Science or pseudoscience?

Martin Gardner

The word pseudoscience is defined as follows in the Cambridge Dictionary:

a system of thought or a theory that is not formed in a scientific way

As for Wikipedia, it is defined like this:

statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method

We can deduce that pseudoscience is a theory or discipline presented as scientific, but not really scientific. The distinction between science and pseudoscience is important, because there are many pseudosciences, almost more than sciences, although sometimes it is difficult to distinguish them, because throughout history, ideas about what is scientific and what is not, have changed.

Can we see the beginning of the universe?

As I often point out in these posts, the mainstream media, and sometimes high-profile popular magazines as well, may not be quite accurate when they announce science news. With headlines, especially, they tend to make major mistakes, because they try to make them as appealing as possible, which means that they also suffer from the greatest distortions.

Let us look at a recent news. This is the headline:

Scientists figured out how to see the beginning of time

Platitudinous scientific projects

Scientific research has become a race against time. Researchers must publish as much as possible in certain journals because their salary depends on it. They must also propose research projects that would receive official funding, on which will depend their ability to hire scholarship assistants and finance doctoral students, plus the possibility of making trips and paying registration fees for conferences where they will present the status of their research.

However, some researchers lack the imagination to design and propose new research projects. What happens then? They may pose problems whose solution everyone knows and design a research plan to demonstrate it by means of statistics or in some other way that sounds scientific. If the design is astute enough, the official entities that award projects will be convinced to finance the project. On the other hand, by doing this, researchers are playing it safe, because they know the results of their research before doing it.

The paradox of unsourced information

Ted Chiang

In a previous post in this blog I discussed the paradoxes that would take place if time travel were possible. One of them was this:

• The existence of objects without a cause, illustrated by the science fiction story Find the sculptor by Sam Mimes, which can be summarized thus: on his first trip, the inventor of the time machine jumps 100 years into the future, where he finds a statue that has been erected in his honor. He takes the statue, travels with it 100 years into the past (i.e., to the starting point of his journey), and places it in the same place where he found it, where it will remain for 100 years without anyone touching it. But who made the statue? Nobody. It is an object without a cause, that only exists during those hundred years.

The manipulation of scientific language

There are several ways in which scientific language can be manipulated:

• By trying to take advantage of the prestige of science where it shouldn’t be applied, to obtain benefits of some kind. For example: when a product or a plan is advertised as the result of a scientific study that has not actually taken place. Over time, this effect usually materializes in an incorrect use of the most advanced scientific terms of the moment. At the end of the 19th century, many products carried adjectives related to the telegraph or radio broadcasting; in the early 20th century, the element radium and radioactivity were widely used, before their harmful effects were discovered; in the middle 20th century the word atomic was in vogue; at the end of the 20th century, the terms computerized, electronic and biotechnological were preferred; and at the beginning of the 21st century the most used terms are ecological, sustainable and environmentally friendly. The scientific value of all these qualifiers is almost null.