59 questions · 28 sources · 0 syntheses
Hoaxes and Pseudoscience
Scientific frauds, hoaxes, and unfounded claims.
Source-derived questions
Questions extracted from the papers in this topic, excluding the curated questions above.
- How did Arnd Leike measure the half-life of beer foam, and why did it vary by beer style?
- How did Bower and Chorley demonstrate the hoax to a journalist in 1991?
- How did Brendan McKay debunk the Bible Code by applying the same method to Moby-Dick?
- How did Credonia Mwerinde's followers in Uganda respond to her 1999 end-times prediction?
- How did L. Ron Hubbard go from pulp science fiction writer to founder of a religion built around his self-improvement psychology?
- How did Sokal reveal that the paper was a deliberate test, and what was the response from Social Text's editors?
- How did nine-year-old Emily Rosa design a controlled experiment to test whether practitioners could detect an energy field?
- How did researchers construct grammatically sound but meaningless sentences to test perceived profundity?
- How did the replication team, which included a magician, test Benveniste's results?
- How did the sharper Mars Global Surveyor images in 1998 resolve the 'face on Mars' controversy?
- How does the frontal cortex actively project face-like templates onto ambiguous visual noise?
- What became known as the Sokal Affair, and why has it kept generating academic discussion?
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- What central thesis did Erich von Däniken advance in Chariots of the Gods?
- What claim did Benveniste's 1988 Nature paper make about extremely diluted antibody solutions?
- What claims did Deepak Chopra make about quantum mechanics underpinning consciousness and healing?
- What conclusion did John E. Mack and David M. Jacobs reach about alien abduction reports?
- What did Chonosuke Okamura claim to have discovered in the polished limestone from his local quarry?
- What did Corentin Louis Kervran claim happens inside hens to produce eggshell calcium?
- What did Emily Rosa's published results reveal about practitioners' ability to sense the energy field better than chance?
- What did Jasmuheen claim about human beings' need for food and water?
- What did John Hagelin claim his 1994 Transcendental Meditation experiment in Washington, D.C. accomplished?
- What did Michael Drosnin's bestseller The Bible Code claim to have found?
- What did Richard Hoagland claim to see in the Cydonia region beyond the face itself?
- What did neuroimaging reveal about the brains of people who can speak backwards?
- What did the 1976 Viking 1 image of Cydonia actually show, and at what resolution?
- What did the Ig Nobel committee actually praise about Hubbard's Dianetics?
- What does it mean to speak fluently backwards, and how does it differ from just reversing a few words?
- What explanations had researchers proposed for crop circles before the hoax was revealed?
- What happened when a television programme tried to observe her going without food and water?
- What is Therapeutic Touch, and how did Dolores Krieger promote it as a clinical practice?
- What is an equidistant letter sequence, and how was it used to claim Genesis held hidden messages?
- What is pareidolia and why do people see faces in toast or clouds?
- What lesson did the Ig Nobel committee say this collective failure taught the public?
- What made Harold Camping's 2011 doomsday predictions especially notable among the laureates?
- What methods of execution did Harold Hillman analyse from a physiological standpoint?
- What personality or cognitive traits predicted who rated meaningless statements as profound?
- What physical properties of black holes did the Van Impes cite as matching theological descriptions of Hell?
- What simpler explanation for eggshell calcium did Kervran overlook?
- What specific odds did Robert Faid calculate for Mikhail Gorbachev being the Antichrist?
- What tools did Doug Bower and David Chorley use to make crop circles in Hampshire?
- What tragedy became linked to Comet Hale-Bopp's approach in March 1997?
- What was Alan Sokal's hoax paper arguing, and why was it constructed to sound plausible to its intended audience?
- What was Jacques Benveniste's original 1991 claim about water retaining a memory of dissolved substances?
- What was the deliberately ironic title of Oppenheimer's paper?
- What were the microscopic structures Okamura interpreted as miniature fossils actually made of?
- What yogic claim about nostril breathing and brain hemispheres did this study set out to test?
- Which ancient structures did von Däniken argue could not have been built by the people who actually built them?
- Which methods presumed to be humane did Hillman conclude probably were not?
- Why did Mack treat the consistency of abductees' accounts as significant clinical evidence?
- Why did Wellesley College dismiss Emily Greene Balch from her professorship in 1919?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee place this grim, serious study in the Peace category?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee single out Chopra's use of quantum terminology specifically for its tenuous relationship to actual physics?
- Why did the Washington Metropolitan Police Department dispute Hagelin's claimed 24 percent drop in violent crime?
- Why did the precision of Faid's number trouble the Ig Nobel committee more than the claim itself?
- Why did the public fear Earth passing through the comet's tail in May 1910?
- Why does searching a very long text for patterns almost guarantee you'll find something?
- Why might studying a skill with no practical use reveal something about how the brain is architected?
- Why would Kervran's theory of biological transmutation contradict established nuclear physics?
- Why would a face-detection system evolve to favour false positives over false negatives?
Sources
- Comet Hale-Bopp reaches perihelion
- Halley's Comet returns as predicted by Newton's laws
- Ig Nobel Prize in Astronomy
- Ig Nobel Prize in Astrophysics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Biodiversity
- Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Ig Nobel Prize in Communication
- Ig Nobel Prize in Literature
- Ig Nobel Prize in Literature
- Ig Nobel Prize in Literature
- Ig Nobel Prize in Literature
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- Ig Nobel Prize in Literature
- Ig Nobel Prize in Literature
- Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine
- Ig Nobel Prize in Neuroscience
- Ig Nobel Prize in Peace
- Ig Nobel Prize in Peace
- Ig Nobel Prize in Peace
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Physics
- Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology
- Ig Nobel Prize in Science Education
- Nobel Peace Prize