13 Embarrassing things that prove modern science wrong

[JBeukema]

1 The placebo effect

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.
We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.
2 The horizon problem

OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.
This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.
You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen – but see Inside inflation: after the big bang.
So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.
A variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this too is impotent in the face of the question 'why?'



3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays

FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.
As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 1019 electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.
Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?

13 things that do not make sense - space - 19 March 2005 - New Scientist

 

[Mini 14]

1 The placebo effect

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.
We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.
2 The horizon problem

OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.
This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.
You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen – but see Inside inflation: after the big bang.
So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.
A variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this too is impotent in the face of the question 'why?'



3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays

FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.
As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 1019 electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.
Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?

13 things that do not make sense - space - 19 March 2005 - New Scientist

The answer to all 13, and then some, is God.

 

[konradv]

That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This part doesn't seem to make much sense. If have two particles traveling in opposite directions at the speed of light, after 14 billion years they'd be 28 billion light years apart. Sounds like the author of that article needs to creack a basic physics text!!!

 

[eagleseven]

This doesn't disprove modern science, but rather gives it purpose.

If we understood everything, why would we need scientists?

 

[JBeukema]

This doesn't disprove modern science

I had to think of some title to catch people's attention.

 

[Dr.Traveler]

This doesn't disprove modern science, but rather gives it purpose.

If we understood everything, why would we need scientists?

Some of this stuff I'm familiar with. Its the same kind of things that told Physicists back around the 1900's that Newtonian Physics had some problems.

I'll read the blog and see what I can say, but again I'm a mathematician not a scientist.

 

[Greenbeard]

The dark matter question is one of my favorites. I had a love affair with modified gravitation theories (descendants of the original MOND) in my undergrad days. I briefly became obsessed with the notion that those kinds of theories could be made to emerge naturally from Mach's principle, no (or not much) dark matter needed to explain the illusion of missing mass.

But I guess the jury's still out on that one.

 

[Dr.Traveler]

Ok, I read this. I can't say I can add any more than the article mentioned. I'd heard about almost all of these at some point in the last year talking with my buddies over in Physics, but I haven't heard on any progress on them.

Like I said earlier though, its not surprising that there's some things that Physics and medicine can't explain. Science theories are different from Math theories in how they're built up. In Science the goal is to come up with the simplest theory that makes good predictions. Its happen before that these little breadcrumbs at the edges unraveled good theories. What follows is that better ones step up to take their place.

If you're interested in this, you should read up on the troubles that physicists had when it came to the constant nature of the speed of light. It went from: "Your Experiement is Wrong" to "That's annoying" to "What the What?!?!?!?" to "Brilliant!".

 

[dilloduck]

This doesn't disprove modern science, but rather gives it purpose.

If we understood everything, why would we need scientists?

Conversely why do we even need science to explain things to us and exactly what's the question. Is the role of science to merely understand or is it really to see if humans can control everything.

I like awe, myself.

 

[Dr.Traveler]

This doesn't disprove modern science, but rather gives it purpose.

If we understood everything, why would we need scientists?

Conversely why do we even need science to explain things to us and exactly what's the question. Is the role of science to merely understand or is it really to see if humans can control everything.

I like awe, myself.

Scientific theories are entirely structured to produce predictions that can be verified by experimentation. That's pretty much the whole point.

I agree, some of the theories in the various fields are pretty esoteric right now, but one day knowing whether we're in a black hole (see the other thread) could be useful for developing some amazing piece of technology.

Even when you know why something works (which is surprisingly rare even in physics) there's still a sense of awe to be had.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

The book is actually a lot more informative. I loved the chapter about life on Mars and the description of how preconception influences science so strongly. Ever wonder why there are no experiments on current missions to follow up on the original data?

 

[dilloduck]

This doesn't disprove modern science, but rather gives it purpose.

If we understood everything, why would we need scientists?

Conversely why do we even need science to explain things to us and exactly what's the question. Is the role of science to merely understand or is it really to see if humans can control everything.

I like awe, myself.

Scientific theories are entirely structured to produce predictions that can be verified by experimentation. That's pretty much the whole point.

I agree, some of the theories in the various fields are pretty esoteric right now, but one day knowing whether we're in a black hole (see the other thread) could be useful for developing some amazing piece of technology.

Even when you know why something works (which is surprisingly rare even in physics) there's still a sense of awe to be had.

So humans use science to try to predict what will happen and why ?
Once they figure all this out will scientists all just retire ?

 

[Epsilon Delta]

Conversely why do we even need science to explain things to us and exactly what's the question. Is the role of science to merely understand or is it really to see if humans can control everything.

I like awe, myself.

Scientific theories are entirely structured to produce predictions that can be verified by experimentation. That's pretty much the whole point.

I agree, some of the theories in the various fields are pretty esoteric right now, but one day knowing whether we're in a black hole (see the other thread) could be useful for developing some amazing piece of technology.

Even when you know why something works (which is surprisingly rare even in physics) there's still a sense of awe to be had.

So humans use science to try to predict what will happen and why ?
Once they figure all this out will scientists all just retire ?

That's the catch - it's likely to never happen. But hey, we're bound to get a little closer every time.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

not just cool but cool *10^356

 

[Dr.Traveler]

So humans use science to try to predict what will happen and why ?

Close. Theorems work differently in Mathematics of course. But in the rest of the scientific fields a theory's value lies in the ability to make predictions.

Its shocking how often "why?" isn't considered in a scientific theory. Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion made accurate predictions, and as such were accepted as a valid theory on planetary motion. But if you asked Kepler why they worked, he couldn't tell you. Newton came along later and used vector Calculus to explain how a system of gravity that varied inversely with the square of distance and directly with the product of mass implied Kepler's Laws. But, if you asked Newton how gravity actually worked, i.e., what is it really, he couldn't answer either. He could describe its behavior, but not the mechanism that makes it work and we still consider him one of the finest scientific minds in history.

Most scientists would love to understand "why", but it isn't necessary in order to come up with a working theory.

Once they figure all this out will scientists all just retire ?

Probably won't ever happen. Like I said earlier, a lot of stuff in this list reminds me of that I read about in 1890's with physicists. They were pretty confident they had the whole thing figured out with the exception of a few issues like black body radiation and that annoying speed of light thing. Einstein came along and unraveled the whole thing with Relativity and has kept physicists at work ever since.

It really feels like we're on the verge of another Einstein-esque moment from what I'm reading into the current state of the world of Physics. Physicists seem to have accounted for "almost" everything but these annoying loose ends.... and those always seem to unravel everything.

The universe is simply too complex and large for a scientist, of any kind, to ever really be done. And even if they do "finish", there's applying it all to every day problems to work out.

 

[Dr.Traveler]

not just cool but cool *10^356

I think we're in agreement on this one.

 

[frazzledgear]

That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This part doesn't seem to make much sense. If have two particles traveling in opposite directions at the speed of light, after 14 billion years they'd be 28 billion light years apart. Sounds like the author of that article needs to creack a basic physics text!!!

You missed the point -this wasn't discussing the distance between two particles traveling at the speed of light in opposite directions. It was talking about heat radiation, which travels at a fraction of that speed and the fact the universe isn't old enough for heat radiation to have made that trip yet when it is just now old enough for light to have made it. Heat radiation travels at a fraction of that speed and the universe is just not old enough for it to have made that same trip light did in order to even out the thermal differences that would have occurred with the Big Bang. Yet from one end of the universe to the opposite side, it IS thermally uniform which makes no sense. There should still be sharply discernible thermal differences between the center of the universe where the Big Bang occurred and the furthest reaches of the universe - but there isn't.

 

[konradv]

That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This part doesn't seem to make much sense. If have two particles traveling in opposite directions at the speed of light, after 14 billion years they'd be 28 billion light years apart. Sounds like the author of that article needs to creack a basic physics text!!!

You missed the point -this wasn't discussing the distance between two particles traveling at the speed of light in opposite directions. It was talking about heat radiation, which travels at a fraction of that speed and the fact the universe isn't old enough for heat radiation to have made that trip yet when it is just now old enough for light to have made it. Heat radiation travels at a fraction of that speed and the universe is just not old enough for it to have made that same trip light did in order to even out the thermal differences that would have occurred with the Big Bang. Yet from one end of the universe to the opposite side, it IS thermally uniform which makes no sense. There should still be sharply discernible thermal differences between the center of the universe where the Big Bang occurred and the furthest reaches of the universe - but there isn't.

I think you don't understand the physics very well. What you call heat-radiation, I would call infra-red radiation. Infra-red radiation consists of photons, which like all other photons, travel at the speed of light. Please give a cite for heat radiation traveling at something other than the speed of light.

 

[JBeukema]

E-M energy, whatever its wavelength, doesn't always travel at c. Remember your winter coat? The 'bending' of the straw in a glass of water?

 

[uscitizen]

Some in each generation think theyt have it all figured out. So far they have all been WRONG.