Everything You Know About Science is Wrong E-Book

Matt Brown

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 203

Beschreibung

A highly entertaining, myth-busting read for anyone with even a passing interest in science. Hot on the heels of the fascinating compendium Everything You Know About London Is Wrong, this next book in the series, written by author Matt Brown in his trademark humourous style, debunks the scientific myths we all take for granted. Does nothing travel faster than the speed of light? Well, in certain circumstances, a winded tortoise can go faster. Are there actually seven colours in a rainbow? Think again. And our author merrily explains why our hair and nails don't keep growing after we die and why chemicals in our diet might not be the toxic threats we are led to believe. Covering everything from pseudoscience to phenomena of physics, scandals of space and scientific misquotes, Everything You Know About Science is Wrong shatters a range of illusions we have accepted unquestioningly since childhood and demystifies this most puzzling of subjects.

Leseprobe

Everything You Know About Science Is Wrong

Everything You Know About Science Is Wrong

Matt Brown

Contents

Introduction

What is Science?

All scientists look like this

You have to be really clever to understand science

Researchers always follow the scientific method

We don’t need scientists to tell us how the world works, we can just use common sense

Scientists get everything right

Science and religion are always opposed

To infinity and beyond

The Wright brothers performed the world’s first heavier-than-air flight

Sputnik was the first artificial object in space

The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from the Moon

Astronauts float in zero gravity

Without a heat shield, spacecraft re-entering Earth’s atmosphere would burn up from friction

The seasons are caused by the Earth getting closer to and farther from the Sun

Moons circle planets, and planets circle stars

Now we’ve sent a probe to Pluto, the whole Solar System has been explored

A miscellany of unscientific laws and theorems

The edge of Physics

We live in a four-dimensional universe

Nothing can travel faster than light

Nothing can escape a black hole, not even light – so they can’t be detected

Wrong inventor?

Curious Chemistry

Chemicals are bad for you, and should be avoided. Eat naturally!

Water boils at 100° and freezes at 0°

Matter exists in one of three states: solid, liquid or gas

Water is a good conductor of electricity

Glass is a liquid

Atoms are like tiny solar systems, with electrons orbiting nuclei

Life on Earth

Life has only existed for a tiny fraction of Earth’s existence

All life depends on the Sun

Fish were the first animals to leave the oceans

The meteor that killed the dinosaurs caused the biggest mass extinction of all time

Evolution is a slow process that takes many thousands of years

Nature never invented the wheel

Humans are the pinnacle of evolution

The Latin name for humans is Homo sapiens

Modern humans are descended from Neanderthals

Scientific misnomers and misquotes

Planet Earth

The last ice age ended thousands of years ago

Earthquakes are measured on the Richter Scale

Water drains anti-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern

Everest is the world’s tallest mountain

Rainbows contain seven colours

Body matters

You are a human being

Hair and nails continue to grow after death

Artistic, creative people use the right side of their brains, while more analytical types use the left brain

The brain is made up entirely of neurons

An A–Z of pseudoscience

Famous scientists

Newton developed his theory of gravity after a falling apple hit him on the head

Charles Darwin was the first to describe a theory of evolution

As a student, Einstein was rubbish at maths

DNA was discovered by Watson and Crick

Are you saying it wrong?

Let’s start a new wave of false facts

Further information

Acknowledgements

About the author

Index

Introduction

Science is Fun! I remember reading that on the side of a pencil, given to me by a representative of the Royal Society of Chemistry. I was only 12 or so at the time, but that piece of stationery must have made its mark*. I went on to study chemistry at university and eventually found myself editing a chemistry journal.

And science really is fun, so long as you have a sense of curiosity. Didn’t we all feel a thrill when we learnt that humans evolved from chimps, that glass is really a liquid and that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light? Facts like these give us a deeper insight into the world around us. We can impress our friends, or provide our children with convincing answers when they ask ‘Why?’.

While science is fun, science mythbusting is even more fun. Despite the copious evidence from reality TV shows, not a single human being is descended from a chimpanzee. Glass most certainly is not a liquid, contrary to what you might have heard. And while the speed of light is fundamentally unbreakable in most circumstances, there are several sneaky ways to outpace it. In exploring such misconceptions, we gain a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, the real science behind the myth.

Mythbusting is not only fun, it’s also important for everyday life. The world is full of pseudoscience – ideas that sound plausible and scientific, but are ultimately worthless. Whole industries are built on the credulity of a trusting public. Homeopathic medicine, detox diets, water ionizers and colonic irrigation all have the ring of scientific plausibility, yet none of them stand up to proper scrutiny. A good grounding in critical thinking can help us avoid wasting our time and money. Meanwhile, science is often twisted and misrepresented by politicians, campaign groups, newspaper columnists and others in positions of influence. With the looming spectres of climate change and antibiotic resistance, and game-changing technologies such as gene therapy and artificial intelligence, it is now more important than ever to be scientifically literate.

This book is a compendium of some of the most common misconceptions about science. Some widely held facts are just plain wrong. Others were once understood to be correct, but have since been overturned by new and better evidence. Still other facts are wrong under certain circumstances or don’t present the full picture. It’s true that the Moon orbits the Earth, but that’s not the whole story.

Throughout the book I use the term ‘science’ in its broadest sense. You’ll find sections that stray into the allied worlds of maths, engineering, medicine and technology. In many cases, especially the section on the nature of science, the brief entries barely scratch the surface. Whole bookshelves could be filled on the relationship between science and religion, for example. So, too, the many misconceptions about evolution, or dubious nutritional claims, which seem to spread as readily as acai berry jam.

In a book full of nitpicking and mythbusting, one does run the risk of sounding uppity; ‘I think you’ll find …’ are the four most annoying words in the English language. To avoid this, I hope I’ve kept the tone light and friendly throughout. For the same reason, I’ve minimised the references to scientific literature – the book is intended as a whimsical conversation starter rather than a fully annotated dissertation.

Finally, why should you believe my explanations over other sources? Excellent question. You shouldn’t. Perhaps the greatest teaching of science is that we don’t need belief in order to make sense of the world. Nothing should be taken at face value, including the entries in this book. The reader is encouraged to use what follows as a springboard. The realms of science are vast, fascinating and often misrepresented. Get digging, and let the nitpicking begin!

* FOOTNOTE The accompanying sticker, which punned ‘Cuddle a chemist and see the reaction’, proved less beneficial to my science career – but that’s another story.

What is Science?

Who do you picture when you hear the word ‘scientist’? What do scientists do all day? Are they all superbrains?

All scientists look like this

In 2001, the first detailed guide to the human genome was published in the scientific journal Nature. This landmark study was written up by a truly international bunch. Dozens of scientists from the USA, UK, Japan, France, Germany, China, Ireland and Israel all collaborated on the genome. They represented 24 different universities and research organizations. This is positively parochial compared with a 2015 paper on the Higgs boson. Its remarkable tally of 5,154 authors worked in more than 50 countries. I’ve not met any of them personally, but I dare say not one of these scientists looks like the character drawn here.

Science is a broad church, employing people of every colour, creed, nationality, gender, temperament, hairline and body odour. You don’t have to be crazy to work here, and it really wouldn’t help. Yet all too often the word ‘scientist’ still conjures up the ‘mad professor’ stereotype. I saw one only this morning while watching an otherwise spellbinding pre-school show with my young daughter. Let us take a leaf from the notebook of Dr Frankenstein and dissect the stereotype scientist into his component parts.

Scientists have crazy hair The clichéd scientist never troubles a barber. He is either bald as an egg or else sports a frazzled, unkempt coiffure. The latter look was no doubt inspired by Albert Einstein, whose tousled white locks were more entangled than two electrons partaking in some spooky action at a distance*.

Big-haired boffins appear regularly on film and TV. Think Emmett Brown in Back to the Future, Gene Wilder’s eponymous character in Young Frankenstein, or the goofy scientist in Independence Day played by Brent Spiner. Bald scientists are typified by such characters as Bunsen from the Muppets or Professor X from the X-Men. (The stereotype continues with meth-cooking chemistry teacher Walter White from Breaking Bad, though his hair loss has deeper meaning and one could hardly call him a cliché.)

I’ve known researchers with no hair, too much hair, wavy hair, spiky hair; blonde, brown, black, red and green hair, or all five at once. In 2012, following the successful landing on Mars of the Curiosity rover, mission engineer Bobak Ferdowsi was dubbed ‘Mohawk Guy’ for his crested locks. Particularly hirsute individuals can even join a Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club For Scientists. Researchers work at the cutting edge, in more ways than one. It hardly needs saying that, in reality, scientists sport as wide a range of hairstyles as any other sector of the workforce.

Scientists are male Do an image search for ‘Solvay conference’. This is an occasional get-together of the world’s top physicists, whose most notable gatherings took place in the early 20th century. A photo from the first conference, in 1911, shows two dozen or so leading scientists grouped around a table. Twenty-two of them have moustaches and one of them is Marie Curie. All are white. Sixteen years later, at the fifth conference, the photo shows 28 white men and Marie Curie. Not much had changed, save for a slight diminution in the popularity of moustaches.

Historically, science, medicine and technology were almost entirely the preserve of men, but it would be wrong to assume that women were totally excluded. The annual Ada Lovelace Day in mid-October celebrates the contribution played by women in these fields, both historically and today. Lovelace (1815–52) is often considered the world’s first computer programmer; she devised algorithms for Charles Babbage’s mechanical contraptions.

She and Curie are perhaps the most famous female scientists (using that term broadly), but there are plenty of other women who played an important role in the history of science. Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), for example, assisted with the discovery of Uranus and collated a catalogue of nebulae. Mary Anning (1799–1847) was among the greatest fossil hunters of all time, identifying some of the first plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and pterosaurs. Maria Mitchell (1818–89) was able to overcome the prejudices of her day to become a professor of astronomy at Vassar College, New York.

The 20th century saw still more eminent roles for women. In 1903, Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (for Physics), for her work on radiation. She scooped the Chemistry prize eight years later for discovering polonium and radium. Her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, was the next woman to get a prize, taking the 1935 Chemistry award.

Such exceptional examples notwithstanding, the opportunities for women in science were dismal until relatively recent years. At the time of writing, only 17 women have received scientific Nobels; I lost count of the male winners somewhere around the 200 mark. Even today, the middle-aged man in the white coat remains the most common depiction of the scientist (try another image search if you want proof). What’s the reality?

It’s true that women still make up a disproportionately small part of the scientific workforce. Jaw-droppingly so. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that just 28.4 per cent of the world’s researchers are female. This varies wildly by scientific discipline, and also from country to country. A handful of places, Latvia, for example, have more female than male researchers. Most nations are flimsy by comparison. The French scientific powerhouse is three-quarters male. Women are also less likely to be awarded a prize, invited to speak at a conference or chair a committee.

One common assumption is that this must be down to sexist hiring, but this isn’t necessarily the case. A reputable 2015 study* looked into the recruitment of assistant professors at American campuses. It found that women were nearly always favoured over men with a 2:1 preference. And it didn’t matter whether the person hiring was male or female. The results have been interpreted by some as ‘positive discrimination’, with recruiters under pressure to favour gender balance over other criteria.

So why do women remain under-represented in higher academia? The authors suggest that the problem is more on the ‘supply side’. In other words, and for a complex variety of reasons, women are less likely to apply for senior roles. When they do, they are more likely to get an interview and secure the job than equally qualified male counterparts.

The picture is slowly improving. The number of men and women taking science to at least PhD level is now roughly equal in many Western countries, and the stats are getting better further up the career ladder.

Scientists are elderly Caucasians The stereotypical scientist is often depicted with white skin and even whiter hair. Stats are hard to come by, but it seems that reality tends towards the opposite. As with any hierarchy, the majority of scientific jobs are at the lower grades – the postdocs, technicians and junior researchers who do most of the experimental graft. Furthermore, this base is getting heftier. Scientific output has grown steadily over the past few decades, right across the globe. That implies ever-more jobs in science, most of which will be at the junior levels normally occupied by younger people. The elderly professor with unkempt white locks is very much in a minority.

How about ethnic background? In Western countries, as would be expected, the majority of the scientific workforce remains white, though disproportionately so. For example, 2010 figures show that 69 per cent of the US sector was white (compared with around 64 per cent of the wider population). If we look at the global picture, however, the Caucasian dominance is less clear-cut. Recent figures show that 40 per cent of the world’s research and development now takes place in Asia. China alone accounts for 20 per cent of R&D. 49 per cent of all bachelor degrees in that country are in a scientific discipline. In fact, China produces more scientific graduates than any other country. With India also on the rise, and Japan and Korea maintaining a strong research base, perhaps the stereotype scientist will soon be a young Asian.

Scientists always wear a lab coat and safety specs: OK, it’s undeniable. Some scientists do wear white coats and eye protection. Anyone who handles hazardous substances or anything that might stain their civvies will don a lab coat, while plastic glasses are mandatory in any chemistry laboratory. Scientific couture is much broader than you might imagine, however. A marine biologist would find her underwater progress impeded by a flapping white coat. A field geologist would feel the wind chill. Many theoretical physicists do their best work at home – anyone who wears safety equipment in bed is probably engaging in pursuits other than the scientific. Some scientists wear suits, many go to work in everyday casual dress and, yes, one or two have corduroy jackets with brown elbow patches. To assume that a scientist must be dressed in lab gear is like supposing that all soldiers wear bearskin hats.

Scientists play with bubbling test tubes You’re not a proper movie scientist unless you surround yourself with coloured potions that churn and foam from exotic glassware. Researchers in the real world never decorate their workplace with such frenzied apparatus. For starters, most scientists are not chemists and so have little business swilling around purple liquids or dodging clouds of smoke. Even those who do muck about with reagents would find such scenarios bizarre. Anything that fizzes, smokes, effervesces or otherwise expels material must be contained within a ventilated fume cabinet. Brightly coloured liquids are, broadly speaking, the preserve of undergraduate teaching labs. Having lived through a degree in chemistry, and another in biochemistry, the only time I ever saw a foaming test tube was when we filched some glassware for an experimental cocktail party.

Another gimmick you’ll often spot, even on serious scientific documentaries, is the preponderance of purple lighting in laboratories. Doesn’t happen, except in the rare labs that use UV lamps for visualizing certain reagents. The mauve hues seen on TV are purely for visual interest. Laboratories are often brightly lit, with stark, white surfaces – great for observational research, but a bit severe for television interviews.

* FOOTNOTE Just a little in-joke for those who know their quantum history.

* FOOTNOTE The paper is well worth a read. It’s freely available online at http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.full

You have to be really clever to understand science

Scene: a suburban dinner party. Friends of the hosts are chatting, getting to know one another.

‘So, what do you do for a living?’

‘I’m a scientist. I work at the university.’

‘Huh. Wow. I was never clever enough to do science. All that maths and stuff. You must be really brainy.’

‘Huh, well, not really. I pretty much just count fruit flies for a living. Why, what do you do?’

‘Oh I’m a banker.’

‘Really? All those numbers and percentage rates? You must be really clever.’

Anyone who’s worked in science has had a similar conversation. That ‘S’ word. It fuddles people. Try saying ‘I chew glass for a living’ or ‘I’m an interpretive dancer who works with bees’ and you’ll get a similar look: minor amazement with a hint of unease. Perhaps it has something to do with the way scientists are portrayed in the media. To take three recent headlines:

‘Clouds don’t have silver linings, say global warming boffins’

‘“Vaping” can cause lung damage, say Manchester boffins’

‘Glum, depressed ... and addicted to Facebook, Twitter? There’s a link, say medical eggheads’

All use language that distances the reader from the scientists. Terms like boffin and egghead can be thrown in an affectionate way, but usually the context is mildly derogatory and anti-intellectual. ‘Global warming boffins’ does a double disservice. It adds to the impression that you must be super-intelligent to study the climate, while the dismissive tone of ‘boffin’ suggests a group of people you wouldn’t want to be part of, as though it’s uncool to be intelligent.

People think that science is hard. People think science is not for them. People think that science is only for ‘boffins’ and ‘eggheads’. Yet science is born of the most basic of human instincts: curiosity about the world. Young children never stop asking ‘Why?’ and ‘Why not?’. Some would say the instinct gets beaten out of us as we grow older; that classroom teaching turns people off science. But does it? Everybody would click the headline ‘Life discovered on Mars’. Nobody would be indifferent to a drug that could cure dementia or double intelligence. Even esoteric concepts such as gravitational waves and the Higgs boson generate enormous public interest. You only have to look at the rise of science festivals and ‘geek culture’ to see that people are interested in science – they just don’t necessarily want to be the ones doing the science.

Perhaps it takes a certain kind of person. Many children find science classes difficult, to the point of capitulation. On the other hand, those of us who enjoyed science sometimes struggled with humanities. With science, it’s easier to know what’s expected of you. If an exam question asks ‘How many electrons in an atom of carbon’, there’s really only one correct answer. If an English literature exam asks you to discuss the motivations behind Macbeth’s slaying of Duncan well, where do you start? Science, at least at the junior classroom level, is underpinned by straightforward rules, while humanities requires more interpretation and subjectivity. Generally speaking.

Of course, science gets more specialized as we progress through education. A student learning the biology of a cell will have to memorize and understand a whole new vocabulary. Terms like anaphase, meiosis, endoplasmic reticulum, ADP and – personal favourite – Golgi apparatus can be off-putting. Then again, millions of cricket fans can cope with phrases like maiden overs, deep backward square legs, sticky wickets, LBWs and googlies.

And what about the maths? Many people are put off the sciences because of a perception that it’s all about formulae and equations. It’s true, most scientific disciplines do require a certain amount of number crunching. But then so does accountancy, banking, plumbing, photography, video game design and a host of other professions.

Like most things in life, success at science isn’t so much about being smart, as having a passion for the subject and putting in the work. As with cricket, a bit of effort to learn the rules and terminology pays off with a lifetime of enjoyment.

Researchers always follow the scientific method

In a perfect world, all research would be conducted according to the scientific method. It’s a bit like a recipe, and goes something like this:

•Ask a question, like ‘Why isn’t this pan of pasta bubbling?’.

•Formulate a hypothesis ‘A watched pot never boils’.

•Test your hypothesis with experiments Measure the time taken for a pot of pasta to heat to boiling point. Is it quicker when you look away?

•Collect enough data to be sure you’ve been thorough – you’ll need to time the pot on dozens of occasions (both while watching and not watching) to be sure your data sets are large enough to draw a conclusion. A good scientist would also try the experiment with different pots, different levels of water, various durations of watching, and with different foodstuffs in the water, changing one variable at a time while keeping stove temperature and pressure constant.

•Draw conclusions No significant difference could be found. The time taken for a pot of water to boil is independent of whether it is observed.

In practice, science rarely runs according to the scientific method. Research is dynamic, evolving and messy. Our culinary scientist might quickly abandon the research when he figures out that the hypothesis is clearly ludicrous. Perhaps she’ll spot a side effect that is much more interesting to study, such as the taste and texture of pasta cooked for different time periods. He might hear from a rival laboratory that all the grant money is going into sauce research, and shift his focus accordingly. Or she might have no hypothesis at all, and simply want to find out what happens when you boil pasta for 24 hours in orange juice. The point is that scientists make progress as much by hunch, whim and serendipity as by following the commandments of the scientific method.

That’s not to say their work is sloppy or haphazard. A good scientist might set out on a study through intuition or even desperation, but he will still use all the proper controls, checks, balances and repetitions to make sure that measurements are statistically sound.

Further, not all realms of science use experimentation. How, for example, can we ever know what goes on inside a black hole? Nothing can escape from these enigmatic objects. We can’t venture inside the black hole and make measurements to test our hypothesis – or if we could, we wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it because nothing we could say, do or transmit could make it out of the black hole again. Many other areas of science hit barriers to experimentation. How can we test the hypothesis that there are multiple universes? What happens to particles that collide at energies hundreds of times those possible in the Large Hadron Collider?