Seven of the greatest scientific hoaxes
Interesting, I thought.
Then I scrolled down to the discussion, and there was crud about how AGW, relativity and evolution should be listed with the hoaxes.
The trouble with most folks ain’t so much their ignorance as knowing so many things that ain’t so.
Josh Billings
Credulous media will apparently never run out.
Blacklight Power bolsters its impossible claims of a new renewable energy source
It’s difficult to pay attention to these claims, because scientific history is littered with ambitious, revolutionary theories that turned out to be groundless. But Blacklight is an interesting case. Its “hydrino” theory isn’t put forth by a single crackpot; instead, the company employs a good handful of high-level scientists who would presumably rebel if the idea was totally false.
No, not really. Creationism, for example, has a few credentialed scientists among its ranks. Pons and Fleischmann really thought they had fusion. Scientists in any field will cover a spectrum — there will always be some on the fringe. A lot of outlandish “theories” have the backing of somebody with a degree. That’s not the right metric for measurement.
As I noted in May, it would be odd, if Blacklight were a complete sham, for Mills to place himself in an end game in which he would be definitively proven wrong within just a year or two. So there does seem to be something deeper here.
As with the above, this isn’t the right way to look at it. There are numerous free-energy advocates out there, convinced they are right, with a working model just around the corner (or so they claim), or gee, it was working yesterday, right before I was going to show it off. Remember Steorn?
Proof here is a working model, producing energy. I’m not holding my breath.
A question asked over at The Great Beyond
A while back I ran across a blog post about the “dangers” of Bose-Einstein Condensates — the purported great peril of a “Bosenova” explosion happening in liquid He, and wrote a post about the various misconceptions that were present. Malcolm Fairbairn and Bob McElrath wrote a response to this that is now available at arXiv. There is no explosion risk associated with superfluid Helium in the LHC cooling system
(Yeah, that will calm the conspiracy fruitcakes)
Liquid 4He has a monatomic structure with s-wave
electrons, zero nuclear spin, no hyperfine splitting, and as a consequence no
Feshbach resonance which would allow one to change its normally repulsive
interactions to be attractive. Because of this, a Bose-Nova style collapse
of 4He is impossible. Additional speculations concerning cold fusion during
these events are easily dismissed using the usual arguments about the
Coulomb barrier at low temperatures, and are not needed to explain the
Bose-Einstein condensate Bose-Nova phenomenon. We conclude that that
there is no physics whatsoever which suggests that Helium could undergo
any kind of unforeseen catastrophic explosion.
It turns out that there’s more of this fumbling and bumbling out there that I had missed. Collider Incidents at LHC Facts (Not sure why “Facts” isn’t in scare quotes) takes things to a new level. There are responses from both Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman (and another researcher) that clarify some of the technical jargon and other statements that have been so badly mangled, and the wingnut conclusion is that the scientists are just covering up!
“I can state ABSOLUTELY CATEGORICALLY that it is totally inconceivable that a black hole could be produced by these phenomena.”
Methinks Dr. Wieman doth protest TOO MUCH…
There are many physicists who can not only conceive it but believe it too. Not too mention those of us with “a terrible ignorance of physics” but an abundance of common sense.
and
What I’d really like to know, and maybe you can find out, is if the ‘Bosenova’ was such a fantastic experiment that raised so many interesting questions why they don’t fire them up all the time. Seems like they would want to keep repeating the experiment wouldn’t they? Unless, of course, they did make a stable MBH, they know it, and they’re scared. They sound scared.
Funny, but not really “ha, ha” funny.
There’s a nice takedown of this, and the original nonsense article by Alan Gillis, over at The Physics Anti-Crackpot Blog. There will be no Bose-Novae at the LHC
So this claim of Gillis & Rössler is completely and totally specious. Any responsible researcher, before making a claim that something will explode like a nuclear bomb, should look up the relevant physics, to see if his idea makes sense. In this case, Rössler or Gillis didn’t even take the first step to see how a Bose-Nova works, and if his proposal is even remotely reasonable. The two crackpots in this story reinforce each other, neither checking their facts. It’s odd here that the “journalist” originates a crackpot idea, asks it of a crackpot, and of course he agrees. Crackpots are not in the business of proving or disproving things.
Given the above article, I don’t think Alan Gillis should be allowed anywhere near the term “journalist”, but I think the term “crackpot” certainly applies. A good journalist, when hearing such a dangerous claim, should call up a few more physicists, to see if this guy is a crackpot, or whether this issue has any credibility in the scientific community. Perhaps he should also contact people who have done or mathematically explained Bose-Nova experiments (as Fairbairn and McElrath apparently did — judging by their acknowledgments they contacted one of the original Bose-Nova experimenters, Elizabeth Donley).
But as we can see above, getting in contact with people who know — really know — what they are talking about doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot. To them, you either agree with the wingnuts or you are part of a coverup, trying to deceive the public. Which is why it can be frustrating to talk science with some people.
Oh, wait. It’s just the time-honored (sorry, honoured) tradition of writing a headline that has the opposite implication than the actual story.
Call for creationism in science
Professor Michael Reiss says that if pupils have strongly-held beliefs about creationism these should be explored.
Rather than dismissing creationism as a “misconception”, he says it should be seen as a cultural “world view”.
Teachers should take the time to explain why creationism had no scientific basis, Prof Reiss said.
He stressed that the topic should not be taught as science.
Yeah, I can see how summing that up should be worded as a call for teaching creationism.
And I still feel fine.
The latest brouhaha, of course is the LHC, which is supposed to destroy us all, but this is not the first time that science, some (quasi-) scientific phenomenon, or scientists, have supposedly threatened to pushed us into the abyss. Here’s a sampling of recent scenarios, ignoring the many-more-numerous armageddon/rapture predictions (there are some people who have predicted the end of the world numbering in double digits, and yet their credibility with their followers seems undiminished)
Leading up to its startup in 2000, amid all of the Y2k and Millennium hype, the relativistic heavy-ion collider (RHIC) was supposed to do almost exactly the same thing as the LHC: make baby black holes that would devour us.
In 2003, it was was feared (by some) that the Galileo probe, scheduled to crash into Jupiter, would initiate a fusion reaction, either igniting it like a star, or blowing it up in a massive explosion.
2003 was also to have brought Planet X close to earth, amid cataclysm, wailing and the gnashing of teeth.
In 1999, the Cassini probe did a flyby of earth in a slingshot maneuver to send it to Saturn, and was going to be the death of us all (some especially egregious physics in that one)
1997 was to have the earth enter the “photon belt” which would cause electrical disruption and, paradoxically, several days of total darkness.
In March of 1982, it was the planetary “alignment,” when all nine of the planets (Pluto was still an evil conspirator back then) were within a sector of less than 100 degrees in the so-called “Jupiter Effect” that was supposed to cause earthquakes and other other disasters (I got a cool night of viewing out of this, since it was so easy to see Mars, Jupiter and Saturn)
yaddayaddayaddayaddayadda LEONARD BERNSTEIN
Teaching evolution — and, by the sound of it, doing a good job — in Florida. He realizes that if the science sounds dogmatic he’s lost before he even starts.
A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash
When Florida’s last set of science standards came out in 1996, soon after Mr. Campbell took the teaching job at Ridgeview, he studied them in disbelief. Though they included the concept that biological “changes over time” occur, the word evolution was not mentioned.
He called his district science supervisor. “Is this really what they want us to teach for the next 10 years?” he demanded.
In 2000, when the independent Thomas B. Fordham Foundation evaluated the evolution education standards of all 50 states, Florida was among 12 to receive a grade of F. (Kansas, which drew international attention in 1999 for deleting all mention of evolution and later embracing supernatural theories, received an F-minus.)
One major difference between cryptophysicists and cryptozooligists is that the public is generally able to perceive that the latter are outside the mainstream. Everyone knows from daily experience that there probably aren’t yeti or sea monsters hanging around. Modern physics is abstracted enough from everyday lives and intuition, though, that many people, including some journalists, honestly can’t tell when someone’s waaay out there.
I think people are more familiar with mythology than physics, and the results of relativity and quantum mechanics being so downright weird, it’s harder to say what’s possible and what isn’t. Which makes cryptophysics and crackpottery harder to discern from each other, and from established science. Credulous media doesn’t help.
I wonder if things like string theory have made this worse. No, I don’t — I’m sure it has.
Cities play hardball to host biodefence lab
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) disregarded the advice of carefully selected experts to put a Flora, Mississippi, site on the shortlist of candidates, the Associated Press said Monday.
[…]
Now, other applicants are crying foul. “It is very suspicious,” said Irwin Goldman, whose Madison, Wisconsin, site failed to make the cut. State representative Marti Crow (D) of Leavenworth, Kansas, was angry that Flora’s score of 81 beat out Leavenworth’s 92 for a spot on the shortlist.
Wait, what? Biodefence lab? Mississippi? Kansas? How about a rule that any state that’s recently tried to derail the teaching of evolution or promote creationism/intelligent design doesn’t get a frikkin’ federally-funded biology lab in their state.
Charlie Brooker’s screen burn
Science is like a good friend: sometimes it tells you things you don’t want to hear
The wariness [of scientists] stems from three popular misconceptions:
1) Scientists want to fill our world with chemicals and killer robots; 2) They don’t appreciate the raw beauty of nature, maaan; and
3) They’re always spoiling our fun, pointing out homeopathy doesn’t work or ghosts don’t exist EVEN THOUGH they KNOW we REALLY, REALLY want to believe in them.
And don’t forget, they say they’re working for us, but what they really want to do is rule the world!”
If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you ARE! Crash Davis
“Making a list of superstitions / foolish consistencies / lightweight OCD behaviors e.g. I always put my RIGHT shoe on first. You?”
[…]
“In what order shall I put my gear on? What is practical? What feels right? You know, I like putting my right skate on first. I can’t tell you why, but the order feels important. Right skate, then left.”We killed them. 9-3. Sure, they started by playing half their game because they were already in the playoffs, but after I scored that hat trick in the first period, they woke up. We slapped them around for another two periods. It was glorious.
I credit the skates. No, I credit the skate application process.
It’s that story that goes through my head each morning as I stare down. I remember deciding to care about how I put things on my feet. It’s a silly superstitious quirk transformed into an unavoidable daily routine and that’s why I twittered it. I wanted to know who else was saddled with these foolish consistencies.
There seems to be a strong tie between superstition “ritual” and sports.
I have a mild OCD about the iron. I almost always double-check that it’s off and unplugged before going out, because it’s one of those mindless “routine” things that you’ll falsely remember doing. Even if you didn’t do it today, you might paste in the memory of any of the other hundreds of times you’ve done it. (And by “you” I mean “I”)
I don’t think things like “wiring the + wire to the + lead and — to —” or “don’t lick the high-voltage connection” count as superstition.
I’ve known women who had to sleep on a particular side of the bed, so any impulse I might have had for this OCD has vanished — it’s not a battle worth fighting. (You’re in bed with her. Wrong time and place to pick a fight.)