56 | NewScientist | 20 April 2019For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback
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This week’s and past Feedbacks can
be seen on our website.PA
UL
MC
DE
VIT
T
you’ve just got a lot of people
in safety goggles angrily beating
the floor with their fists.
It is a simple enough principle.
If your experiment says a
certain effect should follow a
certain cause, then anybody
replicating that cause should
observe the same effect. Trouble
is, this doesn’t happen as often
as it should. It happens so
infrequently, in fact – about 50 per
cent of the time – that a team of
researchers in Germany decided
to save themselves the bother of
replicating an experiment by
flipping a coin instead.
Their satirical experiment was
intended to make a serious point
about deficiencies in clinical
trials, but Feedback worries
people may get the wrong idea.
We predict the rapid emergence
of coinology, a scientific discipline
dedicated to picking the right coin
to produce the desired results.
Detailed sub-disciplines will nodoubt emerge, pitting the pound
against the euro on the basis of
flippability and heft. And
theoretical numismatists will
hypothesise a perfect, ideal coin
that exists in 12 dimensions, is
responsible for the accelerated
expansion of the universe and
always comes up heads.LAST week, Feedback reported on
a study testing how willing students
were to bluff their way through
tough questions. When presented
with entirely made-up mathematical
concepts, such as “proper numbers”,
“subjunctive scaling” and
“declarative fractions”, many
chose to invent definitions rather
than plead ignorance.
Since then, it has been pointed
out to us that these expressions do
in fact have legitimate mathematical
meaning. A proper number, for
example, invariably refers to itself
as “one”; subjunctive scaling always
involves an element of rotation,
depending as it does on how one is
inclined; and declarative fractions
cannot have their arguments
simplified without appeal to the
lowest common denominator.
Readers are invited to correct
the above definitions if they feel
we have somehow erred, and to
suggest their own entries for the
following bona fide mathematical
concepts that somehow remain
undefined: impulsive value, sinister
multiplication and trivial figures.THE latest issue of Pure and
Applied Mathematics Quarterly
wasn’t a terribly diverse affair.
All five of its articles, spanning
more than 600 pages of dense
mathematical physics, were
written by people who look
alike, sound alike, are of the same
age, height, weight and hat size,
have identical hobbies and share
the same name. In short, they
were all written by Princeton
Institute of Advanced Studies
physicist Ed Witten.
Witten, who has won a Fields
medal and is frequently called
the smartest man alive by some
of the other smartest people alive,is clearly no slouch when it comes
to churning out copy. We look
forward to his future publications
in Productivity, Writing and No
Sleep Monthly, The Journal of
Applied Overachievers A and
Inferiority Complex Review.INTERNATIONAL man of cutlery
Uri Geller has been back in the
public eye of late after claiming he
would use telepathy to stop the UK
from leaving the European Union.
He implored prime minister
Theresa May to change course,
but frustratingly for the noted
spoon-smith, his intervention
appeared to have no impact.
Contrary to some reports, May is
not made of metal, and is therefore
apparently invulnerable to Geller’s
unique brand of mental manipulation.
So Geller came up with an
alternative plan. On 4 April, a pipe
burst in the House of Commons,Rob Ellis sends us a photo of a “Moroccan
vegetable pasty” encased in packaging that
promises “a taste of Cornwall”. “Did someone
move Cornwall or Morocco?” he askscausing a flood that necessitated
the suspension of the parliamentary
session. Geller immediately claimed
responsibility on Twitter, saying “I can’t
sack them but I can soak them”.
One observer on Twitter
remarked that Geller’s foray into
political terrorism should earn
him the nickname “Guy Forks”.
However, we can’t help thinking
that his pragmatism, flexibility
and willingness to accept the
limitations of his abilities should be
an example to Britain’s politicians.BUREAUCRATS in Brussels have turned
their attention to one of Feedback’s
favourite subjects: nutritional
nomenclature. The European
Parliament’s agriculture committee has
decreed that vegetarian food should
not be labelled with terms usually
reserved for meat, such as steak,
sausage or burger. French MEP Éric
Andrieu dismissed suggestions that
the meat industry’s trotter-prints were
on the legislation, adding that “people
need to know what they are eating”.
Feedback was unaware that those
buying veggie burgers or sausages
were under any illusions about
their contents, but perhaps there is
a case for increasing clarity. No doubt
vegetarian food producers who
grasp the opportunity to rebrand
their wares as bean pucks and
mycoprotein cylinders will soon be
bringing home the streaky tofu strips.REPLICATION is to the scientific
process what water is to a
swimming pool: without it,