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| George Boole |
To continue with the previous post, I’ll add here a few more cases of bad translations between English and Spanish, many of them due to the existence of false friends between those languages. In other cases, the English word is used as-is, although there is a Spanish word that can be used instead.
· Heard on the radio news: Meteorology is to blame for the spread of this fire. I suppose we must sue the meteorologists.
According to Wikipedia, Meteorology is the scientific study of
the Earth's atmosphere and short-term atmospheric phenomena
(i.e. weather), with a focus on weather forecasting. Apparently, saying that excessive heat or dryness
is to blame for the spread of the fire is too vulgar, and the news needs to be
phrased in a more scientific way.
· DNA (deoxyribonucleic
acid) is a molecule that contains the genetic information of living beings. The
idea of identifying it with the properties that define a different entity,
such as a cultural construct or a society, is an ingenious metaphor, but
through overuse and repetition it becomes hackneyed. We hear frequently about
the DNA of a football club, or the DNA of a company, or the DNA of the work of
an artist.
· A variation on the previous case consists of using the word genome instead of DNA with the same meaning, as in this example, which appeared in an article in the Spanish newspaper El País with the following headline: The household genome: the new consumer battle is fought at home.
In the last thirty years, interest in scientific popularization has decreased worryingly. Perhaps not unrelated to this is the loss of prestige of science, which the man in the street tends to consider guilty or accomplice in some threats, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the uncontrolled destruction of the environment or climate change.
During this time, several permanent sections
of the media dedicated to popular scientific have disappeared, as well as a few
important magazines, while books on popular science do not usually achieve great
sales, with few exceptions, mainly related to health.
In the mass media, the only thing that matters now is the appeal of the headline, at the expense of scientific accuracy. Thus the effects of this type of dissemination are often negative and counterproductive: instead of informing, they distort the public opinion. I have spoken about the harmful effects of this type of disclosure in several posts in this blog.
Scientific popularization, as it was carried out after 1970, can be divided into three large groups:
o Scientific American, which had entered its second century of existence and published monthly each year less than one hundred long select articles, in addition to a small number of short information articles. Its prestige increased even more when it became the medium through which some important discoveries were made public, this journal being chosen instead of better-known scientific publications, such as Nature or Science. Thus, in October 1970, Martin Gardner published in his section (Mathematical Games) the first article dedicated to the Game of Life, devised by the British mathematician John Conway: The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game "life". And in May 1975, Gregory Chaitin published in Scientific American his famous article Randomness and Mathematical Proof, where he showed that the randomness of integers is undecidable, an undecidability theorem comparable to Gödel’s.
Being interested in the world, being curious to find out the causes of natural phenomena, is as old as man, but in the strict sense one cannot speak of science until the invention of writing, as the knowledge communicated through oral transmission was disorganized, imprecise, and fragmentary. For science to appear, the body of knowledge must constitute a coherent and ordered whole, which was practically impossible before more permanent means of storing information than human memory could be used.
As soon as writing systems appeared in the Middle East, India, China and America, sciences began to develop. The first three were medicine, mathematics, and astrology. They arose for practical reasons: to cure diseases; for the good management of the economy; to predict natural phenomena related to the cycle of the seasons. The natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and geology) were less necessary for early human societies, so they did not emerge until the Greek civilization.
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| Ray Kurzweil |
Short-term predictions are dangerous, because the expected date does not take long to arrive, and the "prophet" runs the risk that someone (like me) takes a note of the predictions and checks if they really took place.
On December 13, 2009, the New York Daily
News published an article with the following headline:
Top futurist, Ray Kurzweil, predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020
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| John MacCarthy |
The term artificial intelligence appears frequently in the media. It is usually used to refer to a computer application that behaves in a way that appears to be intelligent. But is it really intelligent? Or is this a case of meaning displacement, the application of a more appealing term to something not really new?
The term artificial intelligence was invented by John MacCarthy in 1956, in a seminar that took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover, U.S.A. At that time, the participants made exaggerated predictions about the imminent advances they expected in this field, some of which have not been fully performed 65 years later. Now the predictions are even more ambitious, but it is quite likely that none will come true in the short term, and that some will never come true.
The magazine Science News has just turned 100 years old. It began with the year 1922. From the beginning, it has numbered its magazines by semesters, rather than years, so the issues of the second half of 2021 bear the number 200. It is one of the longest-lived magazines of scientific information in existence. But its evolution in recent decades is worrying, and does not bring us to be optimistic about the current state of world science.
On my first day every
year, lecturing in the degree on Telecommunications Engineering, I used to say
this to my students:
Don't believe any
scientific news published in the press or in generalist media. Most of them are
false or have been misunderstood.
In previous posts I have mentioned several cases of scientific misrepresentation by the media, although sometimes the fault lies not with the journalist, but with the scientist, who tries to sneak in philosophical ideas based on reductionist materialism as if they were science. In this post I'm going to comment on three relatively recent news stories, published in the Spanish press, and try to explain what is really behind them.
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| 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.
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| 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.
Thematic Thread about Science in General: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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| Illustration of the initial news |
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| Levitation of a superconducting sheet |
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| Freeman Dyson, who proposed a way to extract energy from stars |
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| Stephen Hawking |
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| Welcome for time travellers |
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| Merging of two black holes |
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| Pope Benedict XVI |
