Science

The Nobel Prizes are announced in October each year. The scientific awards, starting with Medicine, begin tomorrow. Economics will be awarded a week from Monday, and the Peace prize on lucky Friday, October 13. None of the Chicago Boyz contributors have been nominated this year, so I feel free to make some predictions. France will probably not win its second Economics prize, since that discipline is so lightly regarded and little practiced there. Many of the prizes for actually discovering something will go to Americans, and the prizes for doing things that make Europeans feel good will go to anti-Americans (Rigoberta Menchu, Peace, 1992; Yasser Arafat, Peace, 1994; Harold Pinter, Literature, 2005). In his Nobel lecture, Pinter had the following helpful remarks to make, among others: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Perhaps his prize should have been in Medicine, for having discovered such widespread but unsuspected mental illness; perhaps he will spend some of his prize money on a subscription to the Guardian. That way he can check from time to time to see whether anyone has yet noticed that large, Engish-speaking evil empire.

But on to the good stuff. The real action will be in Cambridge MA, where the Improbable Research institute will begin awarding the Ig Nobel Prizes next week. Good seats are still available. In the interest of Bad Science, here are some random links to show that the mission of Improbable Research has not been accomplished. Long may they mock!

• The persistent belief that the Apollo moon landings were faked is proof that skepticism can be as foolish as credulity.
• The Flat Earth Society may have fallen on hard times, but the remaining few struggle nobly against the moon hoax and the pernicious Copernican doctrine.
• Others believe that the moon landings were real, but have a different explanation for how they were accomplished. The adjustment is necessary to account for the belief that there is no gravity in space. (See the other scientific myths at the site and vote for your favorite. Some of them turn out to be true.)
• UFOs, alas, are not related to anything outside our planet, according to recently-released archives of the British Ministry of Defence. This will no doubt convince no one.
• Try not to miss this site devoted to Bad Science. The guilty parties handing out erroneous information often turn out not to be hairy patchouli-intoxicated crystalmongers, but science teachers and textbook writers.
• The James Randi Educational Foundation goes after frauds of the occult with a glee that is almost painful to see. He is following in a distinguished tradition.

Have fun!

I ran across this and this today: yet another reason why everyone ought to be educated to competence in the basics of biology, physics and chemistry.

From the cited press release in the first link:

For the first time since Product Licences of Right were issued in 1971, companies will be allowed to include information about the treatment and relief of minor, self-limiting conditions based on the use of the product within the homeopathic tradition. For example, labels may indicate that a product may relieve the symptoms of common colds and coughs, hay fever or chilblains. All homeopathic medicines authorised under the new scheme will have clear and comprehensive patient information leaflets to help consumers use their medicines safely and effectively.

Professor Kent Woods, Chief Executive of the MHRA, said, �This is a significant step forward in the way homeopathic medicines are regulated. Products authorised under the National Rules Scheme will have to comply with recognised standards of quality, safety and patient information.�

The only patient information that ought to be included is: “This crap does not work. Do the math”. Sometimes I think that the entire UK is just slowly circling the drain.

When I was a graduate student working on a project involving colloids, I ran across some seriously strange alternative medicines based on “colloids“. I ran across the infinite dilution concept in homeopathy at the same time, and it came up again when I was doing the piece on Emoto, people who are inclined to believe that water has emotions are also inclined to believe that a medicine becomes stronger when diluted to Avogadran proportions. This, Ladies and Gents, leads me to my personal quote of the day, from Skepchik:

Would you sit in a bathtub someone just peed in? Would you swim in an ocean that someone just peed in? There�s a difference, and if you can�t tell that difference then you deserve to spend your life sitting in a tub of pee.

Discussion of Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed drew criticism from several bloggers here: Lex, Shannon, as well as a more positive take on his earlier Guns, Germs & Steel by Michael Hiteshew, who voices an appreciation shared by many of us who were more critical of this later, apocalyptic work.

A&L, that great aggregator, has linked to an article by Terry L. Hunt, Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island, that finds Diamond’s assumptions quite wrong. We are pleased when we see a scientist, in Arnold’s words, “turn back on himself” – not because we want their assumptions to be wrong but because we respect those who are willing to listen to what the evidence says, to approach their projects with sympathies but not closed minds. So, Hunt tells us:

When I first went to Rapa Nui to conduct archaeological research, I expected to help confirm this story. Instead, I found evidence that just didn’t fit the underlying timeline. As I looked more closely at data from earlier archaeological excavations and at some similar work on other Pacific islands, I realized that much of what was claimed about Rapa Nui’s prehistory was speculation. I am now convinced that self-induced environmental collapse simply does not explain the fall of the Rapanui.

(In American Scientist Online.

I fall somewhere in the middle of the camp that looks at the progress of science as a series of spikes precipitated by Great Men (and a few Great Women), and the camp that sees new discoveries as inevitable given the pressing questions of the day and the level of instrumentation available. Most of the time someone was going to discover or explain a given phenomenon anyway, and the horse race included some very smart also-rans who would have arrived at the same conclusions if the front runner were removed from the picture.

However, certain intellects can paint a coherent picture of Nature in a way that most mortals can’t, and when those intellects come along, study hard, and are allowed to apply themselves to what amounts to a metastable collection of old knowledge, the progress of science leaps much further ahead in a much shorter time than if a bunch of less motivated, mediocre intellects were slowly plugging away at the same problems. There are plenty of instances in history where a given civilization had all the tools and observations at hand to discover or explain something, and for some reason just didn’t. The Chinese should have invented and perfected cannons long before the West. They didn’t, and a lot of that has to do with the freeing of individual intellects caused by competition between European states, as opposed to the push to maintain the social and technological status quo in Imperial China.

Read more