Category Archives: Antiscience

Crackpottery, woo, superstition

Danger, Will Robinson!

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TSA discovery prompts New York bomb scare – six hours later

Short version: TSA confiscates some pipes (not the smoking kind) even though they were determined not to be a threat. Forgets about them. Next shift sees them and goes WTF? and calls the bomb squad. But no evacuation ensues.

Several law enforcement sources told CNN the objects were determined to be homeopathic medical devices.

If it was a homeopathic bomb, then it would have beed diluted of all explosive materials, making it (homeopathically) the most dangerous explosive device EVAR!

via

Let's Play Blackmail!

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Radical Theory Explains the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life, Challenges Conventional Wisdom
(update: link no worky now. Here is the Google cached page)

In addition to resolving long-standing paradoxes and puzzles in chemistry and biology, Dr. Andrulis’ theory unifies quantum and celestial mechanics. His unorthodox solution to this quintessential problem in physics differs from mainstream approaches, like string theory, as it is simple, non-mathematical, and experimentally and experientially verifiable. As such, the new portrait of quantum gravity is radical.

All I can think is someone has compromising pictures of the PAO or Dean, etc. That’s the only way this gets released on university letterhead.

I found the article online, in case you don’t want to download the pdf.

Thus, as modeled by the ohiogyre, quantized macrophoton influx induces macroelectrogyre oscillation between excited and ground states, explaining both the periodicity of planetary orbit and why a planet does not gravitationally collapse into a star. Finally, as with atomic orbitals, in planetary orbits, the attractorepulsive effects diminish the further away from the macrophoton singularity. The macroelectrogyre predicts that increased size and slower orbit of distal planets relative to proximalones (as in the Solar System) corresponds to the composition, length, and stability of macroelectronexuses.

That’s some tasty word salad.

It's Not as Hard as All That

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In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain’t Easy

Somewhat ironic that a story about science is just anecdotes, but the larger issue is that they are inappropriate ones.

She shares my sense that some popular suppositions—notably the notion that reality consists of extremely tiny strings wriggling in hyperspaces of a dozen or more dimensions, or that our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes—verge on pseudoscience, because they are even less experimentally testable than Jim Carter’s circlon theory.

String theory is a work in progress and isn’t the basis for, well, anything as far as I know. Does anybody outside of string theory actually use it? But it’s going through the process, which is important — it just hasn’t completed it. If for some reason relativity had not panned out it would not be crank physics, it would just be wrong, unless Einstein (and followers) had continued to push it even after it had been falsified.

Quantum mechanical interpretations should not be interpreted as science. They are a bridge to understanding, of visualizing concepts, because so much of physics is a construct of the models — we occasionally forget that nobody is guaranteeing that the components of these models are real, just that nature behaves that way.

I have no knowledge of circlon theory, but if it holds to form as crank science it will have little to no math and be of limited application, solving one or two problems in science, but failing to address the broad scope that conventional science does. Thus it will not make specific predictions and would not be falsifiable.

As for the respected-scientist-as-crackpot, one has to remember we follow the evidence, not the person. You give deference to people who have made great advances, but you still test the claims.

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

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The Great Global Warming Fizzle

As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

Any time science gets compared to religion it just, as Dean Keaton might say, makes me tired all over. It’s where you go when you can’t actually discuss science, because you have nothing.

I Knew You Could, I Knew You Could

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You Too Can Be a Snake Oil Salesman

For “magic bracelet” type products it’s even easier. Your product essentially works by magic, so just throw out a bunch of technobabble that doesn’t mean anything. Keep up with the latest buzzwords for maximal effectiveness, but here are some suggestions: “Balances your energy frequencies,” “Quantum whatever,” “Works on the nano cellular level, “Resonates with your connecticazoit.” Make sure to include at least one reference to “quantum” or “energy” and you’re good.

One tip that’s not spelled out completely is that testimonials generally make no causal claim. “I use this and I’ve never felt better” or “after using this, my pain went away” doesn’t actually mean the product has anything to do with the end results. But it’s easy to get people to fall for post hoc, ergo propter hoc — happened after, therefore was caused by. (Hey, nuclear weapons weren’t invented until after women got the right to vote. Just sayin’.)

It Worked the First Time

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“Climategate” Redux: Conservative Media Distort Hacked Emails … Again

Anonymous hackers recently released another batch of emails taken from a climate research group at the University of East Anglia in 2009, along with a document containing numbered excerpts of purportedly incriminating material. Many of these selections have been cropped in a way that completely distorts their meaning, but they were nonetheless repeated by conservative media outlets who believe climate change is a “hoax” and a “conspiracy.”

There Must Be Room for Debate

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There’s a science-literacy backbeat to several of the recent supposedly-superluminal-neutrino stories, and it really manifested itself in a barrage of tweets a few days back, responses to the WSJ “science” article I discussed where the author mused that because of the neutrino experiment, the global warming science isn’t settled. Lampooning such denialism is pretty easy (and fun) and it’s summarized in Be(c+)ause Neutrino and ‘Settled Science’ and CO2. The tweets went with the format of

If serious scientists can question Einstein’s relativity, there must be room for debate about [silly argument]

And fun was had by all. But it occurred to me that there are a lot of people who wouldn’t get the joke. As I tweeted, serious scientists question Einstein ALL THE TIME. That’s what we DO. This is something I think the most people probably don’t get, and that the crackpots who liken science to dogma and scientists to priests certainly don’t. ANY time you do an experiment you are questioning and testing the principles at play in that experiment. If you get some unexpected result you may have discovered new science. Most of the time, of course (and more so the further you are from the cutting edge), you either get what you expected to get, or you made a mistake that you might later uncover. But that’s not due to science being a religion or some conspiracy, it’s because the science is on a solid foundation. So any experiment that uses relativity is a test of relativity, just as any experiment using chemistry principles is a test of those principles, and for biology and geology.

Once a theory has been tested numerous times, you gain confidence that it’s right. Toppling it is not really an option once you have established that it works over the range of problems it’s meant to address — at best you might have to modify it. If you let go of an object and it rises, you don’t rush out and declare “gravity is dead!” (unless perhaps you’re Charles Krauthammer). What you do is look to see if there is some other influence at play — the object is a helium balloon, perhaps, or there’s a strong air current. Established science mandates the adage that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Established science defines what ordinary is.

And ordinary does not get toppled with a single experiment. While some abbreviated history lesson might point to these paradigm shifts, the reality is that the experiments were repeated or other experiments were done and there was invariably a period of debate. Paradigm shifts are slower than the history books sometimes depict. The famous 1887 Michelson-Morely experiment, for example, was a higher-precision repeat of an 1881 experiment that hinted at a discrepancy with the expected answer. The 1881 experiment was insufficient to topple the idea of the aether as a medium (representing an absolute frame) we moved through (but it most certainly was a test of the current paradigm) but at the time, so was the 1887 experiment. Other experiments were subsequently done, and new hypotheses arose to explain the results, such as the partial entrainment of the aether and the ad-hoc FitzGerald–Lorentz contraction. Michelson-Morely may have been the mortal blow for the aether, but it took decades for it to actually die.

Evolution is another example. It took a long time for the theory to be accepted, but by now has accumulated so much evidence and been tested in so many ways, no single bit of evidence is going to topple it. Theories are either shown to be systemically wrong, or they get modified. The early thermodynamic theories of phlogiston and caloric were tossed out because they were wrong — they were not examples of a simplified version of a more complete theory, as with relativity and Newtonian systems. Atomic models came and went as more data were obtained, and the Bohr model had its day as quantum mechanics was developed. The Rutherford scattering experiment may be the closest example of which I am aware of a single experiment toppling a model, but that model was not particularly well-developed and certainly did not have 100 years of testing and confirmation behind it.

Ah, the Cranks

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I get mail: Brown’s Gas and Perpetual Motion

The cranks believe that if you just find the right way to burn it, then you can create a perfect source of free energy. You see, if you can just burn it so that it produces a teeny, tiny bit more energy being burned that it cost to produce, then you’ve got free energy. You just run an engine – it keeps dividing the water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then you burn it, producing more energy than you spent to divide it; and the only by-product is water vapor!

Of course, this doesn’t work. Thermodynamics fights back

Five Manufactured "Truths" About the Climate Change Discussion

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Five Truths About Climate Change

I’m going to start by quoting the conclusion

It’s time to move the debate past the dogmatic view that carbon dioxide is evil and toward a world view that accepts the need for energy that is cheap, abundant and reliable.

There are two possible lines of argument in the discussion: science and policy. The best science establishes that anthropogenic global warming is true, and from that you decide what, if anything, you do about it.

The first point is about political reality

The result? Nothing, aside from promises by various countries to get serious—really serious—about carbon emissions sometime soon.

Here’s a reality check: During the same decade that Mr. Gore and the IPCC dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.

i.e. the politicians of the world couldn’t get their act together and actually do anything. Somehow, that must falsify anthropogenic global warming. In the real world, though, nature doesn’t take its cue from politics. Some legislature could declare a gravity-free day, but you aren’t going to float off into space as a result. So really this is just a celebration of the fact that the denialists in the government have been successful. It doesn’t mean they were right.

2) Regardless of whether it’s getting hotter or colder—or both—we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.

That’s a non-sequitur. The need for energy has absolutely no effect on the correctness of the science. It’s also not true that we need a lot more energy — our energy use growth has been a meager 0.4% a year the last decade — and it also doesn’t mean that added capacity can’t be “green”.

3) The carbon-dioxide issue is not about the United States anymore.

It never was. The author plays some games with statistics, but we’re still the biggest producer of CO2 per capita of the regions mentioned. So, whoop-de-doo that we’ve lowered our emissions 1.7%, when they are twice as much per person than in European countries or three times as much as in China. While the author is happy to pass the buck and complain that what others are doing isn’t working, we in the US can only be responsible for what happens in the US. We’re not in a position to try an influence anyone else if our own house isn’t in order.

Nearly all of the things we use on a daily basis—light bulbs, computers, automobiles—are vastly more efficient than they were just a few years ago. And over the coming years those devices will get even better at turning energy into useful lighting, computing and motive power.

This is despite the GOP trying to kill the measure that increases lighting efficiency, and that the improvements in things like computers, appliances and cars are driven by government regulation (energy star and cafe standards).

The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Seriously? Neutrinos were measured (probably incorrectly) to be FTL, and that means global warming is wrong? The weasel is strong in this one. This is a standard denialist tactic — science has been wrong in the past, therefore we can’t trust science. Which seems terribly hypocritical when presented by someone using the advances of science, probably on a daily basis. I’m just guessing, but I’d wager that the author doesn’t think his computer or car run because of magic.