I don’t have a cite unfortunately, so feel free to take it with credence approximately zero. Bethe’s ignition calculations were a topic of public discussion at the time, and came up during an astrophysics tutorial. In the next session, the tutor produced an article from the 80′s showing that some cross section figures that would have been cutting edge knowledge in the early 40′s and likely used in the safety calculation were incorrect by three orders of magnitude, but the error bars at the time were less than 30%. Fortunately the true figures were for much lower cross section (and therefore chance of ignition), but if the true figures had been erroneous by a similar magnitude of error in the opposite direction, it would have been unacceptably risky.
It was used as a lesson to us that confidence intervals only have any validity at all if your model is correct in the first place. The lesson I took away from it was that when you’re doing research, you should expect that your model is not correct in some important way, and you should be very much more cautious about how safe something is.
Huh, interesting. Definitely an example of why multiple semi-independent lines of evidence is a good idea. I wonder if you could get the relative rates of hydrogen and nitrogen fusion out of the distribution of elements in the sun, even without having to know its age… except of course we’re made out of leftovers, which means you can only put a bound on it.
I don’t have a cite unfortunately, so feel free to take it with credence approximately zero. Bethe’s ignition calculations were a topic of public discussion at the time, and came up during an astrophysics tutorial. In the next session, the tutor produced an article from the 80′s showing that some cross section figures that would have been cutting edge knowledge in the early 40′s and likely used in the safety calculation were incorrect by three orders of magnitude, but the error bars at the time were less than 30%. Fortunately the true figures were for much lower cross section (and therefore chance of ignition), but if the true figures had been erroneous by a similar magnitude of error in the opposite direction, it would have been unacceptably risky.
It was used as a lesson to us that confidence intervals only have any validity at all if your model is correct in the first place. The lesson I took away from it was that when you’re doing research, you should expect that your model is not correct in some important way, and you should be very much more cautious about how safe something is.
Huh, interesting. Definitely an example of why multiple semi-independent lines of evidence is a good idea. I wonder if you could get the relative rates of hydrogen and nitrogen fusion out of the distribution of elements in the sun, even without having to know its age… except of course we’re made out of leftovers, which means you can only put a bound on it.