ChatGPT is an amazing Chatbot with the ability, competency, and confidence to construct paragraphs, sentences, essays, and more. However, this optimism can be deceiving because it succumbs to several common misconceptions among the general public, even though experts know much better. Can an astrophysicist teach ChatGPT to acquire new information and absorb it such that it gives exact responses when it previously gave confident but mistaken ones?
When we try to understand anything more intensely, we all end up in an awkward situation: we believe we know how something performs, only to explore that we are wrong. Occasionally it’s simply insignificant things
that don’t affect our capacity to accomplish the important things in our lives, but also other times we must invest the time and effort to deepen our understanding. This entails not just learning what is true, but also why what we assumed was true was, in actuality, false, and how we can avoid making the same mistakes again.
Exploring our misconceptions is a challenge that every budding as well as aspiring scientist faces on their educational journey. We have a better chance of succeeding in our professions than those who keep asserting, falsely, that they were right all along if we attempt to discover how we deceived ourselves, whatever the truth is, and how to obtain this one right from now on.
It’s difficult enough to persuade a room full of learners to substitute their incorrect misunderstandings with exact, accurate knowledge, but just how good is ChatGPT, the world’s most advanced Artificial intelligence Chatbot, at the same task? I gave the Chatbot 3 misconceptions to test; Trivial, easy, and advanced.
- Trivial: Edwin Hubble was a great boxer in his Early life
Background: Edwin Hubble was a twentieth-century astronomer best known for discovering the expansion of the Universe, measuring distances to galaxies far beyond the Milky Way, & pioneering the redshift-distance relationship. Decades after he dies, the Hubble Space Telescope was named after him; he remains an influential person in astronomy. Hubble, on the other hand, was a phenomenal athlete in his youth, having competed at the highest levels of boxing, track, football, and basketball. Edwin Hubble was a “Gold Gloves” boxer as a young man in Chicago where, by coincidence, I was also an undergraduate approximately 90 years later and allegedly knocked out the German title holder at one point.
Question: How skilled a fighter was Edwin Hubble?
ChatGPT: Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer, is renowned for his contributions to the study of astronomy, which include the discovery of the universe’s expansion. He had a little reputation as a boxer. Edwin was a gifted athlete in his youth, yet it is unknown whether he ever considered boxing as a vocation or whether he ever achieved anything particularly noteworthy in the sport. He chose to instead concentrate on his studies, and he later rose to prominence as one of the most significant astronomers of the twentieth century.
Question: What kind of boxing accomplishments did Edwin Hubble have in his youth? He was a heavyweight boxer who competed in gold gloves matches, according to what I’ve read. He once even defeated the heavyweight champion of Europe. Do you know anything about that incident?
ChatGPT: Edwin was a successful amateur boxer. Both the Amateur Athletic Union. Light Heavyweight Championship and the Illinois State Golden Gloves championship were won by him in 1920. He had a reputation for having strong punches, and Edwin allegedly reportedly defeated the heavyweight champion of Europe in a sparring fight. Sadly, There isn’t any set of documents of the exact occurrence or its particulars.
Verdict: Edwin Hubble is not recognized to have followed boxing as a profession or to have had any major achievements as a boxer, which caught me off guard at first, but ChatGPT appears to have absorbed the knowledge correctly and even was able to pull out the information I didn’t know. And whose veracity I am unable to verify; it seems odd that Edwin, who received his degree in 1910 and assumed leadership of the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California in 1917, might have been engaged in combat as a man in his 30s in Chicago in 1919 and 1920.) I’m quite impressed, but I’m also extremely wary.
- Easy: Comet tails do not produce meteor showers.
Background: When most people initially understand meteor showers, they learn that comets are to blame for them. Most comets are generated by comets, whereas some are created by asteroids or any other bodies that contain volatiles. However, we also discover that they aren’t created by comet tails, which is a fallacy that is so pervasive even NASA has repeated it. It’s not the tails since the Sun blows them away and out of the Solar System. Instead, the comet’s nucleus is broken up into smaller pieces by gravitation and heat, which are then dispersed along the comet’s orbit. Meteor showers occur where Earth crosses this orbit, especially the debris stream which runs along it.
Question: What triggers meteor showers?
ChatGPT: The collision of streams of cometary or asteroid debris with the atmosphere of Earth produces meteor showers. A meteor is a dazzling streak of light that is produced as these particles heat up when they enter the atmosphere. A meteor shower is produced when numerous of these meteors appear at once.
Question: What distinguishes comet tail debris streams from the comet & asteroid debris streams that produce meteor showers?
ChatGPT: Small pieces of dust as well as the rock that are expelled from asteroids and comets as they orbit the Sun make up the debris streams that result in meteor showers. The beautiful display of falling stars is produced when these particles enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up. On the other side, the debris streams from a comet’s tail are made up of bigger dust and ice fragments that are released from the comet’s nucleus as it gets closer to the Sun. As the comet speeds away from the Sun, the solar wind pushes these particles outward, creating a structure that resembles a tail.
Verdict: It doesn’t seem to fully comprehend that debris stream responsible for meteor showers is distinct from and unrelated to the debris responsible for comet and occasionally asteroid tails. When tidal forces & uneven heating lead the parent body’s nucleus to split and small particles to spread out across the comet or asteroid’s entire orbit, a debris stream that is essential to meteor showers is generated. ChatGPT’s responses reveal that it doesn’t understand despite its claims that it does.
- Advanced: How was cosmic inflation created and how did the hot Big Bang begin?
Background: Since the universe is currently expanding (and cooling), it must have previously been denser, hotter, and smaller. If we go back arbitrarily far, you would think that we should get to a catastrophe, which is the location in space and time where the energy of the entire universe is focused. But since our observations don’t support that interpretation, that is no longer a valid extrapolation.
As a substitute, they agree with projecting that to a warm, dense state and then having a time of cosmic inflation come before it. Energy seems to be no longer confined in radiation and matter during the inflation of the cosmos, but instead in a field that is a part of space itself. During this time, it grows exponentially, causing seed quantum fluctuations to stretch across the Universe’s flat, uniform surface. We don’t know when or how inflation started, but we do know because when inflation stops, this field releases its energy into radiation and matter altering the expansion of the Universe and matching to what we understand as the hot Big Bang.
Question: It is impossible for you to be using 2 different definitions of the phrase “Big Bang” unless you mentioned that inflation “occurred shortly after the Big Bang” and then later that inflation “is regarded to have engendered to the hot Big Bang.” Did inflation start soon after the Big Bang or later?
ChatGPT: You’re right that my earlier remarks might have been unclear. I apologize for any confusion. The theory of Big Bang is the most widely accepted hypothesis for describing how the universe was created and evolved. The Big Bang theory alleged that around 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was a singularity or a center of infinite temperature and density. After the cosmos began to expand and cool from this singularity, matter, and radiation gradually formed, becoming the universe we know today.
To be clear, the cosmic inflation theory proposes that immediately after the Big Bang, which is the term used to refer to the start of the universe as we know it, the universe experienced a rapid period of expansion. The Big Bang theory is continued and expanded upon by the cosmic inflation theory, which explains the observable homogeneity as well as isotropy of the cosmos on enormous scales. The cosmic inflation theory doesn’t suggest a new model for the creation and history of the universe.
Verdict: Okay, this was unquestionably developed even by the standards of many astrophysicists. It irritates me that it refers to the Big Bang by first stating that “According to the Big Bang theory, the universe started as a singularity,” and then later adding that the term Big Bang is also frequently used to refer to the warm, dense state of the early universe, recognized as the hot Big Bang, which is believed to have occurred about 10 to 32 seconds just after Big Bang. But well, it’s a Chatbot built to learn, so maybe one-day ChatGPT will be the one discussing this with some astrophysicists instead of me!
