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Re: [Phys-l] "The Truth Wears Off" by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker Dec 13, 2010.

But since most of his examples involved the life sciences, I wonder
if there are examples of this sort of thing in the physical sciences.

In the last column on the last page of the same article, this claim is made: "The same holds for any number of phenomena... the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons... appears to have fallen by more than 10 standard deviations between 1969 and 2001." He then cites an even weaker example (IMO) about gravity.

Don't know if anyone here can expand on the neutron decay issue - as pointed out, there are no citations. A brief search otherwise did not come up with any such claim, but I was terribly inexhaustive.


Stefan Jeglinski