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.

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

The scientific mistake in Cube

Cube is a horror movie directed by Vincenzo Natali and released in 1997. The film was inspired by an episode of the popular television series of the end fifties and the sixties, The twilight zone. The episode in question, issued on December 15, 1961, was titled Five characters in search of an exit, a title which in turn was inspired by Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author. This is the summary of Cube’s plot:

Six persons find themselves inexplicably in an unfamiliar place, consisting of cubic spaces connected together. As they explore, they discover that there are 17,576 spaces, which together form a larger cube, 26 small cubes per side; that each space is numbered with three three-digit numbers; and that some of the cubes (those where at least one of the numbers is prime or a power of a prime) contain deadly traps, while the cubes marked only with composite numbers (the product of different primes) are safe. Before being transferred to the cube (we never learn how) the six characters were engaged in different activities: a policeman, a crook specialized in escapes, a doctor, a math student, an autistic genius and the architect of the cube. The autistic boy has the amazing ability to decompose numbers into their prime factors, which helps them make sure that cells are safe. The math student says that breaking a number into its prime factors is very difficult. In the end, only the autistic boy gets out of the cube alive.

Sometimes, in my classes, I posed my students the following problem:

What is the scientific mistake in Cube?

The scientific mistake in The Matrix

Let's start with a summary of the plot of the famous science fiction movie The Matrix, directed in 1999 by the Wachowski brothers, the first of a trilogy:

During the twenty-first century, as a result of a total war between human beings and artificial intelligence machines, the humans are defeated. As a result of the war, the Earth is caught in a nuclear winter and sunlight cannot reach the surface. To find an alternative energy source, which they need to ensure their operation, the machines collect the human survivors and put them in a state of suspended animation to extract energy from their bodies, entertaining their minds with a virtual reality program (The Matrix) that makes them live in a world similar to that of 1999. Some of the humans escape that fate and carry out a guerrilla war against the machines, using the algorithms in The Matrix to obtain superpowers in the virtual reality world. One of the free humans (the main character, an exceptional hacker played by Keanu Reeves) manipulates The Matrix in such a way that, at the end of the film, he is hailed as the chosen one, who has been sent to save mankind from slavery.

During the last years when I taught, I used to pose my students the following problem:

What is the most important scientific mistake in The Matrix?

On-line bullying

In an article by the press agency Europa Press published on June 28 2012, which refers to a study performed by Microsoft among youths in the age range 8 to 17, it is stated that 37% of Spanish youths suffer on-line bullying through the Internet. This looks like a high figure, but it may depend on how bullying is defined.

Reading the article, it appears that 17 per cent of the polled declares having been addressed in an unfriendly way, 13 per cent have been targets of mockery and 19 per cent have felt insulted. Also, 24% of the youth confess that they bully other people.

Neither in the Europa Press article, nor in the summary of the Microsoft study, is there a definition of unfriendly behavior and the other forms of bullying. It appears that the youths who answered the poll just considered it thus.