Saturday, October 4, 2014

You should be skeptical about Scientific American

The cover story of this months Scientific American is "How Big Bang Gravitational Waves could revolutionise Physics," by Lawrence Krauss


It begins:
If the recent discovery of gravitational waves emanating from the early universe holds up under scrutiny, it will illuminate a connection between gravity and quantum mechanics and perhaps, in the process, verify the existence of other universes
Unfortunately, for the magazine, this "discovery" was discredited a few weeks ago. You can read about it here, on Peter Woit's excellent blog, that consistently critiques string theory and the multiverse.

As a scientist, I find the level of hype and speculation masquerading as science that is found in popular science magazines, particularly New Scientist, disturbing. It is quite unrepresentative of what the majority of scientists actually do, believe, and actually know.

1 comment:

  1. Absolutely .I gave up my subscription to New Scientist years ago . It seems speculation alone has status almost equivalent to grace alone amongst many . Clearly one of the tests of sound speculation is if it bears fruit longer term . new scientist seemed to live off the fruit and was certainly no where near practical enough either - being infact quite ignorant of where one should begin and end with foundations in my area of applied chemistry and geophysics
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