13 Things That Do Not Make Sense 1013
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!"
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:5, Informative)
13 or so (Score:2, Informative)
Here is something else that does not make sense (or for which there is no standing theory): Tachyons [wikipedia.org], or particles that travel faster than the speed of light.
Belfast homeopathy study? (Score:4, Informative)
One million dollars [randi.org] says homeopathy is a placebo. Do you want to argue with it?
Re:Homeopathy. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And number 11.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:5, Informative)
"Pursuit of happiness", a reference to Locke's "pursuit of property", was a principle stated in the Declaration of Independence, a document that has no bearing on US law.
On cold fusion (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Assholes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Assholes (Score:5, Informative)
Why 'Nice guys' are such losers [heartless-bitches.com]
Depend on the test (Score:5, Informative)
In the case of homeopathy this NEVER depend on life, but since this is only sugar (for any dilution beyond Avogadro number) they do not need the labor trial and can be tested directly on double blind. Fact is, all study I know of in double blind , the group getting the drug and the group getting nothing did not show any statistical difference. In other word their body reacted as if they got nothing (which they did... Since beyond 20CH I think , you have no active molecule). In other word in double blind nobody has yet of today proved that homeopathy worked. Ever.
Now there are a serie of controversial experiment where ONE attempt to dilue some allergen substance, and then after enough dilution to ahve nothing of the alergen in the end liquid, attempt to make it react with Basophile (the so called bevenist experiment). Up until now all of those experiment yelding positive result where either downright fraud, or sloppy experimental design (forget to clean up, or bad dilution processes). And seriously I doubt any new results will change that. This would be a MAJOR news for all physiker (physicist?)...
Re:Homeopathy. (Score:2, Informative)
If the homeopathy study has any validity, it should have been replicated independently several times by now. Has it? (I don't know, I'm just askin'). I'm surprised that the article didn't comment on the importance of this.
FTFA:
The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine.
Re:Assholes (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.galaktek.com/cgi-bin/index?page=deffec [galaktek.com]
Re:Conflict of what?? (Score:3, Informative)
Point 1) Placebos have an effect, except when they don't, such as when a drug is replaced with another which counteracts the original's effects.
Point 4) A placebo controlled study showed that homeopathic remedies are effective.
It doesn't say that the studies in point 4 was "placebo controlled". It sounds more like the cells they were testing were in a pitri dish, not in a person. It does mention that no large-scale placebo-controlled study of homeopathic remedies has been shown to be effective.
Mind over biochemistry (Score:3, Informative)
Hey, my roommate in college claims that I have a THC gland.
-russ
Re:Assholes (Score:3, Informative)
BBC & James Randi & BBC & Dr. Ennis al (Score:5, Informative)
The results of a controlled, random, double-blind study were that the effect did not actually exist.
Here's the link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopa [bbc.co.uk]
I think what we are seeing here is a six month editorial lead time on articles in New Scientist (giving their research department the benefit of the doubt).
-- Terry
read closer.... (Score:3, Informative)
Point 4 showed that homeopathic remedies are effective in vitro, on specific human white blood cells.
No chance for the placebo effect to come into play.
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Alpha, Pioneer, Horiz (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Alpha, Pioneer, Horiz (Score:3, Informative)
Homeopathy test results (Score:5, Informative)
Not long ago (in 2002), there was a very good, very scientific test done by Horizon on the BBC using the very same technique.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2512105.stm [bbc.co.uk]
It seems that part of the problem in the Belfast findings may be due to the fact that the cells that had a reaction were manually counted, possibly introducting a bias known as "the experimenter effect", of which little is really known apart from the fact that it exists (a bit like the placebo effect).
There is little doubt that the experimenter acted in good faith, but the fact was that the very controlled experiment commissioned by the Horizon (involving the Royal Society and a number of specialists in various relevant fields) ended up showing a statistical no-greater-than-chance result.
Now, before you say "how can you trust a TV show", I'll say that Horizon is no ordinary TV show. It's probably the best, most balanced and scientific accurate show ever to grace the screen. Those who are lucky enough to be able to watch it will probably agree.
There is another large scale experiment being done at the moment on homeopathy, invoving both homeopaths, scientists and people like James Randi.
Randi predicted that the experiment will show no more than we already know today, that homeopathy is not worth much as a medical practice, but that most believer will be undeterred by any amount of evidence.
The real question to test a practitionner of alternative medecine is to ask: what would it take you to admit that it doesn't work?
For many, nothing will.
But it's worth investigating anyway, I'm ready to consider that there is some benefit to it if tangible, undisputable proof was found. It would certainly help to use homeopathy if its field of action -if there is any- was actually well known, and if it is doing better there than other types of medecine. http://www.homeowatch.org/ [homeowatch.org]
Problem with HTML (Score:3, Informative)
Or is it a problem in my browser? Are they doing something so that <UP> should be treated as a synonym for <SUP>, and Firefox isn't handling it right?
How does it display for other people?
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:5, Informative)
Re:2) The horizon problem - SOLVED! (Score:5, Informative)
* It invokes The "God of the Gaps" Argument.
This argument has the form:
* There is a gap in scientific knowledge.
* Therefore, the things in this gap are best explained as acts of God.
This is not based in logic. It is simply a statement of pessimism about the future progress of science.
Down through the centuries, science has eliminated a great many of its gaps. People who had used the Gap argument were embarrassed, since their God shrank in power with each new scientific advance. For example, after the work of Galileo and Newton, it was no longer thought that angels pushed the planets across the heavens.
Re:On cold fusion (Score:5, Informative)
In all I thought the committee's conclusions seemed reasonable, pragmatic, and scientific, without being strongly prejudiced for or against the "cold fusion" effect. However, in the media (such as this article) the final report has been painted with much broader strokes. I find that disturbing.
Slashdot covered the DOE report here [slashdot.org].
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial-OT (Score:4, Informative)
Methadone does come in an injectable form but the oral preparation is safer in terms of number of fatal overdoses
Methadone also doesn't give people the euphoria that heroin gives them.
Some people develope an addiction to heroin specifically becoause they get addicted to the euphoria, others develop their habit because they don't like the withdrawal effects. This second group tend to achieve maintenance and reduction of the chaos in their lives on methadone and once they have achieved the necessary psychological and social infrastructure necessary to withdraw then they can have their doseage reduced to zero. Those who seek the euphoric affect tend to use methadone to remove the withdrawl effects but continue to use illicit drugs on top of this in order to achive their high. This group may well be able to have their addiction controlled more successfully with injectable diamorphine (heroin). Various european countries are exploring this option and 2 pilot projects have been set up in the UK in order to research this very point. Once the results of these have been audited then policy as a whole will change. Almost all substance misusing people who approach drug dependency services do so with the aim of coming off drugs but it has to be done in a safe and controlled manner to attempt to try and put mechanisms in place for them to address the reasons why they became addicted in the first place.
Re:lasers faster and slower than light speed. (Score:1, Informative)
However, I have taken some more advanced undergraduate courses in electromagnetics and optics. Caveat emptor, so hopefully, this doesn't come off as being too condescending, and is, in fact, more or less accurate
First off, it's necessary to understand the difference between group velocity [wikipedia.org] and phase velocity [wikipedia.org]. Basically, a pulse of light can be thought of as a sum of many perfect sinusoids, each of which travels through space with a particular phase velocity. The superposition (sum) of all of these waves appears to travel with the group velocity (note that in almost all media save for vacuum, the phase velocities are not equal and so distortion of the wave packet, the shape of the pulse, takes place as the pulse propagates). Got it? Good.
For the easy problem: slowing the speed of light is nothing new (though the degree to which they managed to slow light down is quite impressive!) The index of refraction [wikipedia.org] is the ratio of the phase velocity in a medium to the phase velocity in a vacuum. As a very simplistic explanation, this difference is due to the delaying of light when a photon hits an electron, is absorbed, and gets released some infinitesimal amount of time later. Almost all materials have indices of refraction greater than 1 for all wavelengths of light. For those that don't, e.g. x-rays in certain crystals driven at frequencies near their resonance, phase velocities are greater than the speed of light, but the fact that they cannot be modulated implies that Relativity remains safe since no INFORMATION is travelling faster than the speed of light. As a neato application of the slowing of light, optical delay lines for fiber optics currently consist of diverting signals into spools of optical fiber, where they're held until signals can become resynchronized. Work is currently being done in using these really high n materials to create optical delays.
As for the slightly harder problem of the laser pulse apparently travelling faster than the speed of light... When the researchers sent the pulse of light into the medium, this pulse consisted of the multiple sinusoidal waves mentioned above. These sinusoids cancel out at the front of the pulse and towards the end of the pulse, and produce the pulse (typically a Gaussian [wolfram.com]) in the middle. Remember what I said about the index of refraction being the ratio of phase velocities to vacuum phase velocities? Some of the sinusoids will travel faster than others, with the result that the sinusoids at the beginning of the pulse that previously cancelled out no longer do so, and so the group velocity appears to be faster than the speed of light. If you were to physically block the laser until just a few moments before the pulse of light was generated, and then detected the pulse a little down the road, you'd find that the maximum speed (the distance from laser to receiver divided by the time from unblocking to receiving the pulse) would be the speed of light. Once again, information does not travel faster than the speed of light (though the group velocity appeared to do so).
So old theory, though it's really cool to see it applied. You'll also note that both of these experiments made use of a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) [wikipedia.org] which is a really hard to prepare state of matter in which quantum effects are readily observable. A lot of really cool (no pun intended) physics is being/will be done involving BECs.
Re:The Placebo effect is controversial (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:4, Informative)
Usually, the claimed effect by drug warriors is "psychosis" or "psychotic symptoms". This sounds terrible at first and has fueled many a hysterical rant at the podium. It is further bolstered by the common drug warrior association of marijuana use with onset of latent schizophrenia (no cause and effect has been established here, though a correlation is always good enough for drug warrior usage). As for the psychosis claim, the evidence quoted is one of two studies, one done in the UK and one in NZ. Unfortunately, neither of these studies can be fact checked by the layman, since they are published in journals to which access is restricted to professionals in the field. However, both of them have been refuted when someone knowledgeable about cannabis eventually gained access to the studies.
The problem is that the studies used questionnaires to collect their data, instead of relying on diagnoses of psychosis by medical professionals. I can't recall the exact questions that were asked (and a link is eluding me at the moment), but some stick out in my mind:
- Do you feel like you and society do not have much in common?
- Do you sometimes feel like you are being persecuted?
Point being, the questions were loaded, and anyone who has used cannabis would recognize the "psychotic symptoms" indicated as normal effects of cannabis use.Of course, these "scientists" were likely well paid for their work. Again, all a drug warrior needs is a vague association to continue to push their propaganda. If they are ever called out on it, they can innocently claim they were misinformed rather than that they were lying. Of course what they would like you to ignore is that they used your money to pay for vacuous studies specifically crafted to support their lies.
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Re:Homeopathy counter example to disprove result (Score:1, Informative)
Hopeopathy isn't merely dilution. It is dilution in a series of unusual steps. A glass of water isn't similar to a homeopathic dilution in any way.
I once knew a highly trained medical doctor who used homeopathy. He said it shouldn't work, yet it seems to, and nobody seems to know which of the cargo cult steps in the production of a remedy were the important ones.
Re:Homeopathy test results (Score:2, Informative)
Randi doesn't try to convince you to believe in what he says: either his observations are right and accurate or they aren't.
Randi, as a stage magician, is able to see where there could be potential issues in an experiment where the state of mind of the experimenter could influence the outcome of what he is researching.
You need a good grasp of human psychology to be able to detach yourself from those very human flaws (at least as far as scientific enquiry goes).
Guys like Randi may not always be liked as they are more artists than scientists themselves, but science is intrinsically unable to deal with deception as trust in your fellow scientists and your human subjects is paramount to the scientific endeavour.
Having people like Randi around is actually very beneficial to science as they can point out those pesky human flaws that can jeopardize any good experiment.
Whether you like him or not is irrelevant: he's helping real scientists devise real experiments that have reliable and replicable results.
His actions in that field of human enquiry speak for themselves.
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:2, Informative)
Re:When observation matches up with theory... (Score:3, Informative)
Giordano Bruno (1600)
Lucilio Vanini (1619)
And that's in the first page of "Scientists Burned at stake" search on Google.
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:3, Informative)
Methadone was discovered in Germany in 1937, but it was during a search for a more effective surgical analgesic, not as some Nazi-inspired plan. Believe it or not, even in Nazi-controlled Germany, there were good people doing things for good reason.
Re:Methane on Mars (Score:4, Informative)
If by "Hydrocarbons" you mean long (>3 carbons) chains of C and H then the answer is that they are exceedingly rare. However, methane (one carbon) is relatively common in the atmospheres of the outer planets (and the moon Titan). Hydrogen, by itself, is the most abundant element in the universe, and carbon is also quite common (it's a product of stellar fusion). But you rarely if ever find conditions where the two will bind together in long chains.
The theory of an "abiotic" origin of oil is pretty shaky, to the point of being wrong. It came from two observations: 1) loud bangs heard off the east coast of the U.S. which somehow led to the idea that it was caused by methane seeps (it was the Concorde. I kid you not!) 2) The observation that most hydrocarbons associated with life (things like ear wax and various fats) are made up of odd numbers of carbon, while oil has equal abundances of even and odd-numbered chains.
There several lines of evidence against the abiotic theory: 1) we understand how temperature and time can change the odd/even ratio in hydrocarbons, 2) people tried drilling for "deep oil" (look up "Siljan" in Sweden) and found nothing. 3) various other isotopic abundace ratios are consistent with life.
For a really excellent discussion of where oil comes from (including a dicussion of the abiotic hypothesis), read "Hubberts Peak" by Kenneth S. Deffeyes.
As for methane and life on Mars; things are still too uncertain to know. There are ways to explain small amounts of methane without life. It's harder to explain more short-lived species like formaldehyde and (I believe) methanol. Stay tuned on that one...
Re:When observation matches up with theory... (Score:4, Informative)
Medieval intellectuals were not stupid, they just started from some faulty premises. Try reading Aquinas some time. Its not easy stuff. And they did not freely ignore obvious physical phenomena, as can be seen by the complexity of some of the Ptolemaic models of the solar system.
Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial (Score:3, Informative)
But back to the matter at hand, the idea that smoking pot will make you a safer driver is a crock of shit. While it may make a person "more careful", it will most definitely cut down on reaction time [druglibrary.org] and lower cognitive ability [drugabuse.gov], even days later.
The Robbe Study [druglibrary.org] is often cited as proof that marijuana makes drivers safer, but it doesn't show what some pot smokers think it does. The Robbe study concluded that impairment from THC was less than alcohol or not greater than medicinal drugs. Somehow, "not greater than" becomes "safer than" becomes "safe, no impairment".
Re:From the center? (Score:2, Informative)
Nothing. We're in the centre of the visible universe. We're in the centre of what we can see, because we can see equally far in all directions. (This is pretty trivial, and is not one of the problems on the list.)
Re:When observation matches up with theory... (Score:2, Informative)
[S]omeone observing something is NOT science. They have to test the observation against a theory, write about how it did or didn't, and be published. THAT is science.
From what I have been able to find about Bruno and Vanini, neither would qualify as scientists under that definition. Again, take Bruno's contention of an infinite number of inhabited worlds. What observation could he be have been testing, and against what theory, which would have yielded that conclusion?
One possibility is:
Of the above premises, only 1 through 3 are what we would call observations. All the rest of the premises were for Bruno pure speculation (some of which subsequent observation has disproven).
Perhaps another account of Bruno's thought can be reconstructed that fits your definition of science, but I feel his work is much more speculative/philosophical than "scientific" on your definition.
Had [Galileo] not recanted, he would have been executed for publishing a theory that the sun was the center of the solar system....
Um, no. At least, not according to this [rice.edu]:
On this account, Galileo did not recant Copernican ideas, and all he got for it was house arrest.
Re:13 Things that don't make sense (Score:3, Informative)
Congress has subpoenaed her to appear, simply meaning that they can't kill her (no law has been passed).
removing the woman's feeding tube and letting her die in peace
I don't think dying from starvation and/or dehydration would be considered 'in peace' by most people.
according to her doctors, she's in an irrecoverable coma
Well, it depends on which doctors you're talking about. Most say she's in a 'persistent vegetative state,' although most neurologists would say that you shouldn't do such a diagnosis without ever having done an MRI or a PET scan (CT/CAT scans were done over a decade ago, but they aren't good for this kind of brain injury). Besides, the fact that she can respond to stimuli proves that she's not in a persistent vegetative state.
Oh, and she's not on life support. She's disabled to the point where she can't swallow, but they haven't tried therapies that may help - her husband won't pay for them. She can respond somewhat, and she has responded negatively when asked if she wants her feeding tube removed. The state courts in Florida are intent on helping her husband to kill her.
Homeopathy (item 4) proven BS once and for all (Score:2, Informative)
Ulrik