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



An interesting question might be whether the phenomena have actually
shifted?

I don't think that most scientists would buy into this, but sometimes it may
actually happen. So in biology a drug which once worked can become
ineffective due to resistance. But another distinct possibility is the
problem of systematic error.

The very first measurement of any phenomenon might have some systematic
error which was not discovered. To publish another value one may have to do
a better job, so subsequent measurements may have lower systematic errors.

Sometimes researchers might be accused of falsifying data when in reality
there were factors that were different from subsequent research. In biology
it is often very difficult to control all of the factors, but the same thing
can happen in physics. We did some very accurate Neutron cross sections
which disagreed with Karlsruhe. It seemed that they used a multi shot TAC
which required some very complicated corrections. But the corrections were
wrong which filled in the valleys of the cross sections. Their data was
considered to be definitive and published in "The Barn Book", but they tried
to get high statistics at the expense of accuracy. They even admitted they
had problems when we talked to them personally, but it wasn't in writing.

But science works by checking other groups measurements. So eventually you
hopefully zero in on more accurate results.

There certainly are some measurements which may have been tweaked too much.
An example is the Hawthorne effect. The original data was lost, and I
understand that subsequently others have not really been able to replicate
the data. But the original paper is so compelling that it is quoted as
being true. The effect may not actually exist, or be very weak. For those
who are not familiar with it, it is a psychological placebo effect. When
you pay attention to workers they produce more output.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX




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.