Slashdot Mirror
(Yet) Another Year End List
gordonb writes "New Scientist has yet another of those endless end-of-year lists, "13 things that do not make sense", including such topics discussed on Slashdot this year as the placebo effect, dark energy, and the ever-popular cold fusion. I know there are a lot more than 13 things that don't make sense, such as free markets, but, oxymorons aside, this is an interesting list, nevertheless."
The placebo effect does work! A friend of the family is a hypochondriac (I used to be a BAD one), and always has the same cold or disease as someone else. I told her that the trick to fending off hypochondria is to gently tap the underside of her chin 5 times slowly and the symptoms will go away.
:)
Guess what? It worked. I just made it up but I told her I heard about it on a medical show. The power of the mind is amazing, but it has taught me how easily duped we humans are. I guess this means don't trust anyone until you know what their end desire is.
This is an interesting article, but it seems common for them to say that these unknown "problems" might all boil down to bad research -- and I believe that could likely be the answer for many. "Bad research" covers all science conundrums: either you misread the results, or previous bad research gave you an incorrect theory.
Problems solved
"Demon Haunted World"(well, techincally "Science as a Candle in the Darkness") which I am currently slogging through. He discusses a lot of there same "phenomenon" such as placebos and this, my personal favorite:
IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says
Actually, earlier than even the "WoW" signal(sometime in the 60s IIRC) a bunch of Soviet scientists convened a conference to discuss how they swore they found intelligent life because they found a long, continuous perfect sine wave somewhere out in space. Turns out it was a quasar, a hithero unkown phenomena, but the Soviets made laughing stocks out of themselves by assuming first it was aliens instead of a more mundane explanation...
Monstar L
Inflation actually solves several problems, at the expense of predicting an infinite number of unobservable phenomina (whole parallel universes with differing physical laws). By Occam's Razor, absolutely any alternate explanation to inflation is to be preferred - I can claim the Flying Spagetti Monster did it, right after He invented time travel, assisted by exactly 144,000 seraphim, whose names, in order of mightyness, start with Larry, Moe, and Curley Sue, and I've still proposed a theory that generates fewer unprovable hypothesi than an infinite number of undetectable "alternate' universes.
That's just for Guth's original work. Hawking tried to give some more backing to it, and had to postulate an unobservable second time dimension, an unobservable imaginary property to this second time axis, and as it turned out a way to apply a whole new form of math that involved rotation, ala trigonometry, without the negative quadrents existing to rotate through (since he dropped the negative half of the regular time axis fifty pages back). Even the totally mind boggleing concept of rotating vectors through dimensions that he had already rejected as non-existant didn't actually get rid of the infinite number of unobservable predictions problem, as Hawking finally acknowledged. Hawking was roundly criticized for treating imaginary in the mathematical sense as meaning imaginary in the common sense, and has since admitted he made both that and a few other mistakes in the papers behind "A Brief History of Time". If you know of someone who has done a better job, by all means, give a link, but all the ones I've seen seem to make the untestable predictions problem worse, not better.
That's precisely what's wild about inflation - it makes an infinite number of untestable predictions, and is still considered science for the testable ones. It does explain a few things very well (like homogeneity), so it's probably on the right track somewhere, but the real thory we need (IMNSHO) is going to explain why the universe looks superficially like the classic Big Bang model, deal with the ways the very early universe deviates from that classical model, fully (and not partially or selectively)include QM in the first few femtoseconds, and either prove that some physical constants are non-random, or show that they don't, at the least, have to be random and so don't have to spin off so many untestable predictions.
Who is John Cabal?
Bit more complicated than that -
Inflation could have been caused by a phase change in the Higgs field, but this is a necessary-not-sufficient part of the explanation for the observed features of the universe. Then one also has to find a reason for the phase change and why it happened to have the precise characteristics needed (there's some fine tuning of parameters required in order for what we see today to pop out the other end of this process).
Then there's of course the root question of whether the Higgs field itself exists, though a lot of the Standard Model would have to be junked in order for it not to exist.