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13 Things That Do Not Make Sense
thpr writes "New Scientist is reporting on 13 things which do not make sense. It's an interesting article about 13 areas in which observations do not line up with current theory. From the placebo effect to dark matter, it's a list of areas in need of additional research. Explanations could lead to significant breakthroughs... or at least new and different errors in scientific observations. Now there are 20 interesting problems for Slashdotters to work on, once you combine these with the seven Millennium Problems!"
Yes, the placebo effect is still not completely understood, if it exists at all. But that article made it sound like things that are pretty common knowledge are new and shocking.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
From the article:
>IT IS one of the most famous, and most
>embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998,
>astronomers discovered that the universe is
>expanding at ever faster speeds.
Embarrassing? Since when is being able to study something qualitatively new and unexpected an embarrassment? One would expect cosmologists to jump for joy at their luck. (And among those whom I know, everyone does!)
If anything, dark energy is a triumph of experimental science. An experimental groups found something no one expected, and within a hand full of years, armed only with careful data analysis, they convinced not only themselves but everyone else that it was genuine and radically changed our picture of the universe. Since then we've accumulated even more convinging data, and found independant evidence to confirm the existance of dark energy. There is a vigerous community studying the problem and proposing new tests, and theorists everywhere proposing new and interesting ways to accomodate the data. One couldn't hope for a more perfect example of science working in the way we all like to believe it does.
Cold fusion, on the other hand, is a *real* embarrassment for physics - dozens of seemingly reputable scientists have spent millions of dollars and decades of work and produced diddly squat. The experimental case isn't bulletproof - it's just so riddled with holes that no one notices when new bullets pass through it. The story is now so thick with poor experimental practice, unprofessional behavior, and overt fraud that few legitimate researchers will touch the subject for fear of being associated with all the hucksters and frauds who haunt it.
(one of) The exciting thing(s) about dark matter/dark energy/Pioneer anomaly is that they smell like new fundamental physics. A bit like in the early 20th century, when people had everything pretty much figured out, except for a few nagging problems such as the UV catastrophe and Michelson-Moreley's failure to detect changes in the speed of light. Which of course led respectively to quantum theory and relativity.
We assume DM and DE are there because according to general relativity we need something to clump visimble matter, something to accelerate the universe today (and another something to accelerate the universe in the past if inflation is to be believed), and a bunch of something to make the universe (very nearly) flat. Postulating all these weird stuff is a bit contrived. Or we can heve some new physics.
This probably what the Wow aliens were trying to tell us...
PS: The 4neutron stuff and changing constant *are* new physics, if true. Right now they are just plain weird, IMHO.
I grow as weary of explaining this as I am of being an example of it*. "Assholes" get chicks because they go out there to meet women, with confidence and at least the illusion of interest. They don't stay in griping about being single on Slashdot, while thinking "no hot girl will ever like me".
* an example of the latter, not the former
Freedom: "I won't!"
In this case, my totally uninformed guess is that the patients subconcious became trained to associate opiates with an IV. The brain gets its "time for opiates" call when the needle was inserted, and when it doesn't get any morphine, takes that as a cue to churn out some of its own opioids - which would then be blocked by the naloxone.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I don't get how they can claim that stuff like spider venom can be diluted in water to the point where the sample likely doesnt contain a single molecule of spider venom... but that it left an "imprint" on the water, whatever the hell that is.
If this were true, then what about the other things which got into the water and "imprinted" those water molecules over the years? Where do they get the water from to dilute in? How can they be sure the water they are using isn't "imprinted" with something bad... or is there some way to de-imprint the water before they imprint it with whatever they're selling...
This is nonsense that requires very, very minimal thought to realize it's flawed very fundamentally. If this stuff which isn't even present in the water, imprinted it... then what about all the other stuff which has touched the water over the years?
Really, though, would you want a partner like that?
I had one once, and it was awful -- she was so convinced that she was useless and constantly putting herself down. I felt really sorry for her because somewhere along the line she'd been seriously messed up, but I also wouldn't wish her on anyone. In any case it lasted for a matter of weeks before I dumped her (or she interpreted it that way) because I just couldn't stand it any more.
The way that she acted a lot of the time suggested that she was expecting to be beaten for some of the things she did, no matter how much I constantly told her that there was nothing wrong and I wasn't going to treat her like that. She never actually listened to me, and all the time she was assuming I was someone I wasn't. Honestly, it wasn't until I'd met her that I understood how it's possible that some women put up with that kind of crap from guys. She was practically inviting it, and with someone else she would've gotten it. (No, I didn't oblige.)
It took me a while to get over that, but my current girlfriend, who took a while to find, is very assertive. If she doesn't like something I say or do, she'll make sure I know straight away, and I do the same for her. It's a whole lot better.
Oh. In other words, there isn't any real reason. It's just that methadone is politically correct and heroin is not. That's basically what I expected.
You need to incorporate the product of the following conditions:
Patient's certainty:
Uncertain
Certain and correct
Certain and incorrect
Getting the drug:
Yes
No
This would leave us with the following groups:
Not sure and recieving drug
Not sure and not recieving drug
Certain of recieving drug and recieving drug
Certain of not recieving drug and not recieving drug
Certain of not recieving drug and recieving drug
Certain of recieving drug and not recieving drug
Then you need many replicates, include all the interactions in your ANOVA (i.e. do it the simple, correct way with none of the monkeying around that bad statisticians will prescribe), and report the results that pass Ficher's LSD (the most powerful detector of significant difference), and possibly also include results passing more stringent significance tests.
Then we will have the answer. Wait 4 years for people to do it with other drugs and make more complicated expirements with more degrees of freedom and it will be canon.
And yes, you will have to LIE to and DECIEVE your patients. This is considered unethical, so this simple basic expirement will never be done in the "developed" world. There can be no waiver of "you may or may not recieve medication" because if introduced it would place everyone in the group "Uncertain." If the patients have a bias towards believing that a medical experiment does not medicate as stated then the patients must not know that they are participating in the experiment.
The part about sending something faster than light is just bad reporting. Einstein says that no information can travel faster than light. If I point a laser beam at the moon and move it quickly, the dot on the moon will move around faster than light. However, no information is sent so there is no problem. The same applies to this experiment except it involves group and phase velocities of light. The concept is very hard to explain in words so I'll just point you to this Java applet with a moving picture:e _stuff/Applets/sines/GroupVelocity.html
http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109N/mor
The part about light moving slower isn't anything special. It has been known for a while that light slows down in a medium (ie anything other than a pure vacuum) at a rate dependent on the type of medium. This includes normal glass.
Oh great. Now we are seeing add the guy making a smartass comment about a "guy complaining about how overquoted pop culture references that have something to do with the topic getting an instant +5 funny" getting modded as insightful" getting ignored by mods. What's next? Will we see the guy who makes a reference to the guy making a smartass comment about a "guy complaining about how overquoted pop culture references that have something to do with the topic getting an instant +5 funny" getting modded as insightful" getting +5 Insightful?! What is the world coming to?!
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.