The Greatest Scientific Hoaxes? 496
Ponca City, We love you writes "The New Scientist has an amusing story about the seven greatest scientific hoaxes of all time. Of course, there have been serious cases of scientific fraud, such as the stem cell researchers recently found guilty of falsifying data, and the South Korean cloning fraud, but the hoaxes selected point more to human gullibility than malevolence and include the Piltdown Man (constructed from a medieval human cranium); a ten-foot "petrified man" dug up on a small farm in Cardiff; fossils 'found' in Wurzburg, Germany depicting comets, moons and suns, Alan Sokal's paper loaded with nonsensical jargon that was accepted by the journal Social Text; the claim of the Upas tree on the island of Java so poisonous that it killed everything within a 15-mile radius; and Johann Heinrich Cohausen's claim of an elixir produced by collecting the breath of young women in bottles that produced immortality. Our favorite: BBC's broadcast in 1957 about the spaghetti tree in Switzerland that showed a family harvesting pasta that hung from the branches of the tree. After watching the program, hundreds of people phoned in asking how they could grow their own tree but, alas, the program turned out to be an April Fools' Day joke." What massive scientific hoaxes/jokes have other people witnessed?
Audiophile cables (Score:5, Informative)
Denon's $500 ethernet cables, those $9000 "vacuum chamber" cables, etc.
Oh, this is science, not technology.
Still, they use edge cases of science to make $$$$$$$$$$$$$$ off of rich fanboys.
In practice, the cable I mentioned are hoaxes.
Scientology (Score:1, Informative)
oh, since this is a Religious hoax it doesn't count? It's got "science" in the name and they pretend to explain the world in a pseudo-scientific method.
Stem Cell Research (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, there have been serious cases of scientific fraud, such as the stem cell researchers recently found guilty of falsifying data
Unless I'm mistaken, the fraud committed in this instance was that the photos taken were adjusted in photoshop to make them clearer (i'm not sure if they were brightened or darkened), which had no affect on the actual data or conclusions of the study. Please point me in the right direction if I'm wrong.
Project Alpha (Score:4, Informative)
Well, some of these hoaxes, like the hilarious Sokal hoax, weren't really scientific hoaxes moreso than exposing the idiocy of certain groups.
So, if you want to go down that route (and I see no reason not too!) then you MUST bring up the venerable James Randi.
Project Alpha humiliated a bunch of paranormal researchers and parapsychologists because of how easily fooled they were.
Banachek has a good article on his website:
http://www.banachek.org/nonflash/project_alpha.htm [banachek.org]
The most interesting thing is that some people were such True Believers in the supposed "powers" of Banachek and Edwards that they continued to believe in them even after revealing it was all just an exposé. The most important thing was that it reveals that while many scientists in this area just didn't properly account for outright fraud; I would guess it is because most experiments do not have to worry about participants purposefully trying to mess with the results.
Re:Biggest scientific hoax of them all... (Score:3, Informative)
Not too hard... (Score:3, Informative)
Judging from this recent /. article [slashdot.org], perhaps one shouldn't be surprised that we are this gullible.
Re:Stem Cell Research (Score:3, Informative)
Does homeopathy count? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cold fusion (Score:3, Informative)
While cold fusion may not work there's nothing in the Wikipedia article, at least, to indicate that it was a hoax. Perhaps Pons & Fleischmann could have been more rigorous in their methodology and waiting for other labs to reproduce their results certainly would have been a good idea. there doesn't seem to have be any malice on their part to perpetuate a hoax. Sloppy science or perhaps not accounting for all the possible ways energy could be leaking into the system certainly, but it does not appear to be a hoax.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion [wikipedia.org]
Goat Glands (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing beats the perpetual search for...ahem...male enhancement.
The scientific pioneer was a guy around the Great Depression who made a mint selling an operation in which he would implant goat testicles into his patients, many of whom claimed dramatic improvement.
In the process he managed to revolutionize modern radio and advertising.
Linky linky: John Brinkley [wikipedia.org]
Re:Stem Cell Research (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Audiophile cables (Score:5, Informative)
I find it hard to believe (Score:4, Informative)
That nobody has mentioned the Museum of Hoaxes [museumofhoaxes.com], which documents all these and more. Much, much more.
Re:What!? (Score:3, Informative)
Fermat's last theorem was proven true by Andrew Wiles in 1993/1994. But Fermat probably didn't have a proof for it, so the "theorem" portion really was a misnomer, maintained that way by mathematicians, I suspect, for romantic reasons. So it's not a hoax per se.
Re:Spaghetti tree (Score:5, Informative)
Back in 1957, even the word 'pasta' wasn't widely used in the UK. There was only 'spaghetti' and that came in tins with tomato sauce (generally served on toast or with fry-ups as an alternative to Baked Beans). This was decades before full ingredients had to be displayed on packaged food, so all the tins used to say was 'Ingredients - Spaghetti, Tomato Sauce'. Widespread use of dried pasta (popularised by the ubiquitous Spaghetti Bolognaise beloved by students) didn't occur until the '70s, and fresh pasta was uncommon until the '90s.
The unfamiliarity with anything remotely resembling 'real' spaghetti, and the fact that the story was broadcast by the BBC on it's flagship documentary programme in it's normal time-slot years before television April Fools pieces were common makes the fact that it was widely believed much less surprising than it would appear to 21st century pasta-eaters with a healthy skepticism towards TV news.
Re:War on Drug Users (Score:5, Informative)
The evidence I've seen suggests that excessive MDMA use decreases the density of serotonin receptors/transporters but not cell bodies. I don't think the effect is visible at doses relevant to most recreational users. Consider this letter to Nature [nature.com] regarding the risks of using MDMA in human research:
That's 2-3 times a normal recreational dose of MDMA, twice a day, for 4 days straight. That's a lot of MDMA, and no damage as measured by serotonin reuptake sites could be observed. So it's not as simple as causing "brain damage, which increases with every dose." This is what I mean by scientific fraud. People taking extreme results, and applying them to real world situations that don't even come close to real world situations. And then they make public policy based on those unrealistic results. Here's more:
Translation:Uptake sites may be downregulated, instead of destroyed. The same kind of downregulation has been seen with SSRIs, and we have no problem giving them to humans. Trying to pass off receptor downregulation as "brain damage" is still more fraud.
The article forgot or missed Dihydrogen Monoxide (Score:2, Informative)
Who can forget the very toxic substance Dihydrogen Monoxide? How many dozens of people have fallen for this???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax [wikipedia.org]
Re:Intelligent Design? (Score:3, Informative)
Intelligent Design relies on that pseudoscience nonsense of "irreducable complexity" and their text book Pandas and People shows almost a word for word replacement of God/Creator and Intelligent Design/Creationism after the court ruled that God/Creationism couldn't be taught as science. You sir have been duped by the fundie agenda, which is EXACTLY why they approached it as "Intelligent Design". It is hidden right in the name, that humans are too complex to have evolved so they must have been designed by an intelligent creator.
So no, Intelligent Design does not "only defend that randomness was not a factor". It advocates that life as we know it is too complex to have evolved naturally. And again, what you are talking about is represented in Theistic Evolution or BioLogos as Francis Collins calls it. Intelligent Design is indeed a scientific hoax. Worse than that it uses word play and politics to seem legitimate to the casual observer.
I would include another classic: (Score:3, Informative)
In it, he described a substance that would actually dissolve just before it touched the solvent. This is a great one, well worth the read if you can find it.
This prank was not actually "pulled" on anyone, but when the professors who were to judge his real thesis caught wind of it, he was strongly reprimanded and apparently there was some question about whether he would be given his doctorate.
Re:Intelligent Design? (Score:3, Informative)
No, ID says "life was designed in it's current form". It makes no allowance for anything except what they call "micro-evolution". If you don't understand that, then you haven't actually read any ID "literature".
Ahhhh! No, ID does not say "life was designed in it's [sic] current form". It says "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." In other words, the current state of biological complexity could not have about without some direction from an outside force beyond randomness and evolutionary pressure. Some IDers combine this with creationism, others do not. Creationism says "life was designed in its current form", not ID.
However, that said, ID is not science, as it is not falsifiable. Science says "there is evolution, and this is the path taken". ID says, "this is why the current state can exist". Taken farther, one can say, "sequences of variations cause macro evolution", and then say "there was a designer causing that sequence of variations" without a contradiction, because the two statements do not occupy the same intellectual space. As someone said above, ID is philosophy (specifically, religion), while evolution is biology.
Re:Intelligent Design? (Score:3, Informative)
My answer is at the end of the sentence you were quoting. It is not about purity or approximation - the notion of "proof" in science and math is the same: proof is a demonstration that some statement you are making is correct. In math, which is axiomatic like you said, truths can be derived from other, absolute truths. Statements about the world are very different, esp broad statements that comprise fundamental models, and that is why you only disprove science. What is offered as proof are observations made in a particular setting, and unless you can prove that all observations in all situations will work with the statement being made, then you cannot "prove" the statement in an "absolute" way. And of course you can't do that, without mathematical necessity, which is what a lot of modern physics has to do with.
Anyway, this all distracts from the original thread about whether non-science should be forgiven for trying to "talk science". I was just trying to say no. Hopefully this discussion on the difficulty of science and the sincere consideration of "truth" by those who really have to deal with it, will justify that.
Re:Intelligent Design? (Score:3, Informative)
so "intelligent design" is to the right what "global climate change" is to the left
Not at all. Both issues involve the Right denying established science.
You know I'm old enough to remember when it was the Left, that did loony stuff like that. Remember when plate tectonics was judged to be inconsistent with historical materialism? Funny how times change.
Re:E-Meter? (Score:5, Informative)
In case anybody missed it, the "Church" of Scientology successfully censored Slashdot [slashdot.org]. Using the DMCA, which is currently being praised [slashdot.org] on the front page of Slashdot right now.
Re:E-Meter? (Score:1, Informative)
"In case anybody missed it, the "Church" of Scientology successfully censored Slashdot"
Its always facinated me the depth of their hypocrisy, in how they relentlessly suppress people and their opinions, yet this group consider suppressive people as extremely bad. Their paradoxical behaviour is completely morally corrupt thinking (because they fail to see how they themselves behave) and then they wonder why people call them a cult.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressive_person [wikipedia.org]
Re:What!? (Score:4, Informative)
Not a theory, a theorem. In mathematics, a theorem is a statement that has been rigorously been proven to be true. A theory is the body of work associated with a particular mathematical subject e.g. number theory, group theory, set theory. Thanks to Andrew Wiles, Fermat's Last Theorem is a theorem of number theory.
Before Andrew Wiles proved it, it was technically a conjecture. However, it became known as Fermat's Last Theorem because of the way Fermat worked. It wasn't unusual for Fermat to write down mathematical statements and then claim to have a proof without actually stating the proof. In fact, at the time of Fermat, it was quite common for mathematicians generally to keep their discoveries secret.
Over the years since his death, proofs were discovered for all of the other statements that Fermat made. Therefore, they turned out to all be theorems. It was thus natural to assume that he wasn't lying when he wrote the infamous marginal note and Fermat's Last Theorem was so-called because it was the last one left without a proof.
By the time it became clear that a proof was not going to be easily forthcoming, the tradition of calling FLT FLT had already set in. Wiles' proof is certainly not the proof that Fermat said he had - it builds on far too much maths that was discovered after Fermat's death. I think the consensus is that Fermat thought he had a proof but there was an error in it.