook a circuit up to a multimeter. And the mathematics of these laws is simple. It's some three- or four-variable equation with a constant or three thrown in, and can be solved using basic middle-school algebra. You can work out the equations on a piece of paper in 10 seconds, roll your ball down a ramp to confirm the answer, and you're done. See, isn't physics easy? Then you take someone with that exposure to physics, and drop something like the Dirac equation on them, or whatever, and also you don't have a physical experiment you can do with balls and ramps and springs to confirm the results even if you did get an answer from that equation, and they are justly and rightly confused. Feynman's response is a perfect one, because he's right: for essentially all of quantum mechanics, there is no physical analogue that we can do with balls and ramps and the like that would easily represent what the theory is predicting. There aren't even any "this isn't right but its close" models. Even Feynman himself used to regularly admit that he couldn't internalize the physics in the way that he could with classical mechanics; that there is no way to build a human instinct for understanding it. All we have is "here's a bunch of messy equations that if we solve them, gives us a bunch of values" and "here's some other values we got by doing these experiments and they match". At that level, QM works fantastically well. At the level of developing a physical intuition for what it means, we're still debating that mess a century later. Sadly, shut up and calculate is still all we have. --Jayron32 14:59, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

I went to a lecture about quantum computing by the professor leading the quantum computing lab near me, he said, amongst other things, something on the lines of "don't worry if you don't understand quantum physics, the thing is nobody does. I certainly don't". DuncanHill (talk) 15:13, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Right! My suspicion is that the feeling of understanding is mostly about long familiarity. Like a song you've heard for a long time: you still might not know who Lucy is, but you at least know what words are coming next. (And the understanding we have of everyday physics like a ball rolling down a board is no exception.) --Amble (talk) 16:00, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Exactly; the problem is that you've been familiar with classical physics since birth. You drop your baby bottle, it falls to the ground. You push your ball, it rolls across the floor. You've been doing classical physics experiments your whole life. Every second of your existence you are constantly getting data which confirms Newtonian mechanics. You're swimming in it. You've never experienced quantum mechanics before at that level. No one has, not even the scientists that work in it. Sure, you can (and they have) look at a computer readout of some measurements made on a some beam of protons or some such, but you've never experienced quantum mechanics. You can't. All you can do it look at your readout and tell it confirms the predictions your models made. But there's no way to build an intuition about it. --Jayron32 16:08, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't say there's no way to build an intuition about quantum physics. But it's true that there's no way to build the same kind of intuition that we have for the physics in our everyday experience. --Amble (talk) 16:30, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

The professor was likely alluding to another of Feynman's quips: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." --47.152.93.24 (talk) 19:16, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

How many different genotypes and phenotypes do you expect in this crossover?

The parents are deaf and mute, heterozygous for different genes. The mother is a light crossbreed, and the father is white. How many different genotypes and phenotypes do you expect in this crossover?

The first trait that is being looked for is complementary polygeny, and the second is additive polygeny.

For normal hearing one must have at least one dominant allele in each gene. (A-B-)

If the mother is light crossbreed that means that she has n1n1n2N2 alleles, and the father has n1n1n2n2.

If the parents are heterozygous for different genes that means that they have either aaBb and Aabb or Aabb and aaBb for hearing.

P: aaBb x Aabb

G: aB, ab; Ab, ab

aB ab aB ab

Ab AaBb Aabb AaBb Aabb

Ab AaBb Aabb AaBb Aabb

ab aaBb aabb aaBb aabb

ab aaBb aabb aaBb aabb

ratio of phenotypes: 4/16 : 12/16 (4 normal hearing : 12 deaf mute)

ratio of genotypes: 1 : 1 : 1 : 1

As for the skin color, since it is additive polygeny it should go like this:

P: n1n1n2N2 x n1n1n2n2

G: n1n2, n1N2; n1n2

n1n2 n1n2 n1n2 n1n2

n1n2 n1n2n2 n1n2n2 n1n1n2n2 n1n2n2

n1N2 n1n1n2N2 n1n1n2N2 n1n1n2N2 n1n1n2N2

n1n2 n1n2n2 n1n2n2 n1n2n2 n1n2n2

n1N2 n1n1n2N2 n1n1n2N2 n1n1n2N2 n1n1n2N2

ratio of phenotypes: 1 : 1 (1 white : 1 light crossbreed)

ratio of genotypes: 1 : 1

I'm not sure, however, that this is the right approach...

Vs⁶₅⁰⁷ 17:24, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Looks fine to me, if I accept that n1n1n2N2 means light crossbreed. Abductive (reasoning) 00:35, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

How not to patent does help in further the advancement of science?

How not to patent does help in further the advancement of science?

In this wiki article Dame Pratibha Gai invented the in-situ atomic-resolution environmental transmission electron microscope but she decided not to patent her invention in order to further the advancement of science. Rizosome (talk) 20:30, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

It's called "sharing". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:17, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

A patent itself 'gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention' so by nature is designed to prevent someone from using the invention in new, or unique ways. By forgoing the patent in the first place, the inventor signaled to the world that she wanted others to have a starting place for this particular area of science. Anecdotally, since patents are adversarial to enforce (e.g. you have to sue as the patent holder if someone infringes it), it is likely that many inventors shy away in fear of being the target of a lawsuit. Andyhill7 (talk) 21:25, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Exactly: One could patent an invention, then announce that you will not be enforcing it, but what if you die, and your kids decide to enforce? Abductive (reasoning) 00:32, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

You could preempt this by releasing the patent to the public, as was done with the setuid bit. --142.112.149.107 (talk) 00:40, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

See also Insulin#Patent for a classic example. Médecins Sans Frontières' website has some interesting rants about cases in which pharmaceutical patents hinder the progress of medical science. Granting legal monopolies is far from the only way to encourage inventions. HLHJ (talk) 01:15, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

One of the things about intellectual property (be it copyright, patent, or trademark, which are all distinct kinds of protection people often confuse) is that intellectual property law usually requires someone to actively defend the patent or whatever. Selective defense, such as allowing some infringements but not others, is not allowed; if you allow one person to infringe on your intellectual property, and then try to stop a second person, that you allowed someone else to do so is a valid defense against infringement. So, if you own a patent, and then say "Hey, I'm going to let this charity over here infringe on my patent because they do good work, but I'm going to sue this evil corporation for the same thing because I don't like them", you can't actually do that; the corporation has a valid defense by saying you had already allowed the patent to become void by allowing the other infringement. You have the right to license your patent to other entities to produce your item, but that's a legal relationship and isn't the same as discovering someone infringed on your patent and that you knew about it and let it slide. That sort of thing can invalidate your patent. Furthermore, if you never had any intent of protecting your product through the patent, there's no reason to go through the expense of patenting it. You can just publish the designs and allow anyone to make it. The only purpose of a patent is to grant you exclusive right to control the production of your product. --Jayron32 13:17, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

I once met someone, a long time ago, who had made a very useful practical (not scientific) invention, one that potentially could have made him millions. All research pointed at the invention being novel, but he was unable to find investors. There were many abstrusely described related patents. Patent lawyers could not guarantee that a court might not find for a claimant holding one of these patents. For something I invented myself I likewise found that it was impossible to figure out whether potentially conflicting patents did or did not cover essential aspects of my invention; the descriptions were insufficiently precise or ambiguous and thereby impenetrable. Any major piece of newly developed software will contain dozens of innocently independently developed fragments that techinically speaking infringe on some trivial software patent. When it comes to a court case, the winner is usually the party with the deepest pockets.  --Lambiam 11:15, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Which is why patent trolls are a real problem. --Jayron32 13:18, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Look, there's a lot of room for opinion, ...but, ... patentable inventions do not "make" "millions" of dollars, unless the claim is for a new method to make money. Businesses can sell goods and services, which may be exchanged for money - even millions of dollars, sometimes! An invention may help make a business run more efficiently, or may provide a competitive advantage. A patent is one of many various legal methods that an individual or a business may choose to use to legally protect some portion of their business.

To claim that an invention - or a patent - "makes millions" is ... frankly reflective of a pretty immature understanding of the way that innovation works in the commercial marketplace. It would be similar - nay, equally absurd - to say that a retail store's burglar-alarm "makes millions" because it helps catch thieves who would break in to the shop and steal the valuable assets inside. In some contorted metaphor, it's sort of true...

But it's so simplified that it's actually incorrect. The alarm is a tool, and it notifies the shop-owner of a burglar, and then the shop owner can later use legal methods to prosecute or sue the burglar to recoup losses and other harm. In that same sense, a patent is a tool - a tool that is more abstract than a burglar-alarm - but it's just a tiny part of an overall process that helps dissuade others from breaking the rules, and helps punish others who have already broken them.

I resent the insinuation that the wealthiest company is the automatic winner of any legal action. If that was true, why would we have courts? We could simply compare bank-accounts, and winner would be the party with the larger balance. Quite the contrary - the court is pretty much the only forum in modern society where dollars can't buy truth. Although it is fair to comment and critique that money can buy talented legal representation, it is not accurate to say that expensive legal representation guarantees any specific legal outcome.

When the legal outcome is valuable, it stands to reason that interested parties would invest (monetarily) in making their case - and although you can take a cynical view of that, it's actually the only sensible way to handle things. If we stopped letting lawyers argue our disagreements, what would be our recourse? there shall be no money, ... and we'll all just agree with each other about everything?

Anyway, why quibble over opinions, when we can actually turn to ... some facts? Here are Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting (2018), from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. When armed with facts, we might truthfully discover that the assignees of the largest number of patents are categorically not identical to the firms with the most money; nor the most positive legal outcomes; nor the firms that are, in the popular consciousness, the most innovative and exciting. "The analysis raises a number of unanswered issues. Foremost among these is understanding the value of these awards. ... The second, more difficult question was alluded to in the introduction: the impact of these awards on social welfare more generally.... These issues, while challenging, will reward scrutiny in the years to come."

Nimur (talk) 21:53, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Some manufacture inventions did make their inventors millions.^{[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]}
I wrote, "the winner [of patent litigation] is usually the party with the deepest pockets". To turn that claim into "the insinuation that the wealthiest company is the automatic winner of any legal action" is a textbook example of setting up a strawman. Here is a counter-strawman: "It is childish to believe that legal action always results in the most equitable decision." Also consider that in most cases of potential patent litigation against an inventor who is a natural person or a start-up, there is a several orders of magnitude difference in the pocket depths of the litigants-to-be.  --Lambiam 10:18, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

• Saying 'patentable inventions do not "make" "millions" of dollars' might be a rather pedantic way of looking at the process. An inventor can sell licences in the same way a landlord rents real estate. A granted patents is a legal right to a monopoly for some technical innovation in a specific country. You can use it to protect your products/services. OR you can sell the legal right so that others can protect their product/service. In the same way a seller of burglar-alarms can make millions, a seller of a licence can make millions. In real life, however, most patents won't neither protect a business nor be traded as a licence. And if they bring money, most won't reach 7 figures amounts, but they can be basically be the source of income. Bumptump (talk) 13:26, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Ah, that's a broad form of the question, the net social impact of patents. Wikipedia has an article on societal views on patents.

Looking at just the impact on innovation, I think it's safe to say that in some cases (not all), not-patenting may further the development of a field, while patents may hinder development. For such a weak claim, anecdotal evidence suffices.

• Patenting is hindering the development of rVSV vaccines; the techniques needed to do the research are patented. CEPI was an attempt to fix these patent problems, but it seems to have failed to change the status quo much.
• There is evidence that patent trolls seriously damage research and development spending.[9] As mentioned by Jayron32. Patents do not have the sort of fair-use exemptions which copyright often has.
• Patents scare people away from innovation altogether.[10]
• Some companies explicitly buy patents to prevent anyone from using them; in some jurisdictions, this is legal, while in others it may be patent misuse. Wikipedia has articles on patent thickets, patent ambushes, submarine patents, and the Tragedy of the anticommons, which strongly implies the existence of significant problems.

But let's be ambitious, and try to answer "Do patents ever increase innovation?". With empirical evidence, because I strongly support Nimur on that.

The 2018 paper Nimur quoted ends: "The second, more difficult question was alluded to in the introduction: the impact of these awards on social welfare more generally. To what extent can the seemingly deleterious effects identified by Bessen and Hunt (2007) be corroborated? Do these patterns hold across all aspects of software, or just in certain segments? These issues, while challenging, will reward scrutiny in the years to come." (link added) Bessen also co-authored a 2008 book on the more general question of patents in all industries (admittedly US-centric and a bit old, but more recent stuff seems similar). Quoting it:

This book moves beyond anecdote to provide the first comprehensive empirical evaluation of the patent system’s performance. We measure patents against a simple, well-defined yardstick inspired by economic analysis of property rights. Our yardstick weighs the benefit of patents to an innovator against their cost, including the risk of inadvertent infringe­ment. If the estimated costs of the patent system to an innovator exceed the estimated benefits, then patents fail as property... Do patents give inventors positive net incentives to invest in innovation?... Our question is simpler and more basic than the questions economists often ask when evaluating policy. Economists like to ask whether policies increase “net social welfare,” a generalized measure of the overall well­being of society. Short of that, economists like to ask whether innovation policies increase innovation or R&D spending. But these are even more difficult and complicated questions to investigate empirically... Not surprisingly, economic studies that attempt to answer these more difficult questions typically have arrived at inconclusive results... In summary, patents do not work “just like property.” While they do play some role in promoting innovation and economic growth, that role is limited and highly contingent... Moreover, figure 1.1B understates the extent to which costs exceeded benefits for several reasons: disputes settled before a lawsuit was filed are not counted, nor are foreign disputes; this comparison ignores the costs of obtaining patents and clearance; and for a variety of reasons, the estimates of worldwide patent profits are biased upwards, while the estimates of liti­gation costs are biased downwards. The patent system clearly provides large positive incentives for innova­tors in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Also, small firms gen­erally receive benefits that exceed costs, but the net incentives for these patentees are not large.

— Bessen, James; Meurer, Michael J. (2008). "1". Patent failure : how judges, bureaucrats, and lawyers put innovators at risk. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691143217. Retrieved 28 January 2021. (from fulltext of chapter one available at URL as a free sample)

The observed small net benefit to small inventors appears when Bessen and Meurer ignore:

1. settlement costs (and small firms often have to settle with patent trolls; trolls are more likely to target small firms,[11][12] but even Apple complained that it is more expensive to fight than settle[13])
2. the costs of patenting (often prohibitive for small firms)
3. the costs of getting patent clearances (often something small firms can't even think about, as Lambiam mentioned)
4. some other known and unknown costs
5. the small innovators who are scared off innovating by the chilling effects of patents
6. small innovators who are not publicly-traded firms

...which rather sounds like it's not actually a net benefit.

Unsurprisingly, they find that "all types of small inventors, including small firms, realize substantially less value from their patents than do large firms. This is true for the independent inventors who work in low-tech fields, as well as for small public firms in many high-tech industries. In­deed, relative to large firms, many small inventors, even small high-tech firms that go public, forgo patents entirely, relying instead on trade secrecy and other means of protecting their profits deriving from innovations."

To say that the richest person always wins a patent dispute is an exaggeration, though it is a standard patent-lawsuit technique to rack up an opponent's legal costs until they are forced to fold.[14] It seems patent-producing large companies lose more than they gain from patents on average; the large companies that win are patent trolls. So this is not really big vs. small (though patent trolls use their size as a weapon). It's innovation vs. litigation.

The only people Bessen & Meurer found to clearly benefit from the patent system are chemical and pharma companies; precisely the industries where the social costs of patents are vehemently decried by groups like the MSF, who say these patents hurt and kill people (e.g. Plumpy'nut). They urge alternative incentives for innovation. Some already exist. Bessen & Meurer also found that people profit from innovations even when they don't patent them, and people innovate for non-commercial rewards. The UK nearly abolished patents in the 1800s; Isambard Kingdom Brunel, among others, argued for it.

There are also a practical problem with chemical and pharma patents. Human genes possessed by you, gentle reader, and chemicals generated by and essential to the functioning of your body (including the insulin mentioned above), have been patented in some jurisdictions. The same goes for many other organisms. Gene patents are increasingly disbarred, but patents on biologics (naturally-occurring chemicals) seem to be going strong and are entrenched in some international agreements. Per Bessen & Meurer, software patents became a net cost to software innovators with the flood of patents in the 1990's, just as everyone acquired the capital equipment needed to write software. Possibly, as judges start to understand more biology, and both bioprospecting and synthetic biochemistry increasingly become something biohackers can do in a garage with their lunch money, such patents will also be disbarred, or the chemical patent system will fall into a similar dysfunctional mess, as a cookie recipe becomes able to infringe, or invalidate, biologic patents.

"Do patents ever increase innovation?"... they might incentivize it for chemical and pharmaceutical firms (in the US, as of 2008), but they can also stifle innovative research in these fields. Are they the best way to increase innovation? Perhaps we need to do some experiments. HLHJ (talk) 05:52, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

That strikes me as somewhat of a false dilemma. Whether the American patent system is, as is, worse than not having patents at all, doesn't imply that no possible patent system can be better than not having patents. One improvement would be to default to having the losing side pay all legal fees (as opposed to the current USA practice), which diminishes the effectiveness of patent and other legal trolling. 93.136.23.7 (talk) 13:33, 31 January 2021 (UTC)