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.

Is scientific research well done?

Tabby Cat
Oliver-Bonjoch, CC BY-SA 3.0

Sometimes, while reading items published by journals such as Science News, it looks like some research currently being carried out is platitudinous. Either it leads to the discovery of things everyone knows, or time and efforts are spent to investigate in fields that no one cares about. We know that many researchers are anxious to publish, and they must justify somewhat the funds they receive, but up to that point?

Let’s look at a very recent news (April 2019):

Cats recognize their name. A study suggests our feline friends can tell the familiar sound of their name from other words. A paragraph of this news adds: As for whether or not a cat understands what a name is, well, only the cat knows that.

Anyone who has had a cat (I had one half a century ago) knows that cats recognize their name. Was it necessary to do a research about this, probably spending public money, to discover something that everyone knows?

A mathematical model for time travel

Welcome for time travellers

On May 2 2017, Newsweek published an article with this title:

Time travel is mathematically possible with mind-boggling model

You may well imagine that, with that title, the article will rather fall into the category of sensationalist papers on seemingly scientific issues. Indeed, in a quick reading of this article I have detected the following inaccuracies:

1. The title does not make clear the difference between a theoretical possibility of traveling in time and building a time machine. That is, the different between theory and practice. What Ben Tippett has developed is a purely theoretical mathematical model.
2. It presents the idea as something new which puts an end to a string of failures and disappointing calculations. Space-time loops, however, are known to be compatible with the general theory of relativity since quite a long time ago. In 1992, for instance, Stephen Hawking came to the conclusion that it would not be possible to use them without negative energy, something that is not known to exist. In 2005, the Israeli Amos Ori proposed a procedure that would not require it, consisting of spinning around an empty toroid region surrounded by a sphere containing enormous amounts of matter (e.g. a black hole). This is not so different from what is being proposed now.

Headlines and texts

Prehistoric pregnancy (Science News)

On several occasions I have criticized the distortion of scientific news by the media, especially the headlines, by saying things contradicted by the text, which apparently are more appealing. It seems that many journalists (at least those in charge of headlines) follow the old journalistic dictum, usually quoted in several forms, more or less equivalent, which, as is often the case with these lapidary phrases, has been attributed (probably apocryphally) to diverse personalities, such as William Randolph Hearst:

Do not let reality spoil a good headline (or a good report).

What I think regrettable is the fact that a magazine dedicated to scientific popularization, such as Science News, also falls in this trap of offering appealing headlines, which after reading the text can be seen not to correspond to the content. Let’s look at a few examples, offered during the week of February 19, 2017:

More about the end of science

Science News, January 19, 2008

In a previous post I mentioned some inklings that seem to indicate that scientific development is decelerating. In this post I will focus on further evidence: the fact that most of the new discoveries being made in many sciences are almost always conditional. Rather than findings of fact, usually they just forecast possible findings that could be made in the future.

To show that this surmise may be true, I will consider a particular issue of the magazine Science News, one of the most prestigious among those engaged in high-level popular science. Specifically, I have taken the issue of January 19, 2008, which contains 18 news. Let us consider the titles or the first words, where I have enhanced those terms that indicate that the results of the investigation were provisional or tentative (unless you are really interested, you don’t have to read them all, you can skip to the last three paragraphs):