Please keep physics out ya mouth 😂. Any decent physicist should be able to explain the meaning of any topic in any field in simple everyday terms. Also, cosmology is a branch of physics…
When ask what the thing actually “is” - I’ll quote the great William Jefferson Clinton to say “… it depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is…”. The answers are generally unambiguous and are matter, field, and space-time or some combination thereof.
Tensor calculus and the tools of theoretical physics are not hocus-pocus. You might not be able to understand them, but it makes them no less real
Getting mad and trying to browbeat me only proves you're no intellectual, let alone a physicist.
And very plainly never studied theoretical math, or you'd understand how much of it has no practical use whatsoever - and therefore understand that it is generally not real.
So I'll just restate what I said before, to whomever can grasp this very simple nuance - "space-time," "fields," and "matter" (originally "mass") are not real things. They are just abstract ideas invented to describe real things. And rather than trying to investigate the substance, the nature of those things - what they are - these concepts focus on how the things they describe interact with each other. Position, velocity, momentum, etc. What they do.
Go ahead, claim you don't understand again, if you think it looks clever
So Lennon was right, nothing is real?
Does that mean the Beatles only existed in people's heads? And thought isn't real either, it's just make believe?
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linguists could help them clarify their terminology
the Beatles are, or were, an unambigously tangible thing. Four specific dudes who used to play music. Assemble four other musicians, even playing the same music, it's not the Beatles, no matter how fab.
But run 100 meters on a track, and you can then go run 100 meters on an entirely different track. That's because 100 meters is not a tangible thing, only an idea. The track is the tangible thing.
having gone down the rabbit hole in many a topic reading research papers i would say the greatest sin in academia is having poor scientific intuition: after a while you can read the opening few paragraphs about what the authors set out to test and know it's gonna be trash results right away, of no actual use to anybody
it's like half the authors didn't even read through all the previous studies that were nearly identical
maybe i'm just jealous at the funding some really idiotic people seem to endlessly have access to
There is not such thing as ‘Theoretical math.’ I didn’t browbeat you, just poked fun at you a bit.
Math just is math. Or maths if you’re a ponce -OR- from across the pond.
Language is just ‘made-up’ and it is a tool that you clearly don’t fully understand, yet you’re completely comfortable using it.
I’ll make it easier for you. Theoretical Physics, for the most part, can be understood to be a branch of applied mathematics that is concerned with solutions to field equations that are physical. Sometimes we find useful things when we delve into the non-physical, and usually that is considered the math(s)-physics boundary line.
Abstraction is power. The same principles apply to an electron orbiting in an atom, a car wheel, and the rotation of the solar system - namely angular momentum (is) and the way it changes (does).
Very rare. Not even enough to prompt a dirt-stirring false controversy about. There are plenty of atrocities and atrocious figures doing insane things right in our faces in the major news that is being treated like normal activity!
The incentives for trainees (grad students, postdocs) are to get meaningful data that can be publish. Couple this with unforgiving personalities at the top and poor pay and everything is ripe for people to start fabricating data to please the boss and get the degree or move on to their next position.
It’s the PIs fault for having a culture in the lab that rewards fraud versus. Frequently in these big labs Semenza, Tessier, Sabatini the PI is less involved in the day to day and pretty much just raises money and expects the trainees to churn out papers. Recipe for disaster.
The good news is that all signs point to fraud being rare; fraud is not the main reason why many findings don’t replicate - it’s the complexity of biological systems and the simplicity of controlled laboratory models.
Lastly the actual impact on human health is pretty well protected by arguably too-strict standard for safety and especially efficacy by the FDA. It’s very hard to fake a phase 3 randomized controlled trial.
I've met Marcia Angell (along with George Lundborg and Drummond Rennie) at the first Conference on Peer Review in Biomedical Publication. Her worry was that the pharmaceutical industry exhibited too much control over drug research. As time went on, mechanisms to address this have been created, such as trial registries (such as clinicaltrials.gov) and requirements for data submission and code submission. COI has also begin to play a big role. And Cochrane has sued European industries for failure to publish negative drug results.
Listen, if you ever have a paper retracted, your career is over. Period. If you are accused of fraud, no university will want you, and no grant agency will give you one. In general, you do not get a second chance here.
You ask 2 provocative questions, including one that has many questions embedded. Some of the issues you raise are not fraud, but they are certainly scientific misconduct, and depending on what your ICD says could put you and your university or organization at significant risk (i.e. putting active product in placebo mix- since the ICD would need to tell you about the potential risks and the manner in which you are randomized). Ghost-writing is a difficult topic- authorship in scientific publication is well defined- see the definition from the International Committee of Medical Journal; Editors, but with a contract, you are paying someone to write for you and they give you their rights- so while the ethics are questionable- and I don't like this- there is nothing illegal there.
As to your second point, you cannot prove the unprovable. We have never found bigfoot, so he or she or it has never been discovered, but people are still out there looking. The fact that some fraud is not discovered- and this has to be true, of course- is not any incentive to try on your own to commit it. The risk is far too high and honestly, it is never seen with younger novice researchers.
All these issues are not new in scientific publication. We editors grapple with this entire constellation of challenges all the time- and now we have ChatGPT,new forms of literature reviews (living, scoping, narrative, systematic, meta-analysis, and more), publication bias in situ, selective reporting of data (data mining), predatory journals, etc.
I appreciate your reply. If you consider the examples I gave as scientific misconduct as opposed to scientific fraud, I think that’s a fair point. Then it is my experience that scientific misconduct is rampant enough that the general public is becoming mistrusting of scientific journal articles. Government agencies and many journal editors look the other way when big money is involved. I had hoped for reform, but I think certain areas are beyond saving and it’s better to just present to the information directly to the public. In the examples I gave, no papers have been retracted. In fact, the company providing the active “placebo” drink mix did so for years of publications and they knew it caused the same reactions (as the test substance) in mice studies as they published a book about it. The fact that they used this substance came out at a FASEB hearing … and there was no consequences. Some other examples: 1. A researcher I knew published a study showing that a consumer produce chemicals that are inhaled and caused severe neurological effects in rodents. It was confirmed by a US govt scientist experiment. It turns out that the industry can conduct experiments that show no problems by making sure the humidity is high enough that the chemicals are precipitated out in water droplets and not inhaled. No journal article retractions. 2. How to avoid showing a chemical in the blood from an ingested product? Find a measuring technique from the 1960s and bury the use of the old technique deep within references to references. This was done many times by industry consultants at a Midwest Univ. No journal article retractions. 3. While Cochrane may have had some success in Europe, it takes lawsuits. Govt. agencies will ask stakeholders to submit references for their reviews and then cherry-pick references. Then they will hide who writes the draft review to then be looked at by the full committee. Even my and other appeals to the ombudsman was met a blacked out name. When I caught EFSA plagiarizing an industry review for their draft report, there were no consequences — they just adjusted the words and everything was fine for them. 4. Recently, scientists from the CDC and FDA published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The numbers in a key table and in the text were clearly made up as they could not be physically possible. After people saw how ridiculous the paper was, they didn’t retract it, but quiety published a revision of the table and a few sentences. But they should have retracted it as the paper now shows basically nothing. There was no apparent consequence for the lead researcher as he continued to lead probably the most important team at the CDC. The CDC published a followup paper with new data, but changed the definition of the categories so comparisons with the first paper were impossible. 5. Recropping a brain image from one amimal experiment and putting the recropped image in a different publication claiming it was from a different primate species — no retraction. 6. Feeding primates a test substance and reporting no reaction and nothing unusual only later in a book letting it slip that the primates were drugged and threw up the test substance. No retraction. 7. If products causes an obvious increase in adverse events, categorize the subjects into smaller and smaller groups until you can say that within each tiny group “there was no *significant* increase in adverse effects.” This will never lead to a retraction by can convince a lot of people of “safety.” Some will say that other researchers will find problems with the product — but only if the researcher happens to get funding and that may take many years. Once a problem is discovered, industry researchers can fund multiple studies coming to a different conclusion.
Happy to talk more about examples 2-7 (but example 1 is second hand) or provide other examples. I don’t think industry-funded researchers do have to rely on fabrication of data as scientific misconduct will get a similar result. I hope that can be cleaned up, but so far I see little being done. Glad you’re more positive and hopeful. I am a bit more hopeful that some scientists are starting to speak out on this issue and I am very grateful for all of the honest researchers doing great work.
Just a short response to your fine response- I see your point- this is all industry-funded research, not academic or institutional health sciences research. And in that realm, the potential for fraud rises. Just think of the movie The Fugitive, right? I can't speak to your examples, since I am not aware of them and do not know which specific papers you are referring to, but for the sake of the argument, let's just say you are correct in all of your reporting. I would be furious about this, as a person who has spent so long in the field both doing and publishing research. It makes life so much harder and gives reason for the public to distrust science at a time when for political reasons alone people are being led to distrust science. It feeds the beast.
the Beatles are, or were, an unambigously tangible thing. Four specific dudes who used to play music. Assemble four other musicians, even playing the same music, it's not the Beatles, no matter how fab.
But run 100 meters on a track, and you can then go run 100 meters on an entirely different track. That's because 100 meters is not a tangible thing, only an idea. The track is the tangible thing.
So if music is tangible, why is 100 meters on a track not tangible, given that the track, you say, is tangible?
In every area of life, it is essential that there be people investigating what people do, otherwise fraud will go undetected. The same goes for academia as for politics and sports. Policing academic honesty poses particular challenges, because it is expensive and requires specialized skills and scarce lab equipment to repeat experiments. There can be massive incentives in the sciences within any given lab to generate the data that will keep the grants and hence, the jobs coming.
There is plenty of low level fraud in academia by which I don't mean front-page headlines about "eminent" scientists compelled to retract papers...but the myriad of daily abuses like lab directors and PIs appropriating grad student ideas and even text without attribution and passing these off as theirs. Lowly grad students can't challenge these medieval practices in the feudal academic system.
But the biggest academic fraud isnt "science"..it's the totally false integrity and equity and the fake DEI peddled in the name of "progressive" climate while litanies of civil rights violations are enacted and covered up. Here's a brief roll call.
Michigan State. Penn State. UCLA. USC. LSU. Arizona and not just Grabowski. How about Utah State where the entire leadership has been turned over since 2021...interestingly coincident with a DoJ Civil Rights investigation into mass violations covered up by AD Prez and even PD.
Universities are phenomenally corrupt entities where vast amounts of public money are wasted and there is close to zero accountability or transparency despite the theoretical existence of public rights of oversight e.g FOIA.
Try filing a Public Records request and discover what is classified as "records not subject to disclosure... in the interests of the state....."
IF you had undeniable proof of X, that goes against "the popular consensus" then your research would never see the light of day in a scientific journal.
There is plenty of low level fraud in academia by which I don't mean front-page headlines about "eminent" scientists compelled to retract papers...but the myriad of daily abuses like lab directors and PIs appropriating grad student ideas and even text without attribution and passing these off as theirs. Lowly grad students can't challenge these medieval practices in the feudal academic system.
But the biggest academic fraud isnt "science"..it's the totally false integrity and equity and the fake DEI peddled in the name of "progressive" climate while litanies of civil rights violations are enacted and covered up. Here's a brief roll call.
Michigan State. Penn State. UCLA. USC. LSU. Arizona and not just Grabowski. How about Utah State where the entire leadership has been turned over since 2021...interestingly coincident with a DoJ Civil Rights investigation into mass violations covered up by AD Prez and even PD.
Universities are phenomenally corrupt entities where vast amounts of public money are wasted and there is close to zero accountability or transparency despite the theoretical existence of public rights of oversight e.g FOIA.
Try filing a Public Records request and discover what is classified as "records not subject to disclosure... in the interests of the state....."
Appropriating grad student ideas?! That's hilarious. Grad students are nearly useless. They are window dressing to make everyone feel good about the broader impacts of a funded project.
IF you had undeniable proof of X, that goes against "the popular consensus" then your research would never see the light of day in a scientific journal.
Simply not true. Science is not a popularity contest and does not govern by consensus. I will use the language of Kuhn to say that overwhelming force must be applied to the current paradigm to change it. Essentially, in order to qualify as a new theory of X, your theory must make new testable predictions not accounted for in the current theory AND it must explain all of the old.
In order to develop a new theory, you must be a master of the old. If you truly are a master of the old, your work is worthy of publication anywhere. The ruling class might make it difficult, but they can’t keep you out for long. The American Physical Society, for example, accepts all abstracts for their March Meeting. Gordon Research Conferences consider all kinds of heretical ideas in just about any scientific field.
If you have extraordinary evidence to back up your extraordinary claims, then you will get an audience. The truth is, the vast majority of practitioners in a field are unable to make such a claim because of the mastery required to do it. Thus, there is a tendency to be dismissive and even arrogant towards such claims in order to keep the misinformed, cranks, and quacks at bay. Much like the dude who busts the first quarter of a 5K in 66 to finish in 28 min, there are no shortage of people that think they have figured out perpetual motion or time travel and would waste everyone’s time if we listened. However, if you’re humble and persistent, and you can back it up, you will be heard.
IF you had undeniable proof of X, that goes against "the popular consensus" then your research would never see the light of day in a scientific journal.
Simply not true. Science is not a popularity contest and does not govern by consensus. I will use the language of Kuhn to say that overwhelming force must be applied to the current paradigm to change it. Essentially, in order to qualify as a new theory of X, your theory must make new testable predictions not accounted for in the current theory AND it must explain all of the old.
In order to develop a new theory, you must be a master of the old. If you truly are a master of the old, your work is worthy of publication anywhere. The ruling class might make it difficult, but they can’t keep you out for long. The American Physical Society, for example, accepts all abstracts for their March Meeting. Gordon Research Conferences consider all kinds of heretical ideas in just about any scientific field.
If you have extraordinary evidence to back up your extraordinary claims, then you will get an audience. The truth is, the vast majority of practitioners in a field are unable to make such a claim because of the mastery required to do it. Thus, there is a tendency to be dismissive and even arrogant towards such claims in order to keep the misinformed, cranks, and quacks at bay. Much like the dude who busts the first quarter of a 5K in 66 to finish in 28 min, there are no shortage of people that think they have figured out perpetual motion or time travel and would waste everyone’s time if we listened. However, if you’re humble and persistent, and you can back it up, you will be heard.
Exactly, most theories that go against the scientific consensus have very little evidence to support them. The ones that do quickly become the consensus. It’s happen countless times in every field.
It was NEVER about science-research-TRUTH. Its about money and power..Follow those trails and you will quickly understand why those in power and have money do what they do even when on the surface, it doesn't make sense. Sad, but true
Look up replication crisis. There's a lot of science that's based on made up science. Scientists don't like being wrong. So if their data says they're wrong, they'll rework their hypothesis and look for new data hoping, eventually, they'll be proven right.
"There's lies, there's damn lies, and then there's statistics" - Mark Twain
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