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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!"
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
That's really interesting. The body and/or the brain releases the THIQ (I would presume) as if herion were present, but only if the morphine blocker isn't used in combination with the placebo.
This suggests that as long as we think we're getting morphine, our bodies will respond accordingly. If the phenomenon could be isolated...combine that with some VR, and you've got the opium dens of the digital age. But no opium.
I Want To Believe
Maybe saline solution is not completely inert after all, and so is not a good placebo.
-- Andyvan
The brain is a very powerful thing. I don't know what is so hard to believe. Pain originates in the brain so it isn't that hard to believe that you can deceive it.
During the dark ages people were absolutely convinced that theory was correct. And anything that disagreed with the theory was burned, as were the heretics who observed it.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
What about "Why do people believe whatever politicians say?". I've never seen a single one not lie out his ass every chance he gets just to win votes then 6 months later deny all knowledge. We're ment to be a smart race yet we repeatedly fall for the same scams and tricks day in and day out.
Might not be "why is the universe breaking laws we know apply to everything in it", but it's something which might effect our lives unlike a few of the things mentioned.
I like muppets.
14. Why Being An Asshole Gets You Chicks
Its true. Go to any mall and you'll see a not-so-attractive man walking around with a beautiful, well-endowed lady in tow while he's making fun of her to his friends, or is putting her down. He never calls, he never does the dishes, he never puts the seat down, and most of all, he's getting some.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Anyway, the counterexample in the article is easy enough to explain, in that the counter-placebo actively prevents some secondary effect, where it is the secondary effect that is closer to the true cause of the perceived pain reduction. The the morphine or the original placebo are just acting somewhere higher in the chain. Given how little we know about the nature of the mind (including our perception of pain), the results are not nearly as suprising as they proclaim.
The whole topic of "truth" just seems so passe these days. Faith-based politicians aren't going to worry about any of it, anyway. They don't need or want better science or more facts--they already know what they believe, and they're going to structure the world around their beliefs, no matter how crazy. The whole notion of truth is under attack.
So many examples, it's hard to know where to start. The two that are on my mind right now are the new UN ambassador who is pledged to destroying the UN, and appointing the master planner of the Iraq fiasco to the World Bank.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
...getting a guy completely trashed on water, because he thought he was drinking vodka. Sure, he'd had a few vodkas already (only a few), but once the bottle ran out, he still wanted more, so I filled up the bottle with water, and he and I sat down and kept drinking the 'vodka'.
I acted as if I were drinking vodka (the flinching at the strength of it, and pretending to be feeling the effect), until he became so drunk on about 350ml of water (and the perhaps 100ml of vodka that he'd drunk earlier) that he couldn't stand and was passed out, and was out of action for almost a day.
After this, with the d*ckh**d out of the way, I finished my good deed for the party, and everybody else had a great time from that point onwards at the party... it only took about 40 minutes for this to work.
So, yes, I can believe that the placebo effect works - and even more effectively on fools like the guy in my anecdote.
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
I think these recent experiments are interesting and require some explanation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/841690.stm
and also
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/655518.stm
Hedley
Wow, the inclusion of cold fusion as number 13 in this list is a big disappointment! Cold fusion took the bang out of legitimate fusion efforts many years ago and it just won't die. Nagel's claim that "The experimental case is bulletproof, [y]ou can't make it go away." is a load of garbage. Even adamant proponents of cold fusion will agree that the experimental evidence is pretty shoddy at best is rife with irreproducibility. It is precisely this lack of reproducibility that makes the "effect" so hard to swallow. I would have preferred to see coronal mass ejections or the enhanced temperature of the Sun's corona listed as number 13.
It's like the opposite of 'bone-pointing'. In some aboriginal cultures, a medicine man could kill people just by pointing some bone or small object. People would really die if they got bone pointed -- not only because they believed that death was certain, but also because everyone else in the community treated them as a walking corpse. No food, no conversation, no medicine. An invisible.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Give everyone placebos, and see if the pills being taken by group A have any effect.
Also get Group C and tell them they are all getting placebos and give them the real pills and get Group D and tell them they are all getting the real pills and give them placebos. With Group A, the patients will have some uncertainty about what they are getting and that may affect the effect.
If it was legal for the clinic to administer heroin, it would be a habit which could be supported without committing crimes. So again I ask, how is methadone better?
I'm sure they're subject-shopping, but it's interesting that there are so many weird things going on out there.
It does feel like there are a few things about to tease themselves apart in cosmology...
Gravity seems to be behaving oddly, with things like the Pioneer acceleration and the anomalous in-track acceleration of the LAGEOS satellites.
The limited age of the universe is being stretched to strange proportions of late with observations of the early universe looking more developed than expected. Observations by the Spitzer may throw even more confusion on the fire.
Add to the pile interesting oddities like Quantized Redshift, originally proposed by Tifft and still observed, that would see to put us at the center of the universe (we shouldn't see the equivalent of even "shells" from our point of view). The Fingers of God is an interesting graphic interpretation.
Association of high-redshift quasars with low-redshift galaxies rounds off the plate.
Actually, a number of these controversies have been around since the mid-80's, but the power and spectrum spread of our telescopes has been getting better. It's been hard to get time to observe the controversial objects - the allocation committees tend to turn such proposals down - but there are plenty of controversies left in the skies, even when we don't go looking for them :)
Personally, I'm excited by the possibilities. It feels like there's something just around the corner, if only we can get some research time in on it.
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
How can pot make you have antisocial behavior? That's absurd. I smoked pot when I was a teenager and it had the opposite effect. It was something that brought our friends closer together. We'd sit and smoke and play video games/ guitar/ cards or whatever and talk. To this day I'm still good friends with all of my ex-pot smoking buddies even though we no longer smoke.
But when we DID smoke, we were all much closer friends.
--Forest C. Adcock--
> It's unclear to me exactly why that is considered an
It is not seen as an improvement by honest doctors ie. doctors who take their hippocratic oath seriously and don't do their governments bidding.> improvement.[methadone over heroin].
I was treated in a mental hospital about 10 yrs ago for alcoholism (UK) and there were a number of heroin addicts in there being treated with methadone. They said the methadone was disgusting in every possible way. (They became the living dead on it).
The consultant psychiatrist wanted to treat his patients with heroin. People with a heroin addiction can lead perfectly normal lives, those on methadone can't. Yet the government wouldn't allow him for purely political reasons: red top newspapers screaming "Junkies get heroin on National Health Service Scandal!"
The psychiatrist (Dr Marks) made a fuss about it, saw that he would make no progress in changing attitudes and then pissed off to Switzerland where they have an enlightened drugs policy:
* Needle exchange (no Aids or hep)
* Heroin prescription (no stealing or shitty side effects)
The UK eventually solved all their mental health problems: it's called "Care in the Community" also known as "do fuck all for them and if they break the law chuck them in prison".
I'm currently doing my bit by lobbying my MP but I feel I will make no progress either and will follow Dr. Marks' in going abroad to a country where mental health problems equates to a trip to hospital and not prison. One needs to protect ones family, right? (Alcoholism and other mental health problems have a genetic component).
Sorry to be OT but people need informing of what is exactly going on in their name and the public disgrace that is mental health provision in large parts of the Western world.
The Machine stops.
There have been recent, successful (i.e. highly reporoducible, statistically significant) experiments with cold fusion, or at least with something that doesn't seem explained by other known science. I know people at MIT who are currently working on cold fusion research, and apparnelty there are at least two commercial ventures that are underway to make products out of some of this research. However, nothing is going to be released till people are damned sure this is the real thinng, because the social and political risks are too big if it isn't.
The probleme with cold fusion is not that it doesn't work (which it may or may not, as I haven't actually looked at the research), but that because of the bad science that has been done on cold fusion, there aren't many reputable scientists working on it. Of course, 90% of the crap you read might be completely irreproducible, so if you were to try to just look into the field you'd find a lot of crackpots and poor results. However, you should not confuse what you will most likely find with what you might find.
Of course, on the other hand, if the results that people are finding really are examples of workinig cold fusion, the experiments should be at a level that cannot be ignored very soon. It follows that *if* this is the real thing, we will know soon, and if it is not, we will know that the current batch of research isn't fruitful. I trust my friends, so I think there is something to look forward to, but its really hard to say what will happen. Its imporant that we have people working on this kind of research, though, because the benefits will far outweight the costs if things do prove fruitful. The trick is keeping it in the realm of science.
John Baez, quantum gravity reseacher have an exellent list on his site of Open questions in Physics
It includes:
sonoluminescence - plasma core in the bubbles of liquid
high temperature superconductivity
turbulence and Navier-Stokes equations -mathematic of chaos
what is meant by a "measurement" in quantum mechanics? Does "wavefunction collapse" actually happen as a physical process ?
What happened at or before the Big Bang?
Why is there an arrow of time; that is, why is the future so much different from the past?
dark energy
dark matter
The Horizon Problem: why is the Universe almost, but not quite, homogeneous on the very largest distance scales
When were the first stars formed, and what were they like
Is the Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis true? Roughly, for generic collapsing isolated gravitational systems are the singularities that might develop guaranteed to be hidden beyond a smooth event horizon?
Why are the laws of physics not symmetrical between left and right, future and past, and between matter and antimatter?
Why is there more matter than antimatter, at least around here?
Is there really a Higgs boson, as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics?
Why do the particles have the precise masses they do? Or is this an unanswerable question?
Are there important aspects of the Universe that can only be understood using the Anthropic Principle?
The Big Question(TM)
This last question sits on the fence between cosmology and particle physics:
* How can we merge quantum theory and general relativity to create a quantum theory of gravity? How can we test this theory?
I saw a PBS documentary on the restoration of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. One major point of the documentary is that the Declaration has taken on much greater importance to US citizens since the Civil War. It may have been largely the result of Abe Lincoln's quoting of it in the Gettysburg Address.
The Hrobjartsson meta-analysis (the story that you ulitmately link to) is intetersting, but in the end it shows that placebo does not resolve people's sysmptoms (it doesn't actually make people get better), which is not surprising, since we know placebo does not actually have any curative powers! They were looking at placebo in disease state, and we know the basis of disease is almost never something can be wished away,even if you believe the placebo is working.
But whether or not the placebo effect actually alters people's perception is another matter, and not one that I'm convinced has been discredited. Some of my colleagues took this seriously and performed a brain imaging study and found that placebo actually changed the way people's brains perceive pain (they examined placebo analgesia) in those people subject to the placebo effect (report less pain with placebo). Namely, people show less activity in pain-related areas and more activity in "control" areas that may be overriding or dampening pain processing. Mind over experience.
nice try, but the Milgram studies have generally been thought to be unethical.
True, they do seem unethical in hindsight.
But they also revealed an absolutely amazing area of human psychology that we couldn't have discovered any other way - That our normal concept of "conscience" completely vanishes in the interaction between an authority figure and a subordinate.
Kinda funny that a lot of the most important findings in psychology (and medical science as well) count as "unethical" by today's standards.
Myself, I interpret that as the entire human race having turned into a culture of whiners. "Oh, boo-frickin' hoo, I feel bad about having thought-I-did-but-not-actually zapped that guy"... "Oh, I feel violated, I must now sue you because you said you would give me caffeine but you actually gave me a sugar pill".
At the risk of sounding like a Trekkie, sometimes the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. I say "sometimes" because you could use the same argument to justify torturing prisoners. When dealing with a minor inconvenience to the few, no problem. When "breaking" someone into saying whatever they think you want to hear, the criteria for "justifiable" become quite a lot more strict, if even possible to satisfy.
I won't argue with any of that. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that you are right.
Also, very sadly, there are certain advances in medicine that *might* not have happened as early as they did without the holocaust and Hitler's experiments on live humans. I don't think that we can safely say that they were worth it, however--and that is the crux of the problem.
Sometimes the good of the many does outweigh the good of the few. The trouble is, however, that it becomes difficult, on occasion, to tell where that line is. Thus was born the Ethics Committees and Review Boards who object to some very strange things at times, but generally do good work.
Are studies involving deception possible? Absolutely. Are they difficult to get approved? Yes, and with good reason.
You do bring up a good point, though. It does, occasionally, seem as though all the major discoveries happened because a researcher (at least in psychology, and to a lesser extent, medicine) was willing to do things to subjects that were more than a little questionable.
I would argue, however, that it simply requires more effort and ingenuity to set up an experiment to test the same thing without crossing that line. IIRC, the Milgram studies have been replicated to show that the effect exists, but in a more humane way.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Normarly they take a population and tell them they will be divided into groups;
1. one group get the test medication,
2. one group get the "old-stand-by" medication
3. one group gets an inert plecebo
the meds are packaged to look the same and have the same taste as much as possible. Everybody knows and consents to be treated with the test med, the old med, and the plecebo med with out their knowege of what they'll really be getting.
if the primary researcher knows what meds are given to who, it's called a single-blind experement because the patient is blind to what they are getting.
if the primary researcher doesn't know, as well as the patient, it's called double-blind. who got what is only revealed after the experiment is over.
There is usualy a mercy clause in the experiment where if it becomes obvious that one group is recieving irrefutable benefits from what they are taking, everybody gets it.
I saw an interesting program on tv about homeopathic remedies, essentialy even when sceptical and respected researchers conducted homeopathic experiments, even on cells in vitro, the homeopathic remadies worked in every single blind experiment. When the same researchers repeated the same experiments in the double-blind method, they always failed. The researcher's knowelege of experiment and control groups even effect the results obtained in cell cultures in test tubes, and analysed with automated test equipment, very strange results in deed.
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