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.