Next week: scientific scandals

Hi everyone,

Next week is our ninth of the semester, and we will focus on scientific scandals. Most of the cases we will discuss happened when scientists went off the rails and committed ethical sins. But there is a significant admixture of politics and sociology involved as well. I will present information and discuss issues from the perspective of an academic physicist. This material is a very important component of the “Perspective” part of the course title “Modern Physics in Perspective”. Students who have relevant expertise in other disciplines are welcome to show it off during our seminar.

Four particularly high-profile cases were:-

1. The claim by Andrew Wakefield that the MMR vaccine (against measles, mumps, and rubella) causes autism in young children. Not only did he misunderstand and misinterpret data from early studies, he actually committed blatant outright fraud. The later involvement of vacuous Hollywood actors in the ’cause’ has not helped. It is all such a waste. Many children in wealthy countries have suffered and died because their parents were too ignorant to get them vaccinated.
2. The claim that power grid transmission lines cause brain cancer in children (and other ills). This is something that a lot of hypochondriacs want to be true, but there is no known biophysical mechanism that could allow this to occur.  Billions of dollars have been wasted on public hysteria over power lines, wi-fi, and other things that fearful people can’t see.
3. The political hacking incident known as “ClimateGate“. This was actually a case of so-called fraud that was loudly proclaimed but not actually committed. It took a lot of careful work to disprove this politically motivated allegation.
4. The Jan Hendrik Schön scandal, a case of outright fraud by a young high-profile physicist. This boy behaved very badly. We will discuss why it happened and how incidents like this can be prevented in future.

I encourage you to bring your own example(s) of malfeasance by physicists and other scientists. We should have a rockin’ good time discussing it all together!

See you next week.

Cheers,
Prof. P.