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The Greatest Scientific Hoaxes?
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?
What massive scientific hoaxes/jokes have other people witnessed?
E-meter comes to mind.
My work here is dung.
Hilariously enough, it bit L. Ron Hubbard in the ass too:
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard met less fortunate timing, listing Piltdown Man as one of the ancestors of humanity in his book Scientology: A History of Man, and describing him as having "enormous" teeth and being "quite careless as to whom and what he bit." Piltdown Man would be exposed as a hoax just months after the publication of Hubbard's book.
I am not a historian but I find it hilarious that British, German and French scientists were rejecting claims of early human fossils in Indonesia or Africa on the grounds that their pride in being the origin of life. Instead they were pointing at anything and everything they could find on their own soil as the beginning of life. What made the Piltdown Man such a great hoax is that because of the mounting tension between European super powers leading up to World War I the British were grasping for anything to prove that humans originated in the UK (which, of course, is far from true). And here was this convenient find, an anomaly in the fossil record--but who cared? The British now had evidence of early humans on UK soil with large cranial regions (which they associated with intelligence). Prime minister, we must not allow an origins of our species gap!
All this stupid pride of who stood on the birthplace of humanity blinded so many intelligent people. If I recall correctly the Piltdown Man fragments were hilariously rudimentary painted lower jawbone of an orangutan combined with the skull of a fully developed, modern man. Let this be a lesson to anyone who lets emotions, national pride & religion get in the way of science.
My work here is dung.
But, then again, I guess its not actually science...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Odd that NS didn't mention the hoax that started the story, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 where it was revealed (incorrectly of course) that Sir Walter Herschel had found evidence of life on the moon.
My favorite wasn't really a hoax; it was a humorous science fiction story by Isaac Asimov who was a grad student studying biology when he wrote about thiotimoline, a substance that, when added to water, dissolves before it reaches the water.
Free Martian Whores!
This from Wikipedia -
"The myth of lemming mass suicide is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. In 1955, Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title "The Lemming with the Locket". This comic, which was inspired by a 1954 National Geographic article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs. Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness in which footage was shown that seems to show the mass suicide of lemmings. The film won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature."
I think this one deserves honorable mention at least!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
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.
proud caffeine whore
The fraudulent research showing that high dose chemo followed by marrow transplants was an effective treatment for breast cancer. It was an experimental procedure, so insurance companies wouldn't cover it. But this study showed it worked, and it got some play in the media, and Congress actually passed a law requiring that insurance companies cover it.
Then it turns out that the researchers left out negative results which, when compiled with the rest of the data, showed a slightly WORSE outcome for this procedure. It seems that the researchers believed that the procedure SHOULD work, and since it was so important to get insurance companies to cover it, they simply modified the data to get the results they wanted.
Of course, insurance companies stopped paying for it, and the procedure isn't used, and Congress has moved onto other things. But I still need to ask: how many women had months or years removed from their life because 2 "scientists" thought they knew better than the data?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Please someone tell me it's a hoax.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It was thought up by Charles Darwin and it goes something like this: In the beginning we were all fish, okay, swimming around in the water. And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different, so it got to live. So retard fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its... mutant fish hands, and it had butt-sex with a squirrel or something, and made this retard fish-squirrel, and then that had a retard baby which was a monkey-fish-frog, and then this monkey-fish-frog had butt-sex with that monkey; that monkey had a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey and that made you. So there you go. You're the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt-sex with a fish-squirrel!! Congratulations!
E-meter [wikipedia.org] comes to mind.
You mis-spelled Polygraph. Slightly more important, given that, unlike E-meters, polygraphs are used in criminal investigations and employment decisions (namely, government security services) and police and prosecutors often try to get the results admitted in court as evidence.
Remember Ashley Todd, who claimed she was mugged and had a "B" cut into her face by an imaginary black dude? Cops gave her a polygraph test, but refused to release the results. Hmm, like maybe a "she's telling the truth" result, that would very publicly demonstrate what a piece of useless crap polygraphs are?
Please help metamoderate.
I submit that Godel solved this a long time ago.
1) Nothing is more awesome than sex with women.
2) We can imagine sex with women. And frequently do.
3) If we can imagine sex with women, the only thing that would be more awesome would be actually having sex with women. For that, women would have to exist.
4) Since point 1 says that nothing is more awesome than sex with women, they must exist, that being the most awesome thing possible.
Who says my philosophy class was a waste of time? =)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Even National Geographic fell for it hook, line and sinker. LOL.
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.
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
Not fraud, because they truly believed what they saw and their publications supported it. And then it went far beyond the source.
Binaural Beat, or EEG "beat frequency" brain stimulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_frequency (see Binaural Beat section), as originated at The Monroe Institute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_institute (TMI).
In acoustics, two beats of nearly the same frequency interfere to produce a change in summed volume of a period equal to the difference between the two frequencies. At TMI, they found that if they played sine waves into each ear of a slightly different frequency, they could detect an increase in EEG power at the beat frequency. I was so taken with an article in OMNI on TMI that I saved it for over a decade until I started studying EEG research under Karl Pribram.
Once I started studying it, a glaring error came to mind. We had to put subjects in a Gaussian cage to shield them from stray signals from the heaters and pumps for the swimming pool elsewhere in the building our lab was at. These caused induced currents in the EEG. If that was necessary, how could they justify putting electromagenticially driven headphones on top an EEG cap?
To first pull things apart, I tested a single subject -- a styrofoam head (a wig stand) with EEG cap and headphones on it. I was able to show power increases at precisely the same frequencies as the beat signal. (I'd first suggested using a bowl of Jell-O. Karl suggested not to, since he'd found increases in alpha waves in a bowl of Jell-O when shaken. No, I don't know why. Neither did Karl. We just thought it was extremely cool.)
To make it more official, I helped teach some students at University of Virginia at Wise to run EEG research. Their EEG system could produce sound remotely in a closed box and transmit it via air conduction up long plastic tubes into the ears -- no electromagnets anywhere near the head. They ran it this was as well as the traditional Monroe way (headphones on top of EEG cap). In the each of the same subjects, the traditional method produced power increases at the beat frequency. With air conduction stimuli, no changes were observed.
My two greatest joys in science are having undergrads produce results presented at international conferences, and in bursting the bubbles of old farts in the field. This particular project resulted in both. Not only did TMI present several pieces of research as valid, but many other people used the same set up and got stuff published elsewhere. Go to PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez and put in "binaural beat" to get the relevant results (and some not relevant, but they're easy to tell apart).
Now, you'd think that once results are presented that show it's bogus, people would quit. Not so. We did the work on 2002. Check the dates on the PubMed results. Now, that's kind of fraudulent, but more a sign that there's way too many people publishing way too many things in way too many places to be able to keep track of everything. OTOH, our work isn't in PubMed because it was a conference presentation.
What is fraudulent is the many places that produce all sorts of new agey junk based on binaural beat, claiming there's scientific evidence, but not ever quoting any, whether the original well done but slightly fatally flawed TMI work, or any subsequent. Also fairly fraudulent by TMI and all the others is claims that specific frequency differences can be used to produce specific changes such as, oh hell, here's just a sampling from TMI: http://monroeinstitute.com/store/home.php
I try to go easy on the scientific community when it comes to possible fraud claims in this area. To their credit, there used to be many more people producing work in this field, including some at U. Va. itself. In fact some from U/
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I don't believe anything is impossible.
With the possible exception of skiing through a revolving door.
I've found that nurturing one's Zen nature is vital to dealing with technology. Violence is pretty damn useful too.