Chariots of the gods

During the 1970s, a Cinerama film with the same title as this post was exhibited and advertised with the following words: Can we say that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings has been proved?

Although watching the film was worthwhile, because it shows many wonderful landscapes and artistic works, I was not convinced by the point it was trying to make. Eric von Däniken, author of the book of the same title, in which the film is based, seems to have very little faith in man’s creative capacity. As soon as a human production seems difficult, he always attributes it to the intervention of aliens. He does so with the pyramids of Egypt, the Mayan astronomical observatories, the mortar of the Incas, and many other things.

The (in)credulity of English writers

Charles Dickens

I am going to talk about three famous English writers, and their answers towards the pseudoscience of the time. One of them lived in the middle of the 19th century, another halfway between the 19th and 20th centuries, and practically all the work of the third was written in the 20th century.

Charles Dickens: His brush with pseudoscience appears in one of his best works (in my opinion the best): Bleak House. One of the characters, called Krook (who is really a crook), dies of spontaneous combustion.

The idea that the human body can ignite spontaneously arose from a series of anecdotal cases of people, often alcoholics, burning to death under dubious circumstances. Some argued that ingested alcohol could ignite spontaneously within the body, even though doctors claimed that the amount of alcohol needed to do so would have to be so large that the person would have died of alcohol poisoning long before igniting.

Pathological science, wishful science, or ironic science?

Irving Langmuir

In 1953, Irving Langmuir (Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry in 1932) gave a lecture on pathological science, a name he applied to the results of the investigations of perfectly honest scientists, enthusiastic about their work... but who are completely deluded. This is Lagmuir’s definition of pathological science, which Milton Rothman in 1990 called wishful science and John Horgan in 1996 called ironic science:

These are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions.

Langmuir signalled five cases of pathological science:

A model for ChatGPT

How does ChatGPT work? Suppose we ignore for the moment that ChatGPT uses an artificial neural network, and represent its algorithm in the traditional way. This algorithm can be divided into two parts:

1. Training: ChatGPT is provided with data (text files), which are used to build two data sets:
1. A list of all the words that appear in any of the texts, without repetition, regardless of their order or the number of times each one appears.
2. An array of indices to the word list, reporting the number of times a given word occurs after a series of words. For example, if the following series appears in the texts: time travel, the indices of the words travel, and time will appear in the array, followed by the index of the next word, followed by the number of times that this sequence of three words appears in the set of texts used for training.

Relativism in science?

Karl Popper

As I have said in other posts, quoting Popper, a scientific theory can never be considered utterly confirmed. In other words, we can never be completely sure that it is true. But some people try to rely on this (and on Kant’s philosophy) to reach the conclusion that we cannot know anything about reality, that scientific knowledge is relative, and that science is no different from other human activities, such as arts or fashion, whose productions cannot be said to be true or false.

Against this position, in an article published in 1990 in defense of realism, Martin Gardner wrote the following paragraph, which in my opinion hits the center of the bull’s eye: