{"id":11767,"date":"2020-05-27T12:47:59","date_gmt":"2020-05-27T16:47:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11767"},"modified":"2020-05-27T12:47:59","modified_gmt":"2020-05-27T16:47:59","slug":"the-weeks-anti-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11767","title":{"rendered":"The Week’s Anti-Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"

I never thought I would see this happen: a university PR department correcting media hype about its research. You might have noticed this comment here a week ago<\/a>, about a flurry of media hype about neutrinos and parallel universes. A new CNN story<\/a> does a good job of explaining where the nonsense came from. The main offender was New Scientist<\/a>, which got the parallel universe business somehow from Neil Turok and from here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The ANITA scientists and their institution’s PR people were not exactly blameless, having participated in a 2018 publicity campaign to promote the idea that they had discovered not a parallel universe, but supersymmetry. They reported an observation here<\/a>, which led to lots of dubious speculative theory papers, such as this one about staus<\/a>. The University of Hawaii in December 2018 put out a press release announcing that UH professor\u2019s Antarctica discovery may herald new model of physics<\/a>. One can find all sorts of stories from this period about how this was evidence for supersymmetry, see for instance here<\/a>, or here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s great to see that the University of Hawaii has tried to do something at least about the latest “parallel universe” nonsense, putting out last week a press release entitled Media incorrectly connects UH research to parallel universe theory<\/a>. CNN quotes a statement from NASA (I haven’t seen a public source for this), which includes:<\/p>\n

Tabloids have misleadingly connected NASA and Gorham’s experimental work, which identified some anomalies in the data, to a theory proposed by outside physicists not connected to the work. Gorham believes there are more plausible, easier explanations to the anomalies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The public understanding of fundamental physics research and the credibility of the subject have suffered a huge amount of damage over the past few decades, due to the overwhelming amount of misleading, self-serving BS about parallel universes and failed speculative ideas put out by physicists, university PR departments and the journalists who mistakenly take them seriously. I hope this latest is the beginning of a new trend of people in all these categories starting to fight hype, not spread it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I never thought I would see this happen: a university PR department correcting media hype about its research. You might have noticed this comment here a week ago, about a flurry of media hype about neutrinos and parallel universes. A … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11767"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11773,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11767\/revisions\/11773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}