I just read an article where scientists have claimed to have found a new color! Many other scientists are highly skeptical. We all know that LK-99 (the supposed room-temperature superconductor from last year) is probably an erroneous result.
However what are some things we “achieved” (within the last 5-10 years or so) that you believe are false and still ambiguous as to whether they “work”?
Comments
you’d love it over in r/skeptic
Artificial general intelligence. You hear it every week, and also that it is about five years away.
Media will often jump with clickbait titles before a study has been reviewed and proven. Only work that has been confirmed should be treated as fact.
That said, there is plenty of “science” published by the media that i would think people should be wise to be skeptical about. In fact, that skepticism is actually why the science community scrutinizes new findings!
True science is rarely disproven. Take Newton. Newton wasn’t proven wrong by Einstein, instead Einstein took newton’s work further. This expansion of science shouldn’t be confused with being wrong.
Clickbait social media posts are eroding the trust in scientists, but that shouldn’t dismiss work being done.
It’s a real thing it’s just not a thing that humans have ever seen because you need to modify the eye to be able to see it. You might want to really read what they did, and it’s possible new colors could be coming.
“Cones take over in bright light, and they are specialized to detect specific wavelengths of visible light — namely, red, green and blue. These three types of cones are respectively named “L,” “M” and “S,” in reference to the long, medium and short wavelengths of the visible spectrum to which they are most sensitive.
Once cones are activated, color vision relies on the brain to interpret the activation patterns of these three types of cells across the retina. Each pattern acts like a code, with different codes unlocking different perceptions of colors and intensities of light.
M cones are most sensitive to green, but technically, they respond to a whole spectrum of colors that completely overlaps with the wavelengths L and S cones react to. As such, in natural conditions, you can’t activate M cones without also activating L and S cones. The scientists wondered what would happen if you could defy that rule and exclusively activate M cones.
Stimulating only M cones revealed the color olo, whose name refers to coordinates on a 3D map of color — “0, 1, 0.” The “o” is a zero, referencing the lack of stimulation of L and S cones, while the “l” is a 1, indicating full stimulation of M cones. After stimulating olo in isolation, the scientists were also able to incorporate the color into images and videos viewed by the participants.”
It’s a color that only a small number of people have seen, but it is new.
The “discovery” that the pyramids had batteries under them is not totally bullshit in that something is there, but they wildly extrapolated from the data in terms of what it was.
https://youtu.be/oYmREV6m-Fg?si=-8QzgaZvNPXa7IKy
“We’ve discovered the cause for autism!” They keep announcing this every few years when they discover another cause for some cases of autism. At what point are people going to acknowledge that autism has multiple causes?
Dire wolves have been brought back from extinction.
Lots of research around biomass energy, biodiesel, carbon capture. Research funding has dried up since solar PV and lithium battery has proved so successful, so these projects have generally shut down, because they’re not profitable.
Those alien discoveries. Annoys the hell out of me
K2-18b is probably not even a hycean planet let alone teaming with life.
You read an article about a new color and are rightfully skeptical. My next step is usually to find the actual paper and read what the claim really is.
Mass media is awful at headlines for technical papers.
Cold Fusion
The white house today claimed it can manipulate space and time!
https://futurism.com/white-house-announces-manipulate-time-space
I disagree with the premise of your question.
Science Reporters have made these claims, not the actual scientists.
Scientists are (usually) pretty careful about what they claim.
Reporters (and their editors) often remove all the caveats and oversimplify scientific statements to a point where what they publish has a meaning that is unclear or even completely different from what was originally said.
For the sake of fairness, it is true that scientists often do a poor job of explaining their work in layperson terms, when they try at all, which puts reporters in a position where they have to try and simplify it themselves.
It feels a bit weird to say “I didn’t believe it before it was officially debunked”, the skeptic version of “I liked them before they were cool”.
The EM-Drive was meant to be a reactionless drive that could produce continual thrust for decades with just electrical power, theoretically enough to accelerate continually all the way to Alpha Centauri. It would have broken several laws of physics but it was hailed as a potential major breakthrough discovery. It needed a lot of electricity to generate very low levels of thrust but low thrust adds up if you can keep going forever without your tanks running dry. It turned out to be the power cable. Turning the power on created a magnetic field in the wire that acted to straighten the wire like water in a firehose. That’s the thrust they were detecting and the drive itself was bullshit.
Another one that was more of a mistake was a particle beam that went faster than the speed of light. The nature of the beam and the detector meant it had to be buried deep underground and the beam was passing through several miles of solid rock. But being deep underground meant you couldn’t use GPS to get an absolutely perfect pinpoint accurate location which meant uncertainty in the distance which makes it harder to calculate the speed. They used a system of mirrors and lasers to bounce a beam from the surface down through the tunnels and accurately measure the location BUT one of the fibre-optic connectors wasn’t plugged in all the way. Somehow this caused a mistake in timing the laser pulses that were used to measure the distance and made them miscalculate the speed. The beam wasn’t going faster than light at all.
M-drives. Cold fusion. E-cat generators.
Literally every headline involving fusion power makes it seem like it’ll happen every day now, despite the fact that we’re nowhere closer today than we were 50 years ago when it was bound to happen within the next 50 years
Also I’ve seen probably a dozen papers over the past decade or so that claim to have discovered a “cure” for type 1 diabetes, yet none of them have seemed to pan out
Why would someone want to obsess about that idea?
What scientists claim? Very little. What science reporting chooses to claim based on loosely related studies? Much of it is suspect.
A lot more is in the “vastly overstated” both in what they did and its significance than the “complete hogwash” category.
Look up the Gartner Hype Cycle. It is enlightening.
The examples you describe in your first paragraph are both very much a criticism of the ‘headline effect’ than any of actual scientific progress or development.
This sort of thing.
new color is very believable. color is psychological.
we have color receptors, their spectral range overlap. so they fire simultaneous for normal. if you can disable one type of receptor, your eye gets a new mix of receptor signals, and as such a new color.
I’m forgetting where I read it, but a scientific commentator wrote about their frustration with pop science media and how no matter how detailed/broken down/etc they attempt to get with a reporter, they’ll often see glaring, wild mistakes in the reporting. Even to the point of getting cause and effect backwards.
This commentator called that “wet streets cause rain” phenomenon. As someone who’s seen this in tech reporting (new startup has journalist over to view their new tech, article gets fundamentally simple aspects of the tech wrong, reporter refuses to correct piece after contact) over and over, I can believe it.
As other comments here have said, it’s not the science that’s hogwash, it’s the reporting of the science that can be hogwash.
That’s just how it will be when some minimum level of understanding/education is needed for a particular topic to make sense, and why teaching science is such a difficult and rare skill.
Did scientists said that ?
Or did a MEDIA REPORTER said that ?
Cause that’s not the same thing at all and it sounds like you’re conflating the two…..
Thank you for responding.
The new “color” is actually sorta of interesting. It is not that they somehow came up with a new wavelength of light. It is that they found a way to directly stimulate a human retina in a way that causes a color perception unlike any that the person being stimulated has seen. So it is a different qualia, not a different color.
Climatologists claim to have climate models that are basically the Word of God. No. Not even theoretically possible. A model can be good within the range of the data it’s calibrated on, but outside that it’s predictions are just hypothesis.
They didn’t really discover a new colour but rather manipulated the eye to see a colour previously not seen. This is more of an indication of the ability to manipulate colour cones and this has implications for colour blindness
Any one of who knows how many cancer “cures”
Don’t provide a platform for ignorance and stupidity to be spread to others. Sorry you flunked 9th grade science. Take it again.
I’m skeptical of everything we learn about exoplanets.
The only possible info is analysis of light spectrum shifts…which seem so easy to get wrong after 124 light years of travel.
Seems like a barely educated guess.
I mean, somebody has claimed that they’ve figured out cold fusion at least once a decade since, what, the 50s?
Anything novel that is published but not yet replicated in multiple instances. Science is not “achieved” until many years after the first reports.
Engineering on the other hand is a somewhat different game. I.e. using current knowledge to build something new. Much more tangible.
Most people are role playing their jobs for goverment money to fund their life so probably a whole lot…. Look up the washing of money CERN is doing without even listening to the professionals.
Money in the right pockets is all that matters to feed yourself and your greedy kids nowadays.
A good motto is “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. So, anything that goes dramatically against our present understanding of science should be viewed with skepticism unless there is a massive amount of evidence backing it up.
The real question is what they claim to have not acheived yet that you know is a total lie.
The new color thing is possible. It would just be a particular wavelength humans cannot perceive. We actually know of at least one instance this occurs within the range of wavelengths we can perceive. We know animals perceive wavelengths we can’t but they are generally outside of our perception range so it’s not that shocking, Calling it a color is a stretch though due to the common perception of what that means. The scientific method requires verification so this will be sorted out (and possibly better explained) in the future.