Mesozoic marine reptiles

Jules Verne

In 1867, Jules Verne published his famous novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, whose protagonists discover an underground ocean at great depth, which they baptize as the Liddenbrock Sea, and witness the fight to the death of two great marine animals: a plesiosaur and an ichthyosaur, supposed descendants of ancestors that sank with the Liddenbrock Sea a hundred million years before and survived down there, protected by the Earth's crust, while their surface congeners became extinct as a result of the impact of the meteorite or comet that put an end to most dinosaurs, although that was not known in Verne’s time. But what were those plesiosaurs and those ichthyosaurs that populated the seas during the Mesozoic, formerly called the Secondary Era?

At the dawn of the age of dinosaurs, the oceans of the Earth were joined in a single sea, Panthalassa, which surrounded the supercontinent Pangaea. In that global ocean, at the beginning of the Triassic period, ichthyosaurs appeared. Since the Jurassic, and during the rest of the Mesozoic, Pangaea gradually fragmented, giving rise to new seas.

The Clock in Strasbourg Cathedral

Clock of Strasbourg Cathedral

One of the most surprising instruments used to measure time is the clock of Strasbourg Cathedral, which contains a mechanical computer, a marvel made up of gears and cogwheels, a pinnacle of the instrumentation of that time, which could be considered comparable to Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, except that it is not a programmable computing device, but a computing machine built for the specific purpose of calculating time. More details can be found in this article in the journal The Sciences of the New York Academy of Sciences.

The clock is inside the building, rather than at a tower, like those of many other cathedrals. It has a long history, as it dates back since the 14th century, although it was completely rebuilt in the 16th. By the end of the 18th century it stopped working. Legend says that, at the beginning of the 19th century, an orderly who was showing the cathedral to a group of visitors mentioned that the clock had not been working for a long time. Then a boy who was part of the group exclaimed: I will fix it! Forty years later, he did. That child would have been Jean-Baptiste Schwilgué, who remodeled the clock around 1840.

The enigma of the natural order

In 2019 a book I wrote was published and distributed with the Spanish newspaper El País in a collection dedicated to the popularization of mathematics. The translation into English of my book title is Everything is Number: Is Reality Mathematical?

I addressed the problem of whether mathematical ideas correspond to an external reality, or if on the contrary they are arbitrary and vary with our current mentality. In other words, the question is whether mathematics is discovered, or invented. In one of the posts in this blog I dealt with this issue in relation to the real existence (or not) of the digits of number π (pi).

In the last chapter of that book I addressed a related issue: whether scientific theories, especially those proposed by physicists, are true (in the sense that they represent an underlying reality independent of us), or if are they mental or social constructs unrelated to a reality that could be unknowable (such as Kant's noumena) or even non-existent. I suppose my readers won't be surprised if I say that my personal position is clearly realistic, as is that of many physicists, while supporters of the anti-realist hypothesis tend to be predominantly philosophers.

Striking Errors in Scientific Research

Venus. Image taken
by Mariner 10

Errors are not rare in scientific research. Since man is doing science (i.e. since man is man), errors have been made. Science often progresses by trial and error, which means that something is tried, found to be wrong, and then something else is tried. From that point of view, making mistakes and verifying that they are errors is one of the typical procedures of the scientific method, so no one should be criticized for using it.

The problem is, in late times the way to publish the results of an observation or an experiment has changed. Up to now, a well-founded article was written, criticized by a number of scientists in the field, and published in a magazine, which disseminated the finding. This is still being done today, but mass media are often used, before or after the article is published, to spread the "discovery" much more quickly and to many more people. If we take into account that the knowledge about science in mass media is usually ridiculously small, the news is often accompanied by misleading headlines (and sometimes misleading texts), as I have denounced in previous posts in this blog.

Since the dissemination of scientific discoveries is done in this way, the general public frequently finds out about the supposed "discovery", but not about its refutation, because this has not the same appeal and the media don't usually publish it. For this reason, the supposed "discoveries" can be engraved in the people's mind, and it's very difficult to eradicate them.

Let's look at a few examples of striking mistakes made in scientific research:

•         The discovery of polywater: in the late 1960s, some Soviet chemists claimed to have discovered a new form of polymerized liquid water, which would arise spontaneously when normal water passes through very narrow capillaries. At that time, the media did not spread it much. For example, the Spanish major newspaper La Vanguardia just published an article on October 21, 1969, saying this:

The surprise has now come from water, as it seems that there exists a polywater. That such a simple liquid, so familiar to us, which has been studied a lot, can still give us surprises, will seem strange to some.

Another piece of news, published on March 26, 1972, is a review of a lecture given by Luis Miravitlles, where he was already suspicious about the existence of polywater:

Despite the many results obtained to date... it is still impossible to decide whether polywater is a true polymer or an artifact produced by conditions in the preparation.

The second alternative turned out to be true. Experiments carried out around the world showed that the properties of polywater were a consequence of the presence of impurities in ordinary water. But La Vanguardia did not publish another article on the subject, so the final refutation did not receive the same diffusion as the original news.

•         The discovery of cold fusion: 20 years after polywater, this new "discovery" received much more attention by the media. In the archive of La Vanguardia, for instance, there are dozens of news items related to this, the first of which was published on April 13, 1989. This was due to the fact that, for the first time in the history of science, a "scientific discovery" was disseminated through a press conference before being published in a scientific magazine. And since, from the beginning, most physicists considered the "discovery" impossible, the media echoed them, so just a year later it was considered a failure by almost everyone.

Thalidomide molecule.
A scientific mistake
with awful consequences

Let's look at a few recent cases, which not so long ago made big headlines and then faded away:

•         A bacterium uses arsenic rather than phosphorous in its DNA: Announced with fanfare by NASA in December 2010, this "discovery" was removed from the scientific heritage less than two years later.

•         Neutrinos faster than light. The news came out in 2011, but it was soon refuted by the discoverers themselves, who found a loose cable that had broken synchronism between the starting point and the arrival point of the neutrinos.

•   Gravitational waves in the cosmic background radiation. Announced in 2014, the "discovery" of those waves was supposed to confirm the inflationary theory of the early universe. (Some media incorrectly spoke of a confirmation of the existence of the multiverse). In less than a month it was found that the effect detected had been produced by the dust of our own galaxy. It is still unobserved in the background radiation.

•         Presence of phosphane in the atmosphere of Venus, news of 2020, which could be considered as an indication of the possible existence of microscopic life. Subsequent analyzes have not confirmed the presence of phosphane.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread about Science in General: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Is there a tree of life?

Tree of life

Many biologists would not hesitate to answer this question in the affirmative. However, in these lines I am going to raise the possibility that the answer should be negative. Let us see why.

First of all, what is a tree? When we use this term, talking about the tree of life, we don’t mean a biological tree, i.e. a plant with a woody trunk that grows to a height of several (or many) meters. We mean a mathematical tree. But what is that?

Atheism, theism and science

Today, the world’s population is divided between two competing, irreconcilable systems: atheism and theism. They are irreconcilable, because they start from opposite fundamental axioms (God does not exist and God exists). The approximate distribution of the population is this:

• About 10% convinced atheists, willing to defend their ideas.
• 10-20% convinced theists, who try to live according to their beliefs.
• 10% agnostics, who in theory don’t accept either of the two axioms, although in practice they tend to approach one of the two opposite poles.
• 60-70% indifferent, either because they don’t care about the debate; or because they live as if God does not exist, without considering whether He exists; or because they have beliefs, but don’t let them affect their way of life.

Scientific predictions for 2020

Arthur C. Clarke

It is well known that future forecasts are all the more risky the further in time they go. Readers of my blog know that I love keeping scientific forecasts to use in the future, so as to check them when the corresponding dates arrive. Sometimes I have waited for half a century to perform these checks, which in general prove that the forecasts tend to be unsuccessful, generally due to too much optimism, although sometimes they are correct. In this previous post, I checked some of the predictions made by such distinguished popularizers as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

The three predictions I’m going to check today were made for the year 2020, with less time to go: 25 years in the first, just 10 years or a little above in the other two. Let’s look at them:

What does mathematics say about time travel?

On September 21st, an article on time travel by Germain Tobar and Fabio Costa was published in the scientific magazine Classical and Quantum Gravity. This article has been given considerable coverage by the mass media. The article argues that time travel would be possible if certain mathematical restrictions were fulfilled that would eliminate the paradoxes. In a previous post in this blog I explain those paradoxes and their different types.

In relation to this we must distinguish two different things:

1. What the article actually says: it only mentions the grandfather paradox (the time traveler who returns to the past to kill his grandfather as a child, which would make his own existence impossible), and specifies a mathematical equation that supposedly prevents it, without making the traveler's freedom of action totally impossible. The equation is this:

Illusion or ignorance?

Every civilization is blind to some things, while others are seen more clearly. This has the consequence that there are problems that a civilization strives to solve, although it is possible to show that they have no solution. This happened, for example, to the Greco-Roman civilization with the problem of squaring the circle with ruler and compass. It fell to the next civilization (ours) to show that it cannot be solved.

On the other hand, we have an evident tendency to deny the existence of what we don’t understand. This is happening to our civilization with two concepts with which we’ve got stuck, that we insist on explaining (away), but don’t have an obvious solution: the flow of time and human self-consciousness. In both cases, many thinkers of the last two centuries have said that both concepts are illusions; that they don’t really exist. Let’s look at it in more detail:

Chesterton speaks to us today

G.K. Chesterton

I don’t need to introduce Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Everybody knows him. Or everybody should know him. Everyone has read him. Or everyone should read him. Chesterton is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, but sometimes he seems to speak for the 21st. To prove it, I have chosen some of his quotes. A few are well known, others less so. Let Chesterton speak for himself:

“Progress” is a useless word; for progress takes for granted an already defined direction; and it is exactly about the direction that we disagree. (The works of Charles Dickens, ch. 8, 1911)

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected. (The blunders of our parties, Illustrated London News, 1924)

We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press. (Orthodoxy, chapter 7, 1908)

If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence. (What's Wrong With The World, part 1, ch. 3, 1910)

The tragedy of the modern woman is not that she is not allowed to follow man, but that she follows him far too slavishly. (The Victorian Era in Literature, ch. 2, 1913)

It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. (Orthodoxy, ch.3, 1908)

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. (Heretics, ch. 20, 1905)

Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. (What's Wrong With the World, part 4, ch.6, 1910). See my post Plans, forecasts and estimations in this blog for E.F. Schumacher’s view on this question.

The old parental authority [will be replaced] by the far more sweeping and destructive authority of the State. (Illustrated London News, 24 Nov. 1928)

Many a school boasts of having the last ideas on education, when it has not even the first idea. (What's Wrong With the World, part 4, ch. 6, 1910)

If individuals have any hope of protecting their freedom, they must protect their family life. (The well & the shallows, "St. Thomas More", 1935)

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it. (A Short History of England, ch. 10, 1917)

Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern. (Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays, The New Name, 1917)

As this is a popular science blog, I will add a few more quotes, somewhat related to science:

Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution. (The Everlasting man, Part 1, ch. 1, 1925). See my post Is man just an animal? in this blog.

It is absurd to say that you are advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. (Orthodoxy, ch. 7, 1908). See my post On intelligence in this blog.

There had begun that easy automatic habit, of science as an oiled and smooth-running machine, that habit of treating things as obviously unquestionable, when, indeed, they are obviously questionable. (The Victorian Era in Literature, ch. 4, 1913) See my post What’s a scientific theory in this blog.

Suppose something of the type of... contraception really stalks through the modern State, leading the march of human progress through abortion to infanticide... One of the chief features of the state of Peace we now enjoy is the killing of a considerable number of harmless human beings. (The well & the shallows, "Where is the paradox" and “Killing the nerve”, 1935) See my post This is what science says about human life in this blog.

Frank Sheed said this about Chesterton:

When a man is as right as that in his forecasts, there is some reason to think he may be right in his premises.

A fully scientific conclusion.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Politics and Economy: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

A few more things about dietetics

In a previous post I questioned that dietetics is a science, because it seems to follow quite often what can be considered alternatives of fashion, and I gave some examples. In this article I’m going to add a few more, along with a general consideration.

• The expiration date of yogurts. A few years ago, there were several books published and speeches made, asserting that yogurt should never be eaten just one day after its expiration date. Of course, no expired food should ever be used to help poor people. However, any quality expert knows that expiration dates always include a safety margin that can sometimes be quite long (days, weeks, or even months). Therefore, some kinds of very recently expired food are probably within that safety margin and can be eaten without problems. Not to mention the fact that there are products (such as yogurts) that don’t need an expiration date, as their substance is not spoiled, even though it may lose nutritional or flavor properties. This is why lately, in this type of products, there is no longer talk of an expiration date, but of a preferred consumption date.

Timeline

Poster of the film based on Timeline

In 1999, Michael Crichton published his novel Timeline, a typical science fiction novel about time travel, whose plot can be summarized as follows:

A research company has developed a procedure to travel into the past. Using it, they sent to 14th century France, in the midst of the 100 Years War, a history professor who is conducting archaeological studies in ruins near the medieval fortress of La Roque. His collaborators, who do not know what is happening, find among the ruins a call for help from the professor, which when subjected to carbon-14 dating turns out to come from the 14th century. Picked up by the company that sponsors their studies, they are sent into the past to save the professor, who cannot return on his own.

In another post in this blog, I discussed the paradoxes that can be caused by traveling into the past, and various procedures invented by scientists and writers to escape them. In the novel, Crichton mentions two:

Equality or absurdity?

Read in Science News, issue of September 26 2020:

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin. Carolus Linnaeus. Gregor Mendel. They’re all men. They’re all white. And their names appear in every biology book included in a recent analysis of college textbooks. According to the survey, mentions of white men still dominate biology textbooks despite growing recognition of the scientific contributions of women and people of color.

The good news, the researchers say: Scientists in textbooks are getting more diverse. The bad news: If diversification continues at its current pace, it will take another 500 years for mentions of Black scientists to accurately reflect the number of Black college biology students.

This article is one more example of the tyranny of political correctness and the degree of madness or folly in our society. That a serious high-profile magazine like Science News also makes these blunders shows that the situation is rapidly degenerating. So fast, that it is possible that I may well see the total collapse of our civilization, which I believed would take place long after my death.

A Singular Universe

Javier Sánchez Cañizares is one of the contributors to the book Preguntas sobre Ciencia y Fe, published in 2014 and republished this year. In 2020, Javier has published a book in Spanish with the same title as this post, which can be considered as a book on philosophy of science at a high level of popularization. The goal of the book is to show that materialistic reductionism has no chance of providing a correct complete explanation, as our universe is singular because of several different reasons:

Are we on our way to Soylent Green?

In 1973, the American film director Richard Fleischer released the film Soylent Green, based on the 1966 science-fiction novel Make room! Make room! written by Harry Harrison, although there are quite a few differences between the book and its film adaptation. This dystopian film describes a future society (it’s supposed to happen in the year 2022, i.e. just now) where there is a very serious problem of overpopulation (New York alone is inhabited by 40 million people), which leads to a huge food shortage.

The Soylent Company, which appears in the film's title, centralizes the production of food obtained from concentrated vegetables, and markets them under names that depend on their color: Soylent yellow, Soylent red and Soylent green. Every time this last product is put up for sale, there is an avalanche of buyers, many of whom cannot acquire it, because stocks are quickly depleted.

The protagonist of the film (represented by Charlton Heston) is a New York City policeman who lives with his assistant, an older ex-professor (Edward G. Robinson), who investigates the murder of one of the top managers of the Soylent Company and discovers that the Soylent green product is made by recycling meat from human corpses. To prove to his friend that what he says is true, he submits to voluntary euthanasia and orders him to follow his corpse. Thus the protagonist discovers that all the corpses are transferred to the Soylent company facilities, where they are converted into Soylent Green. But when Heston tries to make public his macabre discovery, he is attacked and badly wounded, while the public ignores his warnings.

Mind and Cosmos

Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel, philosopher, professor at New York University and specialized in the philosophy of mind, has published a book (Mind and Cosmos) where he summarizes his argumentation against materialist reductionism, dominant in philosophy since the mid-nineteenth century. I have read the book in a Spanish translation made by the Seville professor Francisco Rodríguez Valls, with whom I have collaborated more than once.

The book provides strong arguments in support of the claim that materialistic reductionism cannot explain conscience, reason, and other mental elements without explaining them away. But since conscience and reason are the dominant elements of our worldview, the conclusion we should arrive at is that materialistic reductionism must be false.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

He who knows, and knows that he knows, is wise. Follow him.

He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep. Wake him.

He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is ignorant. Teach him.

He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. Shun him.

This anonymous text is well known. It is generally presented as an Arab or Persian proverb, sometimes as a Chinese proverb, and is even mistakenly attributed to Confucius, as what is written in Analects 17:3 is different. The Dunning-Kruger effect, which refers to a study published in 1999 by these two authors in a journal of the American Psychological Association, could be considered as an experimental study on the first and last lines of the proverb.

To identify the effect that bears their name, Dunning and Kruger conducted and analyzed, with psychology students, a set of tests related to intellectual and social activities in fields such as humor, grammar and logic. They then asked the participants to self-evaluate, by answering the following three questions:

The problem of no best world

The Auschwitz concentration camp

In 1993, William Rowe proposed an atheistic philosophical argument to prove that God does not exist. Although based on the problem of evil (like so many other atheistic arguments), it takes a somewhat different turn. For this reason it has been given a name, as in the title of this post. The argument can be summed up like this:

If God exists and has created the universe, he must have created the best of all possible worlds, from the moral point of view. But given a universe, it is always possible to devise a better world, which means that the best of all possible worlds does not exist. Furthermore, our universe contains a lot of evil and is far from being one of the best. Therefore God does not exist.

It is curious that, in response to this argument, some philosophers who are believers (such as Klaas Kraay and others) have tried to refute it using the theories of the multiverse, which were originally devised by atheistic thinkers to deal with the fine-tuning problem. According to these philosophers, the problem of no best world would be solved if God had created, not a universe, but a multiverse containing all the best possible worlds, perhaps in an infinite number. I don’t think this attempt has much future. It is easy to foresee that the same argument that applies to the universe can also be applied to the multiverse, so the problem would not have been solved, it would only have been moved to a higher level.

In my opinion, the problem of no best world is poorly posed, because (as is usual with atheistic arguments) it contains a logical fallacy: the straw man; and forgets a very important question: original sin. Let's look first at the straw man fallacy, which in this case should perhaps be called the straw god fallacy. What kind of god does Rowe's problem envision?

Rowe's god is not free. If he creates, he must create the best of all possible worlds. This god is totally determined by human reason.

Materialistic atheism is so obsessed with saving determinism that when they try to formulate an idea about God, in whom they don't believe, they can't escape their obsession and imagine him as a deterministic god, unable to act freely. But is that the God of the Christians?

The God of Christianity is completely different. The main thing is that He is love, as said in the first letter of John, which implies that he is free, that he is not determined, for love without freedom has no meaning. The god Rowe envisions in his problem of no best world is not our God. If he proves that that god does not exist, we agree. In fact, Rowe's god closely approximates the god of philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Christian philosophy concluded long ago that this god is not our God, although this approach may have provided in its time a rational approximation to monotheism.

The second difficulty with Rowe's argument is more subtle. How can we compare worlds, to find whether one is better than another? There must be some criterion. Rowe seems to think that this criterion is given by the amount of moral evil in each world. But this criterion is very dangerous. It could lead us to the conclusion that the best of all possible worlds is one where life does not exist, an empty universe, with no moral evil at all. What could move God to create such universe?

In fact, if things are pushed to the extreme in this way, it could be argued that the best of all possible worlds is the world that does not exist. If God is a Perfect Being, God alone is more perfect than God plus a created universe that by definition must be imperfect.

Mark Twain

If God wanted to create a universe, it seems logical to think that He would choose one similar to ours, where intelligent beings can exist, image of God, capable of loving and being loved. Those intelligent beings should be free, because what interest could God have in creating a universe of automata? Once this is admitted, it is inevitable that any created universe that we can imagine will contain moral evil, for a free being can decide to do evil rather than good. That is what I meant when I said that in posing his problem Rowe has forgotten original sin. If we consider what I have said, God is not to blame for the moral evil in the universe, as implicitly implied by Rowe: we are. As usual, Rowe is looking for a scapegoat, and as usual, he finds it in God, according to Mark Twain's famous phrase:

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is Providence. (Notebook, 1898).

In fact, the problem of no best world is ill-posed, since it is impossible to compare different imaginary worlds and classify them according to the moral evil they contain, if that evil comes from the freedom of created individuals, as an inescapable consequence of the fact of they are free. That is why I don’t think it appropriate to try to solve a problem that does not really exist, by resorting to multiverse theories that have probably nothing to do with reality.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Science and Atheism: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Badly designed polls and surveys

A social network specialized in young people performed a few years ago a poll among its members to find out their habits of connection. By the way they asked a few questions to check their knowledge:

·         Do you know how much is a gigabyte of data? 63% answered yes.

·         Do you know how many photos fit in one gigabyte? It should be understood that the question refers to photos taken with a mobile phone, for otherwise the question does not make sense, as the answer depends on the dimensions and resolution of the photos. The authors of the poll assumed that a typical photo takes 70 kilobytes, which means that 14,900 of these photos would fit in a gigabyte (1,048,576 kilobytes). The correct answer they expected was “around 10,000.” (The other options offered were “around 5,000” “around 2,500” and “around 1,000”). Only 10% of those who took the poll gave the expected answer.

·         Do you know how many YouTube videos fit in a gigabyte? This question is clearly absurd, since the answer depends on the size of a YouTube video, which depends on its duration. The researchers estimated that an average YouTube video contains between 1.5 and 3 megabytes, so they expected “around 500” as the correct answer. (The other options were “around 200” “around 100” and “around 50”). Only 7% of respondents gave the expected answer.

From the previous answers, the pollsters concluded that young people do not know the size of a gigabyte of data, although they think they do. Apart from the fact that the survey is poorly designed, as the questions are ambiguous, to understand the results we need to know the answer to the following question:

·         Were the respondents told that a typical photo in the second question takes 70 kB, and that a typical video in the third question take about 2 MB? If they weren’t told, they were not given enough information to answer the questions, and the conclusion of the survey should be: young people don’t know the size of a typical photo or an average YouTube video. If they were given that information, the conclusion should be completely different: young people don’t know how to divide. In both cases, the conclusion drawn by the pollsters is wrong.

In fact, the correct response to such poorly designed questions should have been: I don't know. But today almost nobody gives that answer, because most of us believe that we know everything.


Thematic Thread on Statistics: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Scientific facts, historical facts

The possibility of repeating an experiment is one of the fundamental principles of the scientific method. No discovery is considered final until it has been confirmed by an independent team or researcher. If this happens, it becomes part of the scientific heritage. It follows, therefore, that a fact can only be considered scientific if it can be reproduced.

Historical facts are treated in a very different way. Documents describing the event are sought to confirm that it actually happened. Those documents are analyzed to estimate their degree of credibility. A historical fact will be more credible as a function of the number of independent documents that tell about it. The assassination of Julius Caesar is a well-documented historical fact, but it is not scientific, as it cannot be reproduced.

The origin of life is an event that most likely happened only once in Earth's history. It is impossible to repeat it, so as to study how it happened, therefore it is not a scientific fact. It is a historical fact.

What would be the documents, in the case of the origin of life? Fossil remains. But it is practically impossible to find them. Therefore, the origin of life will most likely be an insoluble problem forever.

But what if one day we make synthetic life in the laboratory? Wouldn’t we know then how the origin of life took place? Well no, for we wouldn’t be sure that the way in which we had made synthetic life were the same as when it appeared spontaneously, a few hundred million years after the origin of the Earth.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic thread on primitive life: Previous Next

Thematic thread on synthetic and artificial life: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

What is a good scientific popularization?

Isaac Asimov

This news was published on November 20, 2007 in the Spanish major newspaper ABC:

Jugene, the most powerful and ecological civilian computer in the world, is German. [In the] Rhinelandic town of Jülich [was installed] Jugene (Jülicher Blue Gene), whose 167,000 million basic operations (teraflops) per second make it the world's first computer for civilian use...

Actually, the most powerful computers at the time could run at a few hundred teraflops. This news exaggerated the speed of the computer by nine orders of magnitude. This error has not been corrected. It’s still in the web.

Heard on a Radio broadcast on May 30, 2008: Fishermen complain about the rising price of diesel. Five years ago it cost them 320% less. In other words, five years ago they were paid to fill the tank.

Let's look at another example of a wrong headline published on 2/18/2020. The headline says: New green technology generates electricity "out of thin air." The text clarifies that it is generated from the humidity of the air acting on a protein.

These errors, so frequent in the media (I could contribute many more), have led me to formulate the following golden rule of scientific popularization:

Any statement you assert must be correct and contrastable.

Everything one says must be carefully checked to ensure that it is not a mistake, hasty or misrepresented news, or in the worst case, fake news.

Another typical error of scientific popularization in the media is showing as already done news that are really nothing but predictions about the future. This usually happens in headlines, which are usually reduced to the minimum, while keeping maximum impact. For instance, in a recent news published on 2/12/2020, the headline is: Mars was also beaten and for a long time. The text, however, is much less conclusive. What the headline gives as certain, becomes just possible: The red planet could have formed in a longer time scale than previously thought.

Statistics are prone to many manipulations, sometimes with unexpected consequences:

In 1995, one study showed that the contraceptive pill increases the risk of thrombus embolism by 100%. The press published it with great headlines. Thousands of women stopped taking the pill. It is estimated that, as a result, 10,000 more abortions took place, only in Great Britain.

What had really happened? What did that study discover?

Risk of thrombo-embolism in women who do not take the pill: 1 in 14,000. Risk of thrombus embolism in women taking the pill: 2 in 14,000.

In this case, the news was not incorrect. What was wrong was the way of making it public. It’s true, the risk increased by 100% (from 0.00007 to 0.00014). But expressed in that way, it could cause a panic, and it did.

I have given more examples in two old posts in this blog: this one and this one.

This is a list of 24 famous popularizers:

Michael Faraday

Galileo Galilei, Michael Faraday, Jean Martin Charcot, Camille Flammarion, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Josep Comas and Solà, Gregorio Marañón, George Gamow, Willy Ley, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Konrad Lorenz, Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Gardner, Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, Douglas Hofstadter, Ian Stewart, Raymond Smullyan, Steven Weinberg, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose and Paul Davies.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Most of them were scientists, distributed among the following fields: 3 mathematicians; 12 physicists, chemists and astronomers; 3 biologists; 4 doctors in medicine; and an engineer. The exception is Martin Gardner, who graduated in philosophy, although he later specialized in philosophy of mathematics. Some of them worked on several disciplines, or kept up to date with them, at least from the informative point of view.

Many of the popularizers mentioned above also addressed the other way of popularizing science: by means of fiction. Some of the names indicated are also famous as authors of science fiction novels, or just fiction, with some scientific stroke: Asimov, Clarke, Gamow, Sagan, Davies, Ramón y Cajal, and Marañón wrote novels, some of which are considered among the best in the genre.

Are popularizers born or made? Surely both things at once. The best definition of a popularizer was given by Willy Ley, when one of his teachers asked the students to write a composition developing the following question: which profession do I want to practice when I’ll be grown up, and why? Willy Ley replied: I want to be an explorer. The teacher did not like the answer, and said there was nothing left to explore. Obviously, the teacher was wrong.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Popularization of Science: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca
Happy summer holidays. See you by mid-August