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Science's Limits Are Only Self-Imposed
Tristfardd writes "The Independent has a fine article on ridiculous experiments, some of which really are ridiculous, while others have interesting ramifications. If only the article gave links for viewing the rotating frog or the film on self-trepanation."
The article forgot to mention that there was indeed a plausible explanation for the 21 grams lost after each person died. No matter how much one exhales, there is always air left in one's body. However, when you die, your lungs relax and thus expel that final bit of air, hence making your corpse a little bit lighter.
Floating Frogs
The sorting issue as defined in the Brazil nut experiment came up recently while I was on a field survey of some land in Nevada. It was a mapping project and we kept coming across areas known as "Desert pavement". This area of the desert experiences the same sorting activity when water or wind is added to the mix.
Though this seems a bit trivial, it has very serious implications for later rain events. This sorting makes the soil mostly impervious to water and contributes to some of the deadly flood events that can occur in these arid environments.
This said, be careful pouring water on that holiday display of mixed nuts.....
http://www.bmezine.com/news/people/A10101/trepan/
With pictures as well
Sig
Here in my department at FSU we are fortunate enough to have the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, which develops the stongest magnets on the planet. Couple this with a professor with a sense of humor and you get .... That right! A Frog floating in a magnetic field! Along with golf balls, dice, and other things. When we asked him why he says, because you can. :) Check out the movies:
http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/science/levitation/
"Engineers do the work of man, Physicists do the work of God"
The soul experiment was terribly bad science, and from it we can only conclude that the man who performed it believed in a soul, and hence found that.
a sp
Details can be found here:
http://www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.
Some of the short points are:
* small sample size of 4 cases
* the results varied widely
* deciding upon the exact time of death is no easy task
All in all, the experiment proves nothing.
Blessed be thine google.
m l
http://www.hfml.sci.kun.nl/froglev.html
http://www.hfml.sci.kun.nl/levitation-movies.ht
http://www.hfml.ru.nl/pics/Movies/frog.mpg
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
The brazil nut experiment reminded me of this fascinating result. If you shake a container of granular material, the granular material spontaneously collects together in one place.
The same page also has a cool video of granular eruption.
We really found a significant amount of methane and it depended a lot on what feed had been given to the cows. Since methane is one of the most significant green house gasses (much more potent per gram than CO2, just less of it), we could make recommendations for feed to help lessen the outgassing.
The other big source of methane is rotting vegetation in swamps. Often a swamp will have little flames rising over it as the methane burns, creating a lot of legends of ghosts and swamp monsters. Because you get a lot of rotting vegetation in the lakes created by large dams, big hydro projects create almost as much a greenhouse effect as fossil fuel plans creating the same amount of electricty, although this diminishes over time, unlike with fossil fuels.
the film on self-trepanation.
Chances are it'll feature on the Darwin Awards soon enough for everyone.
-Adam
Anything that a scientist can calculate, he or she will. Einstein calculated in his youth that putting his socks on in the morning and taking them off again at night would occupy him some hundreds of hours during the course of his life, and thereafter went sockless.
Yes, but did he calculate the time wasted dating new girls from scratch due to his foot oder?
Table-ized A.I.
If you have a sensitive disposition, you would be wise to skip straight to the next topic. Trepanation (cutting a hole in the skull to relieve pressure) was practised by the ancient Egyptians. In the 1960s, Joey Mellen and Amanda Feilding decided to try it in the hope that it would "expand their consciousness". Unable to find any doctors willing to perform the operation, they each did it on themselves...
Yeah, "expand" all over the floor.
Table-ized A.I.
Bravo! I love this kind of article, and wish there were far more of them.
We in the sciences need to fight our tendency to suppress the embarrassing history of mistaken scoffing; where new discoveries are rejected because if they were real, they'd make the scientific community look like fools. Suppress? Yes. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And it may not be conscious suppression, but the effects are the same. If we take a detailed look at the history of science, it's quite fascinating to see which discoveries were ridiculed at the time. And it's amazing that this ridicule is not common knowledge. Perhaps historians of science need to focus more on digging up dirt, rather than letting scientists tell their own sanitized version of history. For example, try to find any texts which mention:
String Theory
rejected by the wider community, kept alive almost entirely by Caltech's John Schwartz, the "pariah of the physics department," who only avoided being fired because of secret support by Murray Gell-Mann. The work was set back ~10 years by widespread sneering. See "Feynman's Rainbow," also "Euclid's Window"
Black Holes
Proposed in 1930 by S. Chandra, who was hounded out of his department by Arthur Eddington and supporters, since black holes would ruin one of Eddington's theories (later proved wrong.) The work was only taken up again in the 1960s, so Eddington's actions set black hole research back by thirty years.
Scanning-tunneling microscope.
Ridiculed by the microscope community. Apparently the project avoided setbacks mostly because its discoverers attracted early support by the Nobel prize committee. See Science News, Atom Tinkerer's Paradise
Non-euclidian geometry
The field was explored by K. F. Gauss, who fearing ridicule, kept all his papers secret until the end of his life. Lobachevsky did some similar work and did attract scorn. The topic was finally taken seriously after several more decades passed. Doppler effect.
Proposed in 1842, but ridiculed and ignored because it contradicted the Aether theory of light. Stellar red shift finally penetrated the wall of scorn two decades later (after Doppler himself had died.)
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Other more famous instances of ridiculed/vindicated discoveries:
Lynn Margulis, mitochondria, chloroplasts, etc., were once independant cells. Barbara McClintlok's "jumping genes"
Robert Goddard, finally vindicated when those idiotic spaceships of his were taken seriously by Nazi scientists.
Weltner's continental drift theory
Wright Brothers. Ridiculed by top US scientists and Scientific American magazine, they finally had to move to France before anyone would believe their claims or even come to observe their machine in action.
Arrhenius, ion chemistry. Nearly lost his degree because ions were a heresy (atoms were known to be indivisible.)
Ignaz Semmelweis, doctors should wash hands before surgery. (Semmelweis fought the medical community for ~10 years, and ended up committing suicide in an insane asylum.)
L. Galvani, electricity. "They call me the frogs' dancing master."
W. Harvey, circulation of blood. The medical community ostracized him.
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