Misunderstood Science Pet Peeves

[Turtle]

___Science is only as good as what people learn from it & I have a few pet peeves regarding good science gone bad.
___One such peeve I already addressed is the misunderstanding that air friction heats meteors or other masses entering Earth's atmosphere from space. Find the article that gets it wrong & my comments here:
http://hypography.com/forums/general-science-news/3849-asteroid-dust-may-influence-weather-study.html

___Next pet peeve is the mistaken idea that rivers carve valleys, as in grinding them down out of rock. No, no, no... a thousand times no! The river in a valley is only a conveyor - a carrying mechanism - of broken rock & does almost no breaking of bedrock in the bottom of its channel. It is solar heating, freezing temperatures, water, & biota that weather the bedrock into smaller parts - boulders, cobbles, pebbles, sand, silt - which then move by gravity to the conveying river in the valley bottom & so downstream to the rivers mouth.
___Here is a photo of the Toutle River meandering down its valley; the valley floor here is now 100's of feet above the level before the 1980 Mt. St. Helens explosion. The river carrying the sediments downstream, not "carving" a valley. (The sediment in this case is trapped downstream behind a huge sediment dam built by the Army Corps of Engineers)

http://hypography.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=485

___What misunderstood science pet peeves do you have?

[Turtle]

___I watched a PBS show tonight on the Missoula Floods & darn if they didn't refer to rivers "scouring out" valleys. Good grief! Great new research & evidence of these floods & then they let the narrator say something so ignorant. Good grief!
___They did present some nice demonstrations of high-speed water vortices generating high pressure bubbles which can scour out potholes - huge potholes in the case of the Scablands of Washington created by the Missoula Floods-. Never the less, this is a high speed/pressure phenomenon & the votex is very localized; again, rivers primarily convey erroded local rock away from valleys & do little active errosion themselves.

[Eclogite]

Pet peeve? Mine is generic: the notion that science provides a comprehensive, accurate assemblage of facts, when it merely delivers a best-guess under current circumstances assessment. [Mind you, that's one heck of a merely.]

[Tormod]

My pet peeve is people who think that scientists (and people who are interested in science) think that what they know is anything but an evaluation of data.

[GAHD]

When people attribute the same qualities to time that they do to space: time is *not* a dimension.

[damocles]

Originally Posted by GAHD

When people attribute the same qualities to time that they do to space: time is *not* a dimension.

In that same vein, people who think that "space" is not quantized.

Best wishes;

[Erasmus00]

Originally Posted by GAHD

When people attribute the same qualities to time that they do to space: time is *not* a dimension.

Most astrophysicists would disagree.

My biggest pet peeve is "the laws of physics don't allow a bee to fly" and such nonsense. Physics is the original empirical science, we don't make "laws" that contradict obvious fact.
-Will

[infamous]

My greatest pet peeves are people holding to positions just because someone with a name introduced it into scientific legitimacy. It's true that most of this material is true and has good experimental basis to support the positions. However, accepting it as fact just because someone of notoriety has voiced the position without inspecting the evidence is too much like jumping on the bandwagon for me. Just examine the history of science and you'll find, many great names that frankly were just honestly mistaken. "The more things change, the more they remain the same"...........John S. Mill

[Kriminal99]

Originally Posted by Tormod

My pet peeve is people who think that scientists (and people who are interested in science) think that what they know is anything but an evaluation of data.

I agree... What percentage of scientists in circles that you are aware of think this way? I have limited exposure to them, but I was starting to develop the belief that the good scientists, the ones with sufficient self skepticism, were few and far between and basically the philosophers of the scientific community.

Originally Posted by infamous

My greatest pet peeves are people holding to positions just because someone with a name introduced it into scientific legitimacy. It's true that most of this material is true and has good experimental basis to support the positions. However, accepting it as fact just because someone of notoriety has voiced the position without inspecting the evidence is too much like jumping on the bandwagon for me. Just examine the history of science and you'll find, many great names that frankly were just honestly mistaken. "The more things change, the more they remain the same"...........John S. Mill

Nice... This forum is run by people alot smarter than some other forums I have visited...

[CraigD]

My pet “bad science” peeve isn’t about any actual science documentaries, but about the confusion of scifi – fictional science – with speculation about science.

I’ve loved Science fiction since before I could actually read. I thing the genre has and continues to promote thoughtful consideration of moral, social, and scientific ideas as or more effectively than the other arts. However, I’ve seen droves of bright people completely confuse scifi concepts like “hyper-space” and “warp drive” with Science concepts like “extra dimensions” and “General Relativity.”

Having been both a Math student and an avid scifi gamer and convention goer, I think I have a good understanding of the phenomena. Attempting to reconcile the often whimsical and ad hoc concepts of science fiction (particularly the “space opera” sub-genre containing Star Trek, Star Wars, and a plethora of similar franchises and one-offs), with actual Physics, is technically challenging. Modeling fictional physics on a computer is challenging, and intensely fun. However, with a few exceptions, these are frivolous, and – I hesitate to use the term, but can think of none more gentle – delusional pursuits. A thousand hours of work on a Spaceship combat game is fun, and the resulting game fun, but, while the programming techniques learned can be useful, the science model is in a sense worse than worthless, because of the peril of taking it seriously, confusing it with reality. It’s like crack cocaine for the Math/Science literate.

Books like Krause’s

“The Physics of Star Trek”
“The Physics of Star Trek”

do an excellent job of combating this kind confusion of fiction and reality. However, the lure of wish-fulfilling pseudo-science is strong, and, unfortunate, often strongest among people with a real love and talent for Science.

Getting to the point: my peeve is with many of the people involved in the creative process of commercial science fiction. I believe it’s possible for popular, main-stream SF in all the medias to be as scientifically robust as the more obscure, “hard” sub-stream. Main-stream SF fails to live up to this potential, I believe, due to an art culture that place entertainment inordinately before factuality.

They’re hurting humankind (or at least not helping as much as they could). They should stop (or at least, improve). Alas, I’m long departed from any proximity to any kind of mainstream media, so don’t have much ability to take arms against my peeve. If any of ya’ll are, I’d appreciate it if you’d.