13 things that do not make sense

[n2doc]

Updated 10:47 14 April 2009 by Michael Brooks

1 The placebo effect
Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.

more:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-not-make-sense.html

[trotsky]

1. Pretty poorly written article.

Parts appear to be at least a few years old, too. These aren't things that "don't make sense," they are data that we have yet to incorporate. As some descriptions note, they could be experimental errors - not mysterious at all. It's possible theories might need to be discarded or altered to accommodate new data, but then again, that's how science works. It's how all our current theories got to where they are: new data was acquired, and existing theories discarded or altered.

It's just annoying to encounter this kind of "science" writing, that makes it all sound so mysterious and unknowable - feeding the woo movement.

[HamdenRice]

2. Have you read "Structure of Scientific Revolutions"?

"These aren't things that "don't make sense," they are data that we have yet to incorporate."

I think what the article was getting at is that for the data to "make sense" science in certain areas will need a "new paradigm" -- a process of intellectual development that is different from the normal process of accretion and incorporation of data.

[trotsky]

3. Then it only reinforces my point.

It's a poorly written article.

[HamdenRice]

4. OK

The writer does not do a good job of distinguishing between those phenomenon that are just anomalous data, but that could be incorporated into current models, and those that would require a substantial alteration of the current model.

[laconicsax]

5. Homeopathy?

#4