Top 10 science scams

When discovering surprising and unique discoveries, never before, scientists can achieve fame and wealth of money. Most of the time, this is the driving force behind positive scientific research, but many times it has been abused.

Trick to shock the scientific world

This list includes 10 scientific scams that have deceived so many people who believe and are a reminder to people to be alert to some scientific 'inventions'.

ten . Jan Hendrik Schön

Jan Henrik Schön (left photo), a researcher at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey , has 5 presentations published in Nature and 7 in Science magazine, between 1998 and 2001. This paper focuses on solving high-end electronic aspects. These inventions are mostly confusing, profound and Schön is widely regarded as a rising star in the scientific world.

In 2002, a scientific committee discovered that he created the least fake results in 16 cases and that the discovery made all colleagues, director of Bell lab, and team responsible for export. copies of both magazines, who accepted Schön's result, were embarrassed by the public opinion. Schön, then 32 years old, said: 'I have to admit that I made some mistakes in my scientific studies and I regret it very much. I really believe that those scientific effects are real, interesting and worth the effort. '. These words are all of Schön's plea posted in Nature.

9. The giant Cardiff

The giant Cardiff is one of the most famous hoaxes in American history. It is a 3 meter long petrified man , discovered in 1869 by a group of workers digging a well behind the home of William Newell in Cardiff, New York. As it turned out, this giant was the product of George Hull, an atheist living in New York. He decided to create a statue to tease the Turk, an orthodox pastor, who believed that in the Bible there was a saying that the giants once ruled the earth.

The giant became so popular that PT Barnum offered to borrow the statue for three months for $ 60,000. After being rejected, he hired someone to make an identical copy and show it. When this replica became more famous than the original, the owner of the 'real' statue filed a lawsuit against Barnum. However, the judge dismissed the case with a statement, unless the original statue proved its authenticity, nothing wrong when Barnum made his own copy.

8. Permanent motion machine

Cars run on water and fusion machines that generate more energy than they use are always in the imagination of inventors.Charles Redheffer , after making a lot of money in Philadelphia when he showed a permanent motion machine, took it to New York in 1813, where hundreds of people paid $ 1 to see it.

The machine seems to be able to operate on its own without any help. In the end, skeptics gave Redheffer a large sum of money so they could prove that the device was a scam. With the consent of Redheffer, they proceeded to remove some vertical planks on the wall next to the machine, and discovered a cat-shaped gut drive. This transmission passes through the wall to the attic, where an old man eats bread and turns his crank.

7. The stones lie

In 1726, Johann Beringer, of Würzburg, published details of the fossils found outside this small Bavarian city. Fossils include lizards that are molting, birds full of beaks and eyes, spiders that are on the net, and toads that are having sex. Other pieces of stone that he found carry the characters YHVH , meaning Jehovah , or God . He believed that these were products created by the 'flexible power' of the inorganic world and commented in a book.

In fact, this is a joke of malicious colleagues. Legend has it that Beringer went bankrupt when trying to buy all the published books and these stones were called 'lie stones' . The colleagues who caused the incident all lost their jobs and their reputation.

6. Tasaday tribe

In 1971, a Philippine government minister (Manuel Elizalde) discovered a Stone Age tribe living in isolation on Mindanao Island. This tribe called the Tasaday has a strong language, uses stone tools and carries the characteristics of another Stone Age. This discovery takes a lot of television time, on the cover of National Geographic magazine and is the subject of a bestselling book. When anthropologists sought to approach the tribe, President Marcos declared the island a sanctuary and banned all visitors.

When Marcos was overthrown in 1986, two journalists visited the island and discovered that the Tasaday actually lived in houses, traded with local farmers, wore jeans, T-shirts and spoke the local language. Tasaday explained that they moved into the cave and acted as Stone Age people under the pressure of Elizalde. Elizalde fled the Philippines in 1983, bringing millions of dollars stolen from a fund created to protect Tasaday!

5. Discoveries of Shinichi Fujimura

Shinichi Fujimura is one of Japan 's leading archaeologists, even though all his knowledge is self-study. In 1981, he discovered that stone was 40,000 years old. It is the oldest stone model found in Japan and this discovery is the springboard for Fujimura's career. In the following years, he continued to find even older specimens, challenging the known boundaries of Japan's prehistoric times .

In October 2000, Fujimura and his colleagues found a chain of stones that they believed were made by primitive people . They also found some holes, according to them, to plug the pillars for the primitive residence. This discovery is 600 thousand years old and is the oldest evidence of human habitation. This incident immediately became international news.

Then, on November 5, the Mainichi Shimbun published three photos on the front page, documenting Fujimura digging holes in the scene and burying ' artifacts ' that he later 'found ' (see picture). ). At the press conference at the same time, he confessed to deliberately burying these stones and most of his findings are fake. Bowing in shame, he said: 'I was tempted by the devil.'

4. The hoax about the moon

In August 1835, a series of articles appeared on the front page of the New York Sun. This series lists an incredible series of astronomical discoveries, with the help of huge telescopes and special methods, by the English astronomer, Knight John Herschel . The article said that Herschel developed ' a new doctrine of comet phenomenon' , found planets in other constellations and 'solved and repaired almost all the most serious mathematical problems in the industry. astronomy ' . And then, the editorial mentioned Herschel's greatest achievement: he found intellectual life on the moon.

He described any forest, sea, and lilac pyramids on the surface of the moon . He also did not ignore the herds of bovine boars wandering on the plains and the blue horned horses living on the hills.

This article is of course an elaborate prank game. Herschel had never observed life on the moon nor achieved any astronomical achievements mentioned in the article. He was not even known for many of his plays associated with his name. Even so, New York Sun continued posting until the public discovered it was a prank.

3. Lamac theory

In the 20s, an Austrian scientist named Paul Kammerer , designed an experiment to prove Lamac's genetics (the notion that an organism can achieve the characteristics and transmissions of the later life of It) is completely done. His experiment is a toad called the midwife toad . Most toads mate in the water, so they have black scales on their hindquarters that can keep them together when mating. However, the old lady's toad is mated on land and therefore they do not have these humps. Kammerer said that by forcing the midwife to mate in the water, he could prove they would develop such humps.

Kammerer gave a number of generations of toads in a water-filled aquarium and eventually announced that he had succeeded in creating a group of midwife toads with black bumps on the hindquarters.

However, in 1926, Dr. GK Noble conducted a review of these famous toads and discovered that the black bumps were just ink being pumped into their hindquarters. When the hoax was exposed in 1926, Kammerer was humiliated. He was determined not to inject ink into the toads and assumed that one of his experimental assistants had done it. A few days later, Kammerer committed suicide.

2. Sokal mission

'Sokal mission' is a prank by Alan Sokal (a physicist) aimed at a post-modern research article called Social Text, published by Duke University. In 1996, he submitted a meaningless article disguised by obscure words, to see if the press world had 'published a meaningless article with added salt if (a) heard it. smelling, interesting and (b) if it satisfies the ideological prejudices of the editor. '

The article 'Crossing the Boundaries: Towards the Science of Explanation of the Transformation of Quantum Gravity', was published in the Science Wars that year. On the day of publication, Sokal announced in another article, the essay was just a prank. He said Social Text is "a collection of left-wing lies, references to flattery, gimmicky quotes and obvious absurdities. " Debates, especially about religion. the academic, hot, broke out soon after.

A recent example is a 2005 article about the groundbreaking circuit (Rooter Paper). This is a randomly generated article on a computer program, then submitted and accepted as available. reason at a scientific conference.

1. The Piltdown man

The man Piltdown is a famous trick in which skull and jaw bone fragments found in 1912 were thought to be fossils of a distant human form. This specimen was officially named Latin Eonthropus Dawsoni , after the name of the person who found it, Charles Dawson . It was not until 1953 that people discovered that it was fake. This specimen is made up of the jaw bone of an orangutan and the skull part of an adult man.

Piltdown man is probably the most famous trick in history. Well known in two ways: attention to the evolutionary problem it brings, and it took 40 years to discover that it was just a scam.