Photo: Otto Beng's "Monkeyman" at the Bronx Zoo.
All people like it when what they do gives tangible results. It is also desirable that the results are obtained quickly enough and be appreciated by others. In science, this development of events is rather luck. But some people are more fortunate than others. True, sometimes it turns out that they helped their fortune a little. We decided to recall the most famous and very recent scientific falsifications
Not quite archeology
The science that creates the optimal conditions for falsification is archeology (and paleontology). For a long time, there were no exact methods for dating the samples, so it was difficult to find out exactly when the excavated artifact fell into the ground. Some "amazing finds", which later turned out to be skillful forgeries, served as the basis for the creation of new theories for decades.
One of these "centenarians" is the Piltdown Man, whose skull was discovered in 1912 by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson in the vicinity of the town of Piltdown in the British county of Sussex. The Piltdown Man's skull was like a human, and the jaw was more like a monkey's, only the teeth were more like those of a human. Archaeologists have hailed the find as the missing link in the evolutionary chain between ape and humans. The Piltdown Man was estimated to be 500,000 years old.
Within 40 years after the discovery of an unusual skull, hundreds of articles were written about it and almost half a thousand theses were defended. The devastating article proving the Piltdown Man's skull to be a fake appeared in 1953. Anthropologist and paleontologist Kenneth Oakley and his colleagues determined the age of the remains by analyzing the fluoride content in them. It turned out that the Piltdown human skull consists of three parts: a human skull about 500 years old, an orangutan's jaw, and chimpanzee fossilized teeth that have been processed to resemble humans more.
The author of the forgery that undermined the reputation of paleontology is still unknown. According to one hypothesis, the "missing link" was created by the author of stories about Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle.
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Two people from Nebraska Hesperopithecus haroldcooki. Image from the site harunyahya.org
Another find that alarmed anthropologists was a man from Nebraska. The actual remains consisted of just one tooth, discovered in 1917 in Nebraska by geologist Harold Cook. In 1922, paleontologist Henry Osborne recreated the skull of a Nebraska man, or Hesperopithecus haroldcooki, from this fragment. Soon there were created drawings of the mysterious ancestor of man "in full growth" and even with his family.
In 1927, other parts of the H. haroldcooki skeleton were finally found. But they did not bring joy to archaeologists. It turned out that the tooth, which became the basis for the creation of so many scientific theories, belonged to an extinct genus of artiodactyl mammals, which outwardly resemble pigs.
The history of the Nebraska man (although it can be more likely associated with insufficient fact-checking than falsification) has become one of the favorite arguments of creationists, who argue that evolutionary theory is untenable, that paleontology is not credible, and that all finds of ancient humans or hominids are error or falsification.
Monkeyman by Otto Benga at the Bronx Zoo. Photo by user Outriggr from wikipedia.org
To prove that evolution exists, and the transitional forms between different groups of organisms are not fiction (critics of evolutionary theory call their absence proof of its fallacy), scientists sometimes went to, to put it mildly, not entirely ethical actions. In 1904, at the World's Fair, held in the United States, a living "monkey-man" was presented. After the exhibition ended, the Ota Benga pygmy was transported to the Bronx Zoo, where his cage was first located next to the cages where the monkeys lived. After a while, Ota Benga began to share his "home" with the orangutan.
After several years of living in the zoo, the "monkeyman" was released. Several years later, he committed suicide.
Some merry fellows, on the contrary, played on the feelings not of adherents of Darwin's theory, but of believers. In 1896, near the city of Cardiff in the state of New York, the fossilized remains of a humanoid creature about three meters tall were found. People from all over America came to see the "Cardiff Giant". William Newell, in whose courtyard the statue was dug up, at first took 25 cents from visitors, and when there were too many - 50 cents each. The find of the giant proved that in ancient times the giants described in the Bible roamed the Earth.
Soon Newell sold the statue to several entrepreneurs for $ 37.5 thousand. They, in turn, set up the "Cardiff Giant" in Syracuse. Showman Phineas Barnum wanted to buy the statue for 60 thousand dollars, but was refused. Then he cast his giant from plaster and also began to exhibit it, declaring that it was his giant who was real. A litigation began between the owners of the giants, and then a message appeared in the press that the statue was a fake. Tobacco factory owner George Hull ordered a stone statue of a "biblical giant" and buried it behind his friend Newell's house, arguing with a local preacher about a verse from Genesis.
Not quite physics
Physics also allows fans of scientific sensations to express themselves to the fullest. Special experimental conditions or a new instrument provide excellent opportunities for amazing results.
In 1999, the Berkeley Laboratory announced that its employees had succeeded in synthesizing the 116th and 118th elements of the periodic table. These heavy transuranic elements are extremely unstable and only live for fractions of a second, making them very difficult to obtain. Physicists under the leadership of Viktor Ninov bombarded a lead target (the atomic number of lead in the periodic table is 82) with krypton ions (atomic number 36). According to the results of Ninov and colleagues, they managed to obtain three ions of the element with atomic number 118. Its unstable nucleus decayed, giving the nucleus of element 116, which gave the nucleus of the 114th element.
None of the laboratories that have tried to replicate the remarkable results have succeeded. Investigation established that Ninov did not succeed either. The transuranic elements cost the physicist work and career.
More recently, at the end of August 2008, due to the desire to become the author of a scientific sensation, Ruzi Taleyarkhan, an employee of Purdue University, lost his professorship. In 2002, he, along with his colleague Richard Leichy, announced the conduct of a cold thermonuclear fusion reaction using cavitation - the collapse of gas bubbles inside a liquid.
Cold thermonuclear fusion - the fusion of nuclei of light elements with the formation of nuclei of heavier ones at relatively low temperatures and pressures - could once and for all solve the energy problems of mankind. However, none of the physicists has yet been able to achieve this reaction. Including those physicists who tried to repeat the experiment of Taleyarkhan and Leikha.
But in 2005, an article was published in the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design, the authors of which argued that their attempt to get the reaction to proceed using cavitation was crowned with success. In 2006, Talleyarkhan's article was published, in which he refers to this work as an independent confirmation of his results.
An investigation by Purdue University showed that the experiments described in the first article were carried out in the laboratory of Talleyarkhan himself, and he was actively involved in the process. However, his name was not on the list of authors. Such work cannot be considered independent confirmation, and it is at least unlawful to refer to it. The university's sanctions were explained precisely by Taleyarkhan's "scientific dishonesty". And although there is no direct confirmation that his results were fabricated yet (although there are a lot of doubts), it is unlikely that now someone will take the "cavitation fusion" seriously.
Not really science
How does scientific research become known to other scientists? This requires the publication of an article describing this study in a scientific journal. Reputable scientific journals are peer-reviewed - that is, before an article is published, it is read by one or more experts in the relevant field.
It is believed that such a scheme allows you to eliminate a large part of the "garbage" (although it does not always allow you to calculate the fraud). Recently it turned out that the peer review system is not as effective as we would like. The peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Publications of Postgraduate and Doctoral Students has published a work by a certain Mikhail Zhukov titled "The Rooter: An Algorithm for Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy." It turned out that the article was generated by the SCIgen computer program for writing pseudoscientific texts, created by students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
And this is not the first time that the scientific community has been given outright nonsense as scientific research. In 1965, a pseudoscientific article by Roberto Oros de Bartini was published in the "Reports of the USSR Academy of Sciences". In 1970, a certain Mylar Fox gave a talk at the California Institute on "Mathematical game theory and its application to the training of therapists." The speaker turned out to be an actor, and the report itself consisted of contradictory and meaningless statements.
Thus, the number of scientific falsifications can hardly be expected to decrease in the foreseeable future.
