I’m reading “About Time” by Adam Frank in which he tells us that the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism was of such great precision that it puts modern clock makers to shame.

Reading more about this mechanism on Wikipedia it says:
In short, the Antikythera Mechanism was a machine designed to predict celestial phenomena according to the sophisticated astronomical theories current in its day, the sole witness to a lost history of brilliant engineering, a conception of pure genius, one of the great wonders of the ancient world—but it didn’t really work very well!

and

Though the engineering was remarkable for its era, recent research indicates that its design conception exceeded the engineering precision of its manufacture by a wide margin—with considerable accumulative inaccuracies in the gear trains, which would have cancelled out many of the subtle anomalies built into its design.

So it seems that Mr Frank is guilty of making stuff up, or at least not properly checking facts that he liked the sound of.

What other examples are there of pop-sci authors allowing their enthusiasm for the subject to cloud their judgement?

Maybe he wrote that before the “recent research”.

It could be why devices like that stopped being made. People realised they were too ambitious in conception and weren’t actually reliable.

Does make you wonder why they didn’t try something simpler, like a clock :)

The Rev Dodgson said:

I’m reading “About Time” by Adam Frank in which he tells us that the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism was of such great precision that it puts modern clock makers to shame.

Reading more about this mechanism on Wikipedia it says:
In short, the Antikythera Mechanism was a machine designed to predict celestial phenomena according to the sophisticated astronomical theories current in its day, the sole witness to a lost history of brilliant engineering, a conception of pure genius, one of the great wonders of the ancient world—but it didn’t really work very well!

and

Though the engineering was remarkable for its era, recent research indicates that its design conception exceeded the engineering precision of its manufacture by a wide margin—with considerable accumulative inaccuracies in the gear trains, which would have cancelled out many of the subtle anomalies built into its design.

So it seems that Mr Frank is guilty of making stuff up, or at least not properly checking facts that he liked the sound of.

What other examples are there of pop-sci authors allowing their enthusiasm for the subject to cloud their judgement?

Fuckin’ all of them.

Probably the worst pop-sci book I’ve read was Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace. All about string theory but nowhere in the book does he actually give a clear idea of what the strings are supposed to be.

Bubblecar said:

Probably the worst pop-sci book I’ve read was Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace. All about string theory but nowhere in the book does he actually give a clear idea of what the strings are supposed to be.

I think that’s a bit hard on poor ol’ Michio. It seems to me that no scientist (pop or unpop) wants to talk about what space is made of. For instance I’ve just finished “A Beautiful Question” by Frank Wilczek, which is in many ways a beautiful book, but he talks of space-time fluids, rather than space-time fields, without discussing at all what this fluid might be.

Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” (1988) was pretty good on the whole I thought. But he wrote that a GUT was only about twenty years away IIRC.

Well, I didn’t believe it then…

Ian said:

Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” (1988) was pretty good on the whole I thought. But he wrote that a GUT was only about twenty years away IIRC.

Well, I didn’t believe it then…

I wonder why GUT is so hard to pin down, are our monkey brains limited or is it far more complex than we ever thought, I’d think the former as humans are pretty damn good at innovation and imagination.

Ian said:

Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” (1988) was pretty good on the whole I thought. But he wrote that a GUT was only about twenty years away IIRC.

Well, I didn’t believe it then…

Just like Nook Fusion Power, the prediction of the GUT being about 20 years away remains as accurate as ever.

Cymek said:

Ian said:

Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” (1988) was pretty good on the whole I thought. But he wrote that a GUT was only about twenty years away IIRC.

Well, I didn’t believe it then…

I wonder why GUT is so hard to pin down, are our monkey brains limited or is it far more complex than we ever thought, I’d think the former as humans are pretty damn good at innovation and imagination.

I could be wrong, but I suspect the problem is our in-built respect for authority.

Someone said something that is fundamentally wrong, but no-one questions it because it is just one of the accepted basics.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Ian said:

Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” (1988) was pretty good on the whole I thought. But he wrote that a GUT was only about twenty years away IIRC.

Well, I didn’t believe it then…

Just like Nook Fusion Power, the prediction of the GUT being about 20 years away remains as accurate as ever.

Pfft, when I graduated as an optometrist 35 years ago an artificial cornea was “just around the corner”. Long way between corners, you still have to wait for someone to die to get a new cornea.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-07/trump-should-not-be-allowed-to-address-uk-parliament-speaker/8246674

Interesting.

Cymek said:

Ian said:

Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” (1988) was pretty good on the whole I thought. But he wrote that a GUT was only about twenty years away IIRC.

Well, I didn’t believe it then…

I wonder why GUT is so hard to pin down, are our monkey brains limited or is it far more complex than we ever thought, I’d think the former as humans are pretty damn good at innovation and imagination.

Insufficent evidence, basically

> What other examples are there of pop-sci authors allowing their enthusiasm for the subject to cloud their judgement?

Let’s see. Not all strictly science, but all cases where enthusiasm clouded judgement. These a just a few that spring quickly to mind.

Velikovsky: “Worlds in Collision” – echos of his error can still be found in the works of Mike Brown and others.

Menzies: “1421”.

Keel: “Operation Trojan Horse” – and other books about UFOs.

The club of Rome: “The limits to growth”.

ESP research.

Cryonics.

Drexler: “Engines of creation”.

Marie Curie’s promotion of radium.

Asbestos.

“Thalidomide doctor guilty of medical fraud: William McBride”.

Paul Kammerer and the midwife toad.

————————————————————————————————————-

I used to keep a collection of quotes by scientists who had got a bit too enthusiastic. Such as:
“in just a few hundred billion years”

and my favourite
“beauty is …

… the call of the scarlet-sided pobblebonk”.

> What other examples are there of pop-sci authors allowing their enthusiasm for the subject to cloud their judgement?

Let’s see. Not all strictly science, but all cases where enthusiasm clouded judgement. These a just a few that spring quickly to mind.

…

Von Daniken: “Chariots of the gods”.

Lilly, dolphin researcher and author, who gave the dolphins he was researching LSD in order to see if that made communication easier.

Swedenborg, the chemist who wrote “Heaven and Hell” and in doing so founded a new religion.

Readers Digest, writing about cures for cancer.

Controlled nuclear fusion, about it being clean (it isn’t), cheap (it isn’t), and just around the corner (it isn’t).

Flying cars.

Everything in “Omni” magazine.

The first ever article about the A-bomb in the magazine Scientific American was titled “Don’t worry, it can’t happen”.

Mars meteorite ALH84001.

Discovery of a fifth force – has appeared many times, one early one was a study showing that the strength of gravity varied from Newton’s law as you got deeper in a mine.

Cold fusion.

SETI.

Futurama.

Everything that’s ever been written in pop-sci about wormholes, hyperspace, teleportation (other than quantum), faster than light.

MOND.

———————————————————-

It’s beginning to look as if everything in pop-sci about string theory and supersymmetry should be added to that list as well.

> What other examples are there of pop-sci authors allowing their enthusiasm for the subject to cloud their judgement?

The entire output of Mythbusters. Their adherence to the scientific method is right up there with Top Gear’s.

Ecocrap

> What other examples are there of pop-sci authors allowing their enthusiasm for the subject to cloud their judgement?

I haven’t seen Al Gore “An inconvenient truth”, but …

mollwollfumble said:

> What other examples are there of pop-sci authors allowing their enthusiasm for the subject to cloud their judgement?

I haven’t seen Al Gore “An inconvenient truth”, but …

—-

but I am very interested in Greenland real estate…

mollwollfumble said:

> What other examples are there of pop-sci authors allowing their enthusiasm for the subject to cloud their judgement?

I haven’t seen Al Gore “An inconvenient truth”, but …

It was actually quite good and was instrumental of bringing global warming to the public’s attention. For this it was hounded by all the GW Deniers, as it pointed out the considerable dangers to the environment caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Carson’s Silent Spring, got much the same treatment from vested interests.