Philosophy & Ethics

Jan Hendrik Schön, if you have heard the name, will either fascinate or enrage you.   His ability to progress from ridiculous fibs to world-class deception as a 31-year-old physicist working at Bell Labs in New Jersey is certainly impressive. How did fellow scientists let him get away with possibly the worst case of physics research fraud known?  It deserves a whole book, and Eugenie Samuel Reich is here to help.   If you can't sit through a whole book like Plastic Fantastic (out next week), her short version is in Physics World. The world's first organic electrical laser!…

I never get tired of talking about the problems with both deficit thinking and framing - and misguided people never get tired of doing both regardless. The latest to fall prey to the mind-numbing, intellectually dishonest fiasco known as 'framing' is ecoAmerica, who think that the problem with getting people to buy into CO2-based global warming isn't the suspect political motivation behind the target date chosen in Kyoto and hammered through by two European nations with an economic sickness that could only be cured by handicapping its largest competitor - it's instead the term "global warming…

What is a Fudge Factor ? It is a most unfortunate fact that, however beautiful a theory is, the data plots just don't want to fit the nicely drawn curve.  It is a problem in all fields of investigation.  The solution is easy.  Just take the function that defines the curve, determine the correction necessary to bring outliers into the curve and - voila! - the theory works! All that remains is to invent a new name for the correction that must be applied.  There is no universal standard for this.  One person's dark energy is another person's epicycle. The British…

Who among us hasn't been tempted to take the easy way out? Hopefully we choose to do the right thing, but this isn't always the case. It's bad enough when your actions just affect you. But when they affect the rest of the world? And mislead people working toward collective knowledge? That puts you on the ranks of the scales of depravity. Part 1 dealt with the Rock of Love; part 2 examined anything with "real" in the title. Part 3 lists a few of the frauds, fakers and other cheaters in the realm of science. Archaeology - Charles Dawson, Reiner Protsch von Zieten, Shinichi FujimuraIn 1912…

When a fake pandemic is being generated by media corporations having a slow news week, fake medicine is sure to pop up and take advantage of it.   The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) today issued a warning to the public about the risks of buying online medicines for swine influenza, such as Tamiflu or Relenza. David Pruce, RPSGB Director of Policy said, "With the current fears about swine flu, we are concerned that unscrupulous people are exploiting the public's fears about swine flu by offering to sell the antiviral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza over the internet. "…

This week, researchers and scientists at UCLA are doing something unusual: They are organizing a demonstration against the violent tactics of certain animal rights groups. This week, people in labs across the country are saying: It's about time. -- It's about time that people came out of their labs and off the bench and took a public stand, rather than relying upon trade groups and animal providers to make the case for them -- It's about time that science generated its own leaders to pro-actively make the case for animal testing, rather than rely on the usual ( and rather suspect) cast of…

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. On the day that Martin Luther King said those words, I was moved.  Whenever I read these words or hear them, I am moved.People with empathy do not speak face to face, but heart to heart, soul to soul. The message is clear: Do not judge any person by physical appearance. But we do.  It is a battle between the personal ethic, the personal aesthetic and the 'not-my-tribe' avoidance mechanisms that seem to be…

There was a time when it was virtually impossible not to believe in God.   That made sense; life had (and certainly still has) many mysteries and a divine hand made sense of an irrational world, at least in the sense that you could believe in one supernatural thing rather than many. But over time two important things happened that should have killed religion; the world got 'smaller' in the sense that a lot more information about people and cultures became available and science was able to explain a much larger, very fundamental and far-reaching set of things about the world in terms of…

There is bad science and then there is bad science, that is to say there is science which does not meet with the standards of care and objectivity through lack of skill, and competence and then there is science which is rotten to the core, because either it’s practice, or it’s ends are unethical. Which of the two is most predominant I could not say, it would require me to make up a best guess statistic, which might be bad in both senses.   However whilst the former is unethical if there is no intent to take on board the critics and corners continue to be cut, I do not regard it in…

Today I was forwarded by several people a really bad and confused op-ed piece by New York Times columnist David Brooks. It is entitled “The End of Philosophy,” which naturally raised my baloney detector level to yellow alert. Brooks’ main argument is that philosophy’s approach to ethics is “hyper-rational,” and that it does not appreciate the fundamental role of the emotions. Odd, considering that it was David Hume (the 18th century Scottish philosopher, 1711-1776) who famously wrote about how reason and emotion interplay to give meaning to our lives (a much, much earlier statement…