The Curious Case of Polywater (opens in new tab)

Media overhypes a cautious plea for assistance made by scientists. Scientists receive their assistance, and announce that the discrepancy has been resolved. Media looks foolish, and claims the entire incident is indicative of flaws in the current state of science.

Good times.

Agreed. Everyone in the physics community pretty much knew that the FTL neutrino problem had to be a measurement error, including the group who published it. I think one individual had to resign because they jumped the gun a bit on the initial announcement, but overall they hit a situation with a pretty crazy and groundbreaking result and none of them could poke holes in it, and all of them were skeptical about it. They published that information in the most responsible manner possible, but the media handled it pretty poorly.

Some other cases are the first two "discoveries" of the top quark, which were both wrong (and the one in 1984 was by Rubbia who won a Nobel Prize for the W and the Z so he wasn't really a lightweight). Recently, CDF at Fermilab had to retract their W+multijet mystery which might have been a leptophobic Z' boson, but was just that they didn't understand their background (again, everyone kinda saw that one coming as well). Also a couple of the dark matter detectors thought they had some signal, but the recently announced LUX experiment negative results pretty much crushed them. This kind of back-and-forth actually happens all the time. That isn't bad science, that's just science.

Absolutely agree. It's written like a badly scripted History Channel "documentary"... "But what was discovered in the tomb? Find out after the commercial break."

Ugh!

My favorite part about all this is the fear of a "Polywater Gap."

Mandrake, how does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual.

MR. PRESIDENT?! I WILL NOT ALLOW A MINESHAFT GAP!!!

...and then all the parallels with the Cat's Cradle novel, by Kurt Vonnegut, heaped on top.

It's like everyone in national security sits around watching movies and reading novels, and then goes out into the world the very next day, and tries to act them out as part of some warped vision of what they think reality should be, given their advantage for shaping world events.

There's something seriously bizarre and disturbing about that.

Known as confirmation bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Yes, but I don't think there was anything new about adding salt to water to lower the freezing point.

Yeah, I was thinking that the plot sounded interesting and I should look for the book... then he said how it ends. Poop.

In the book, it didn't really freeze the oceans "in an instant." It took several days.

Yes and no: in that flying and computers have been possible since the dawn of time. But they emerged at specific times. So this leads folks to always be cautious to reject. But to your point: it isn't definitely true until proven.

Spoiler alert: Something was wrong with the science.