7 great scientific hoaxes

Scammers from naukiUvazhayuschie scientists themselves diligently trying to distance itself from cheap special effects and speculation facts. Nevertheless, hoaxers from science manages to fool even experienced professors.

Ethereal mashinaVydayuschiysya American naturalist of the nineteenth century, John Worrell Keely, like many others, dreamed of building a perpetual motion machine. And in 1885, he said to have invented a fundamentally new mechanism works by using sound vibrations, "resonate with the ether." Indeed, in his public eksperimantah vibration forks raised trehkilogrammovye metal balls and is driven by a large mechanical wheel.





Soon Keely became the official author of a new science - physics of sympathetic vibrations - and convinced investors to open a company Keely Motor Company, to finance its further development and experiments. But then the scientist began to play for time, maintaining the interest of sponsors spectacular experiments, but without providing commercial samples. And after the death of Keely it proved that history with essential vibrations - just focus: the house and the laboratory of the inventor were equipped with devices with compressed air, which is driven by its instruments. However, not all countries experiments Keely skeptics have found an explanation - so the scientist left a lot of fans.

Mysterious toksinV 1990 three students of the University of California decided to see how far can go the Americans in their confidence in environmental advocacy. And distributed flyers on campus, warns about water pollution dangerous substance - dihydrogen monoxide. Four years later, Craig Jackson has created a web page 'Association to ban DHMO », and in 1997, 14-year-old student Nathan Zoner Idaho collected 43 votes to ban chemical survey of 50 classmates. The catch lies in the fact that "dihydrogen monoxide" - this is just an alternative chemical name for water.





Zoner study of human credulity has received recognition at the Science Fair in Idaho, but the problem is the use of dihydrogen monoxide continued to disturb the minds of many years later. Last loud case was recorded in August 2007, when a member of the New Zealand Parliament Jacqueline Dean asked the Minister of Health, any plans to do anything to prohibit this harmful substance. A website dedicated to joke, is still active.

Generator stateyNemalo scientific problems brought to the scientific community computer program SCIgen, developed at MIT. The program is created, according to the developers, more for fun than for profit, generate a random text that resembles a scientific article - with illustrations, diagrams and notes.



But in 2005, suddenly it turned out that the creation SCIgen not so difficult to accept at face value - Article Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy has been accepted for publication by the International Conference WMSC, and the authors invited to make a presentation. The authors spoke about the hoax on your website and because of the gullibility conference organizer lost the financial support of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

But this sad example did the scientists attention: pseudoscientific article calmly took to the publication of two more conferences. And another similar article was leaked to the magazine Applied Mathematics and Computation, where she had time to remove the print - the author is still admitted in the drawing.

The invention MIT delivered anxiety and Russian editors: staff of popular newspaper "Troitsky Variant - Science" translated into Russian text Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy and managed to publish it in the "Journal of publications graduate and doctoral students" ( paid, however, for the publication of 4500 rubles). The publication caused a scandal in the scientific community, and the magazine removed from the list of VAK. Slip wording was more noticeable that article loomed some clear hints - in particular, was listed in the bibliography of the author names Softporn.

Read more on the website «T & P»

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