flinn@seismo.UUCP (E. A. Flinn) (03/16/84)
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The net discussion of ESP and of 'scientific' evidence for creation
rather than evolution reminds me of the papers submitted to regular
scientific journals by the lunatic fringe. Some of these are pretty
funny. I served a term as editor of the Journal of Geophysical
Research, and we got so many nut papers that I had an associate editor
to handle them. We were patient and careful with them, because they
put an awful lot of work into their papers (hand-colored figures and so
on), and I think the scientific establishment has a responsibility to
try to help these people see where their ideas have gone wrong. The
associate editor was something of a nut himself, but that's another
story. I wanted to start a system of putting little symbols at the
beginning of each published paper, like the Michelin guides - one or
more stars for good ones, little turkeys for not so good ones, etc.,
but the editorial board didn't think this would work out very well.
Examples of some of the manuscripts we handled:
1. The guy who thought the geomagnetic field was generated by
counter-rotating shells of free electrons and protons in the upper
atmosphere. The associate editor calculated that the time for the
shells to collapse into hydrogen atoms is something like 10^-24
seconds.
2. The guy who noticed that Coulomb's law and Newton's first law looked
the same, and who by equating the forces was thus able to derive the
mass of an electric charge. {a theoretical physicist friend told me I
shouldn't snicker, because he said he saw a lot of things very much
like this in his journals}
3. The guy who used a home-made gravity meter made out of beer cans
and coathangers to detect 'jumps' of the earth in its orbit.
4. The guy who noticed that a string of geographical features lie on a
great circle, from Bermuda to some big lakes in Northwestern Canada,
and who thought there was some geophysical significance in this - just
what it was never made clear.
5. A retired lawyer in New Jersey, who believed that he could prove
that the earth was simultaneously rotating about multiple axes. I was
never able to get him to understand vector addition.
6. James Tatsch of Massachusetts, who derives all geological phenomena
on the basis of his tectosphere theory, and who sells thick books on
tectospheric physics to gullible oil companies.
7. Anton Schneiderov of Washington, DC, who believes that the universe
is permeated by radions, and who calculated the cross-section of the
earth for radion capture from microseisms and the assumed radion flux
in the solar system.
8. An otherwise reputable scientist who claimed to see a sidereal
periodicity in earthquake occurrence statistics. I finally accepted
this one, because neither I nor a battery of reviewers could put our
fingers on just where his mistake was, and after all, as Rutherford
said, you shouldn't bet on anything in science at odds of more than
about 10^12 to 1.
9. The geophysicist (an employee of a U.S. government agency) who had a
demonstrably incorrect theory for earthquake mechanism based on an
algebraic error and extrapolation through 12 orders of magnitude from
rockbursts in mines to great earthquakes. He predicted a magnitude 9
earthquake in Peru for a certain date a few years ago, which caused
very considerable disruption in that country, despite offers from
myself and other geophysicists to go to Lima on the date in question
and swing in a hammock from the highest balcony on the flimsiest
building in the city.
10. Prof. Tamrazyan of the USSR, who found a correlation between
earthquake occurrence and phase of the moon. Completely unrelated to
Tom Heaton of the USGS, who showed that tidal stresses were able to
trigger small earthquakes under favorable circumstances.
11. A guy at a California State College who built a cryogenic gravity
meter and claimed to see free oscillations of the earth in the record
made by the boiling helium. He managed to get two papers in Nature in
1972. They were real beauties - he drew a 95% confidence limit line on
his spectra, and proudly pointed out that about 1/20 of the peaks were
above the line. After the rebuttals from me and others began to
appear, the editor of Nature told me I'd lose my lunch if I knew who
the reviewers of those papers were. If you're interested you should
look up the rebuttal comments, some of which are quite funny.
12. An otherwise reputable seismologist who found that more
earthquakes occur at night than in the daytime, forgetting that the
noise background is lower at night, so more earthquakes are detected
then than in the daytime.
13. Finally, my favorite: Prof. Abraham Hoffer of Malcolm X University
in Chicago, who submitted a paper on how plate motion on the earth is
caused by relaxation of the earth from its original 'Saturn
flattening,' by which he seemed to mean that the earth once had the
same ellipticity as Saturn. I rejected the paper, and got back a
protest letter twice as long as the paper. Each letter I sent provoked
an even longer reply, until I stopped writing him. Months later I
got a carbon copy of a letter to Hoffer from the editor of another
journal saying that he [the editor] didn't really think they had space
to publish the text of all the correspondence between Hoffer and me...