imagine robert stack reading it to you
Via Michael, and now Slashdot, check out New Scientist's Thirteen Things That Do Not Make Sense. It's a fascinating read, although it overstates the evidence for homeopathy and cold fusion, and makes the placebo effect sound more mysterious than it is by pretending that biochemistry and psychology are neatly separable. There's a brief but (I think) interesting tidbit from my undergrad days after the cut.
Anyway, go have a read. I won't pretend to understand the scientific ramifications of each of the potential resolutions to these mysteries. But personally, I read "mystery in physics" as "there's still a chance for hoverboards".
I remember hearing in a pharmacology class that recovering addicts are supposed to avoid environments associated with their substance abuse. The reason is twofold -- first, if they're visiting the same places, they're more likely to engage in their former patterns of behavior. That's simple enough to understand.
But there's a purely biological reason, as well. If you put a heroin user in the basement where he used to shoot up, his body will react in a Pavlovian way to the surrounding environment and produce a response: his heartrate and blood pressure will go up, and he may become more sensitive to pain. The body is getting ready to partially counteract the administration of the heroin -- biological systems are big on this whole "equilibrium" thing, and they'll fight back, so to speak, against many types of drugs.
Anyway, all of this preparation done by the body exacerbates the perceived need for the heroin, making a relapse more likely. Better to stay out of the basement.
All of which is a long way of saying that yes, the body appears to learn, based on sensory input, what its biochemical state "ought" to be. It's not a huge leap from there to assume that the expectation of relief could become associated with the stimulation of opioid receptors, and that the brain might pump out extra endorphines if it realizes its opioid receptors "ought" to be more stimulated.
It's only if you think of the mind as unidirectional, causal machine (in the flowchart sense) that this seems counterintuitive. I'm probably overreaching to say this, but I suspect that in general neural networks are better thought of as creating associative relationships between stimuli rather than as creating deterministic chains (although groupings of the former can certainly approximate the latter).
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Sorry Tommy, but that article is pretty lame. Or at least, it doesn't live up to its title. "Ten unexplained phenomena in cosmology and high energy physics" would have been okay. But homeopathy and cold fusion have been pretty well debunked (despite ongoing research), and to say that the placebo effect "doesn't make sense" is just ridiculous. We have a strong understanding of not only the reasons for the placebo effect, but the underlying biochemistry as well.
Also, counting dark energy and dark matter as two separate phenomena is lame. And they don't really fit, anyway - the problem isn't that they don't make sense, the problem is that we can't prove they exist. The whole reason we're looking is because they do make sense (to a physist, at least).
There's a book I think you'd enjoy called "The undergrowth of science: delusion, self-deception and human frailty" by Walter Gratzer. I'll sum it up for you by saying, "cold fusion deez nutzz".
well, I agree with you about homeopathic medicine, the placebo effect and cold fusion, and hopefully made that clear w/ the qualifiers I applied.
But I still think dark energy and matter should count. Isn't the former hinted at by the expansion of the universe, and the latter by the galaxy not flying apart? or is there a unifying issue at hand? Plus, the fact of there being such massive, missing items from the physical ledger is a pretty big deal. It *is* weird to think that a huge proportion of the universe's mass can't be observed in the same way as the rest of it. Not nonsensical, but still kinda mysterious.
my understanding has been that the term "homeopathic" is thrown around a lot as a catchall for "natural" remedies, but that homeopathic medicine, strictly defined, is really all about the water memory mumbo jumbo, and therefore properly derided.
the white blood cell study is interesting, but fwiw, I've read elsewhere that the data in that experiment came from investigators counting the occurrence of an event under the microscope. I haven't tracked down more details to confirm that, but if it's the case it certainly opens up some possible explanations. I'm not sure if microbiologists generally use double blind protocols, but my suspicion is that they don't.
Heh... I guess I should actually read what you say instead of just following your links. But even so, the fact that those three were even mentioned I think nullifies the entire article. How can you trust their discussion of the horizon problem if they don't have the facts straight elsewhere?
interesting. But then, the obvious problem is how to disentangle the just-induced "water memory" from the memory it should presumably hold of everything else those molecules interacted with throughout the years, but are no longer in the presence of. Why is the non-present spider venom having an effect, but not the snake venom from when molecule 1231240358745945079234 lived in the poison glands of a rattle snake a hundred thousand years ago?
Have they got an answer for this, or is water just considered "new" when it comes out of the distilled water bottle/tap?
or is the argument that those effects would average out, but that the ones in the new sample have all been "tuned" to the remembered substance (and can propagate that effect to other water molecules that weren't)?
Seems like homeopathy ought to get past its logical problems before it tackles any empirical ones. Still, I agree that it'd be interesting to see it investigated more (world of infinite resource, etc etc).
shit. archival note: michael of articultory loop's thoughtful postings seem to have been eaten by our anti-spam engine. shit.
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