Stanley Pons (right) and Martin Fleischmann with a publicity shot staged to show them “working” on their experiment in 1989

The first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
—Richard Feynmann

The passing of Martin Fleischmann on August 3 brings to mind one of the most famous (and infamous) recent episodes in the history of science: the cold-fusion fiasco. Those of us who were involved in science in March 1989 (or just paying attention to the news) could not avoid hearing about Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Utah supposedly producing nuclear fusion at room temperatures. Announced with great fanfare and huge press publicity on March 23, 1989, Pons and Fleischmann claimed that they had run simple electrochemical experiments in the lab that had managed to start a nuclear fusion reaction. Conventional nuclear physics had always argued that fusion (squeezing two or more atoms together to produce another atom) could only be produced at extreme temperatures and pressures, such as the fusion reactions that occur now to drive the heat engine at the core of the Sun. This is why nuclear fusion has only been used for hydrogen bombs and is not yet practical for nuclear energy or other peaceful uses. If Pons and Fleischmann were right, their discovery would revolutionize nuclear physics and possibly solve our energy problems with a source of energy that was cheap to obtain and not as dangerous as the various proposals for fusion reactors. The media immediately ran with the story on a massive scale, so that nobody who paid attention to the news at that time could possibly miss the message. (continue reading…)

What Really Happened on Fox’s TV show Moment of Truth:
Travis Walton responds to Michael Shermer

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article by Travis Walton explains his side of what happened on this dreadful Fox television show on which I also appeared and described in last week’s Skepticblog. To understand Walton’s explanation you should read that article first, but if you don’t have time the upshot of the story is that Travis Walton claims that on November 5, 1975 he was abducted into a UFO in an Arizona national forest during a logging job and that his co-workers witnessed the event. According to the late UFO investigator Philip Klass, Walton passed one polygraph test (published) but failed another (unpublished), and in his opinion Walton and his associates made up the story as an excuse for failing to complete the logging job on time. Walton’s side of the story is recounted in detail in his 1978 book The Walton Experience, later reissued as Fire in the Sky, the title of the 1993 film based on the book. —Michael Shermer

With the recent airing overseas of the canceled Fox television show, Moment of Truth some people may have been mislead into believing that some shocking new revelation about the famous logging crew UFO case has come to light. Quite the contrary. Now that the airing of the show ends the “gag clause” in my contract (with its $1 million penalty) I am free to reveal that Moment of Truth has used testing methods that the producers were informed from the beginning were long ago completely discredited by every polygraph expert, lie detector school, and polygraph professional association in existence. I’ll quote here specific condemnations of the show’s methods by four of the world’s most highly respected polygraph experts who agree: “the polygraph aspect of the show has no validity whatsoever.” I will reveal other blatant deceptions the show has committed. And I will provide details of how, after the show, I underwent two of the most rigorous new polygraph tests available anywhere in the world.

I should have seen it coming. I should have known better. But there were unique circumstances. (continue reading…)

You have probably had the experience of having a heated conversation with one or more other people and after things calm down and you are comparing notes you find that everyone has a different memory of the conversation that just happened. Of course, you are certain that your memory is the one that’s correct.

Likewise, different people can look at the same set of information and come to radically different interpretations. That’s because we all have narratives inside our head – worldviews and ways in which we model and make sense of the world.  We are very clever and creative at incorporating new information into our existing narratives.

I was reminded of this when reading a recent article by Deepak Chopra on the nocebo effect. Nocebo effects are similar to placebos effect except they are negative – unwanted side effects that are reported from taking inactive placebos. Chopra clearly has a narrative that he is working from, one that is very different from my own. He is steeped in, and in fact is partly the architect of, various “alternative medicine” narratives.

(continue reading…)

Most people get the right answer to the toothpaste puzzle, but it never ceases to surprise me how many get it wrong, and even staunchly argue their position. I’ve even seen it tested by taking a tube of toothpaste to the bottom of a swimming pool.

The question: What would happen if you took a tube of toothpaste to the bottom of the sea, and then opened it? It’s a great party question. Try it sometime. (continue reading…)

Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans

—John Lennon

Forty years. In some contexts, it’s not very long, but in the span of a human lifetime, it’s huge. Only a few generations ago, most humans did not live past their 40th year, and in some parts of the developing world, they still don’t. However, in the Western World, most of us can not only assume that we’ll live at least 40 years, but many of us will survive for 80 years or more. Still, 40 years is a long span of time, when most people can assume that life will have changed in many ways and thrown a lot of surprises at them.

Yours truly, 40 years ago: a skinny, nerdy kid with thick glasses and no social skills…

Last weekend, my high school class (Glendale, California, High School Class of ’72) had their 40th reunion. It was a real eye-opener for me.  I missed the 5th year reunion in 1977 because I was in grad school at Columbia University in New York, and the tenth reunion because I was in my first teaching job at Knox College in central Illinois. I made the 20th reunion, but sometimes our class couldn’t get their act together, so there was no 15th, 25th, or 30th reunion that I know of. The last reunion before this one was the 35th, which was the first time I’d really seen most of my classmates in a long time. Then the big FOUR-OH came up, and a lot more of them made the effort to show up from around the world, and reconnect with people they’d grown up with. Most of them were not just my high school classmates, but I first met them in elementary school over 50 years ago, so we went back a LONG ways. Like in every reunion, it’s a mixed bag: people who I’ve remained in contact with over 40 years, but seldom see; people who I’d lost touch with since 1972, but we had once been close friends; many people whom I barely knew in high school, but I had to be friendly and try to  remember them; and a surprising number of “guests” who came to the reunion who were just plain weird (along with a bunch of drunks in the back of the room). Time had not been kind to many of us. Some had aged much more than others, so I could barely recognize them without trying to squint at their tiny name badges (complete with our senior photos, which further cruelly reminded us of how much we’d all changed). But I was also reminded how I was a skinny nerdy kid with thick black glasses back then, excluded from the major social cliques, and so I feel fortunate that time hasn’t turned my hair gray yet or caused much hair loss, and  I’m no longer underweight. (But I’m even more near-sighted than back then). I also was shy and awkward, and had difficulties relating with people back then, whereas after 40 years I was much more comfortable with these people I’d known since childhood. (continue reading…)

A Moment of Truth (or not) for the most famous
UFO abduction case in history

Because I have a teenage daughter I am relatively current on what’s popular in pop culture. American Idol is the ne plus ultra in the reality television genre (don’t let yourself get hooked), and because Fox incestuously promotes its other shows I was vaguely familiar with The Moment of Truth, a game show in which contestants have to tell the truth under the watchful wires of a lie detector in order to win cash prizes. Contestants are put through a battery of questions while hooked up to the polygraph, but are not told whether the examiner determined from the readings whether or not they told the truth. Later, in front of millions of viewers and a live studio audience, with their friends, co-workers, family, spouses, or boyfriends and girlfriends (or ex’s) sitting on the set with them, they are asked the same questions again. After each answer a female voice says “That answer is…” and after a long pause a “true” means the contestant continues up the ladder to $25,000, $100,000, $200,000 all the way to half a million bucks. A “false” sends you packing for home.

One night a woman was faced with her husband and ex-boyfriend and was asked if she wished she had married the other guy. “Yes,” she said. “That answer is…true,” sounded the voice. She won the money but lost the husband. I remember thinking to myself, “you’d have to be a real pinhead to go on this show.”

On July 31, 2008, I appeared on The Moment of Truth (watch Part 1 on YouTube. I appear at about 7 min. 35 secs. in Part 2.) The contestant was Travis Walton, arguably the most famous alien abductee in Earth history. (continue reading…)

I remain fascinated with the mindset of the conspiracy theorist. Partly this is because I think we all have a little conspiracy theorist inside us – deep within our evolved psyche. There is something very compelling and satisfying about believing that you have peeked behind the curtain and seen the true machinations at work in the world. Hardcore conspiracy theorists are mostly regular people who have fallen into a psychological trap, or perhaps they simply have a greater tendency towards the kinds of thinking that leads to belief in conspiracies. Theirs, however, is a difference in magnitude, not kind.

I recently received an e-mail with an innocent question from someone who appears to fall into the former group – a regular guy whose conspiracy sense has been tickled. The e-mailer’s brother, who is a conspiracy theorist by his account, pointed him to this Youtube video – a short clip from an interview with John McCain and Barack Obama during the 2008 election. Take a look at the interview before reading further.

McCain is apparently posturing about the debate schedule between him and Obama (typical political fare for a US election), and refers back to the debate planning between Barry Goldwater and JFK before the “Intervention and the tragedy at Dallas.”  The video would probably pass most people by without a thought, or perhaps just the slightest notice of the word choice by McCain. Calling the assassination of JFK an “intervention” at first seems like an odd word choice. Did he say “the intervention and the tragedy at Dallas,” or “the intervention of the tragedy at Dallas,” – meaning that the tragedy intervened in the course of events? It’s probably the latter. It’s also possible that the wrong word came out, or the intended word did not come to mind (although there does not appear to be any delay or stuttering). Either way, this is a non-event.

(continue reading…)

Since the days of Darwin, eyes and evolution have been an irresistible topic for scientists and amateur authors alike. British biologist St. George Jackson Mivart was initially a supporter of Darwin, but when his Catholic religion caused conflict with Thomas Henry Huxley in 1871, he changed to a critic. Mivart’s critique focused on the issue of the perfection of the human eye and how he could not possibly imagine how it could have evolved by natural selection and random chance (a point still raised by creationists today who know nothing about comparative biology). In later editions of On the Origin of Species, Darwin specifically addressed Mivart’s criticism and carefully explained how the incipient stages of complex structures like the eye could be useful, and could have evolved by small steps; it did not require a giant leap to the complexity to develop the human eye. As Darwin first showed, nature is full of examples of every kind of photoreceptor, from simple light-sensitive cells to eyespots to simple eyes with no lenses, to a variety of solutions of seeing with more and more complex eyes. Once you arrange these solutions in an array, it is only a small step from one to the next, more complex eye. (Indeed, many animals actually show this transition during their embryonic development as their eyes change, and in some organisms, the eyes develop differently in males and females). In fact, the passages where Darwin talks about the eye are one of the most frequently “quote mined” by creationists trying to distort Darwin’s meaning, because they quote only the beginning of the paragraph were Darwin is setting up the creationist position in order to shoot it down the in the rest of the passage (which creationists never quote). In full context, the quote reads:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.[This is where the creationist quote-mine usually ends]. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound. (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 6th ed., 1872, 143-144).

The rest of Darwin’s chapter then goes into great length describing the full range of photoreceptor solutions in the animal kingdom—none of which any creationist ever bothers to read, let alone address. (continue reading…)

Most Americans have used the internet to look for health information (a recent survey reports that 59% of adults have searched for health information on the net). Yet there are serious concerns about the accuracy and reliability of that information. There have therefore been many studies looking at the accuracy of health information, and not surprisingly the results are concerning.

Most of these studies pick a specific topic and then have one or more experts on that topic review websites obtained through specific search terms. For example, a British study looking at the treatment of fever in children concluded:

Only a few web sites provided complete and accurate information for this common and widely discussed condition. This suggests an urgent need to check public oriented healthcare information on the internet for accuracy, completeness, and consistency.

(continue reading…)