New Scientist and cranky science

[mmcirvin]

Via james_nicoll: Greg Egan has gotten fed up with New Scientist.

Comments

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

I mentioned this in that blog entry, but this is making me think about how I teach resource evaluation at work since that's a big part of my job.

Last summer a student asked me what I thought of Wikipedia. Some of the teaching faculty rolled their eyes, but at least he knew enough to ask the question. (My response was that I think it's a better resource than a lot of people give it credit for, but give it the same critical treatment you should be giving everything else: double-check everything it says, if it doesn't cite its sources then forget it, and if it pings your bullshit detector then find something else. Except I didn't actually say "bullshit".)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree with the people who point out that this isn't a new thing: New Scientist has been a source of pseudo-legitimacy for manifestly bogus physics claims for a long time, 20 years at least. The Internet's made the phenomenon more visible: whenever an Amazing Physics Breakthrough that makes absolutely no sense rolls around the blogs, there's generally a New Scientist cite in there somewhere.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

I have GOT to take a physics class. This is an area where I lack even basic knowledge and it's really working against me.

Maybe next semester. I only have time in my work schedule for one class at a time, especially if a lab is involved.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

From: Ian A. York
Date: Sat, Oct 7 2000 12:00 am
Groups: rec.arts.sf.written

"Personally, I don't bother with New Scientist, a credulous,
non-peer-reviewed magazine written by journalists rather than scientists,
which is routinely filled with wild-eyed speculation and misunderstood,
rehashed, misinterpreted hyperbole."

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I saw the "reactionless drive" mentioned somewhereabouts, and was wondering when it would start making the rounds.

"No, THIS time it isn't a crackpot! Look, he even has a patent!"

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Reactionless drives are a mainstay of the genre. (Sometimes they go the opposite way, such as when New Scientist more or less uncritically reported Thomas Gold's contention that a solar sail wouldn't work because of some specious reasoning about heat engines.)

Also, faster-than-light information transmission.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Does anyone know why the observed behavior of ECHO satellites didn't figure into Gold's model?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There were a lot of things that didn't figure into Gold's model. At the end of his little paper, he actually said that there is no such thing as photon momentum, which makes one wonder how the Compton effect works.

It was pretty much the last bizarre controversy Gold stirred up before he died.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Something had to be.

Usually he didn't contradict observed fact quite so blatently (and he was right once or twice. He wouldn't matter if he was always wrong).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...The thing that made me start wondering about New Scientist about twenty years ago was actually another reactionless-drive article, only that one was somewhat better supported as it was written by Robert Forward.

He was writing about one of his favorite topics, the weird consequences of negative-mass matter, and in particular how if you could somehow put a connecting rod between a positive mass and a negative mass, you'd have a gadget that would accelerate off to infinity all by itself. Which is all in good fun, except that it annoyed me a little that he kept overplaying the idea that this could be real and emphasizing how "no law of physics" prohibited the existence of the stuff. To my mind, and to the minds of most physicists, the mere fact that you can get instabilities of this sort is at least a pretty good heuristic telling you that it probably doesn't exist.

Later I studied quantum field theory and discovered that "boundedness below of the Hamiltonian," which basically means no nega-matter, is usually taken as a pretty solid axiom by people trying to construct usable theories, since if you don't have that, the vacuum instantly falls apart into a sea of real positive-mass and negative-mass particles and you can't construct anything like the world we know and love. I don't know if that's a "law of physics", but it's good enough for me.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

uh, make that 16 years ago.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The great names in steady-state cosmology, who also made major contributions that ended up in the standard model, all seem to have been these ornery maverick types who Went Emeritus to an increasing degree as they got older. Gold, of course, was only the second most spectacular case; Fred Hoyle is practically the textbook example. And Geoffrey Burbidge is still pushing increasingly convoluted variants of steady state as the one true cosmology.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I saw this when Slashdot, in its usual cheerful fashion, ran the article in complete sincerity.

I was giving it the benefit of the doubt, thinking that maybe it'll explain where that momentum comes from later on, until I got to the end of it and the really juicy paragraph,

Then there is the issue of acceleration. Shawyer has calculated that as soon as the thruster starts to move, it will use up energy stored in the cavity, draining energy faster than it can be replaced. So while the thrust of a motionless emdrive is high, the faster the engine moves, the more the thrust falls. Shawyer now reckons the emdrive will be better suited to powering vehicles that hover rather than accelerate rapidly. A fan or turbine attached to the back of the vehicle could then be used to move it forward without friction. He hopes to demonstrate his first superconducting thruster within two years.

So apparently this engine works by pushing against the coelestial aether.

(The full article, despite what that link says, is available online at http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg19125681.400;jsessionid=NMGHKBGMCGMM)

So

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

New Scientist is the new Nature. Got it.

Re: So

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

New Scientist is far worse; as majikthise's commenter "oliver" once wrote, it seems to sustain itself largely on cheeky attitude. Uncritically relaying crackpot science is part of how it maintains its level of cheekiness. Also, its articles are its reporters' often ignorant glosses on the research, which compounds the problem.

What it reminds me of most is the BBC's stories on the impending end of the world. As Mark Liberman has complained, the BBC seems to regard science as mostly a source of quirky light entertainment stories, and as I've noted before, there's this deep tendency in British culture to think of the end of the world as a prime entertainment subject, so they have a lot of super-scientific ends of the world on the BBC. Genuine stories like global warming get inflated to be more hopeless and unstoppable than they actually are, and they like to fret inappropriately about killer asteroids and mega-tsunamis a lot too.