The multi-dimensional generalization of the Virasoro algebra beats SUSY at negativity, since it is forbidden not just by one, but by two no-go theorems:

1. In field theory, there are no diff anomalies in 4D.
2. The difeomorphism algebra has no central extensions except in 1D.

Fortunately, I didn’t know about these no-go theorems when I started to look. Sometimes ignorance is a good thing.

Hi Warren,

I’m not sure what you mean by

Your arguments are proven false by that simple example.

I would agree that most news is negative. It seems that you agree that most science news is not. We most also seem to agree that in order to get consistent decent science reporting, one needs many more and much more highly trained science reporters. What precisely is being proven false?

I think the reasons I gave all do contribute to the reporting phenomenon and find no contradiction in the public being fascinated by the negativity of who’s having an affair with whom and the positivity of science stories (so perhaps that is where we disagree), but agree these obstacles would be overcome if the right reporters were around. But they aren’t.

The main point I found interesting about Goldacre’s article was about medical professional journals.

I wouldn’t be surprised if being assigned to science reporting is not recognition of expertise in that area, but rather promotion from the mail room.

I wouldn’t go that far, but it is certainly true that at many newspapers one need have no particular demonstrated skills to become a science reporter. If papers were really interested in good science reporting, they’d be looking to hire people like K.C. Cole, Tom Siegfried and Dennis Overbye, who are clear examples of how to do it right.

I’ve long thought that there is a market for a special journal — the Journal of Negative Results — which would specialize in such things. Plus it would sound cool when cited: “J. Neg. Res.”.

Hi Mark,

your point is an interesting one. My friends who are successful theorists are sometimes very upset or frustrated when, after a long and difficult effort, they find that their project or theoretical model fails because it is incompatible with solid measurements, or the parameters of their model must take on extreme values in order to satisfy experimental constraints. So I observe the problem that you describe second-hand and can verify that theorists really do want positive results that they can publish, and not negative ones that journal referees will find uninteresting.

The situation in experimental physics is quite different. Unfortunately, all we have right now are negative results when we search for phenomena beyond the Standard Model. And while some of our “searches” papers can be dull to read, they do get published, since that is all the experimental particle physics can offer. Now, imagine that the journals rejected all papers which reported negative results on searches for new phenomena. First, that activity would be difficult to sustain within experimental HEP, and second, we would not know what are the bounds on the Higgs boson, or whether gravity deviates from Newton’s law at short distances, etc. etc. That would be rediculous, for sure!

So I wonder whether theoretical referees could take a lesson from that, and listen to your complaint seriously. I hope so…

From Richard Feynman’s “Cargo Cult Science” (from a Caltech commencement address given in 1974—also included in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!):

I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.” He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing– and if they don’t support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.

I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.

Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this–it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person–to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happened.

Nowadays, there’s a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment being done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen, he had to use data from someone else’s experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn’t get time on the program (because there’s so little time and it’s such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn’t be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying–possibly–the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.

All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on–with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using– not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.

Negative results are “bad” news in medical sciences, surgery and the pharmaceutical industry.

One does not continuosly report on the failures of heart surgery, one waits till there is a “success”. First heart transplant patient survivor is hailed and aired with much fanfare, and if the patient dies the next day, he is swept under the carpet and replaced with a ‘live’ patient. Desperate people can be duped into trying anything. But to secure government funding and attract or appeal to the vanity of the well “endowed” who can make you rich & famous, you need to make (enhance) the probabilities and odds of a good prognostic.

That is the continuing story of the organ transplant industry. They show you their survivors as their success story, the deceased are not mentioned. Well they would have died anyway, no? well maybe. But in that case the survivors too may have survived without the transplant, no?

If the walls of Transplant clinics were filled with photos of deceased patients, would they get as much funding or as many clients and paying customers? If the walls of transplant centres were filled with photos of some of the butchery and carnage, would they have got so many to put their life in their hands?

If the walls of the plastic surgery clinics were covered with photos of those patients butchered by plastic surgery it would turn the stomachs of, and turn away prospective patients with more cash or hope than sense.

If the pharmaceutical industry filled its reception walls and glossy magazines with photos of the real tests or results of lab experiments on animals and photos of thelidomide children, they would get less volunteers or human guinea pigs, thus being unable to meet the legal requirements to market their drugs as “safe” or proven.

Incidentally ever read the disclaimers on pharmaceutical products: “If it doesn’t kill you, it may cure you” and if it doesn’t kill you or cure you, here TRY THIS ONE!

I was taught to use the phrase null results (this was in the context of the Michelson-Morley experiment). The word null doesn’t carry the connotation of failure that the word negative does.

I vaguely remember enjoying a cartoon duo named Null & Void. I wish I could remember their special powers, but I recall thinking they were cool. After a fair bit of Googling, I think I must be recalling a pair of friends (not villians, I hope!) in the TV cartoon Inspector Gadget. I don’t know how the brain works, but I’m sure that storage area could have better used. *sigh*

I wonder if there would have been as much commotion in the press if Perelman had provided a solid counter example to the Poincaré conjecture rather than a road map to a proof. Unfortunately, I’m guessing not, although to me this would have been a fascinating situation. Negative results often define bounds that help us avoid getting lost down blind theoretical alleys. But negative results, particularly in relation to intuitively appealing conjectures as this one is, can also be considered to be an opportunity: “whoa … what does this mean then? We still must be missing something here!”

Hi Elliot, of course Biology & Medical Sciences aren’t as precise as physics.

There is more than way to skin a cat, oh and there is more than one way to propel flight, cars or trains, maglev possibly my favourite for the latter (for now), and there are many ways to produce energy, large for industrial use + metropolis, smaller alternatives for certain greener rural needs or desert areas.

But yes milk is good, but not for all
Milk is bad, well only for certain people or Vegan beliefs

Meat is good, well for most carnivours.
Meat is necessary, nope, not for vegetarians or vegans

Beer has good qualities, unless you abuse
Wine has good qualities, nless you abuse

Not eating pork, will not save you from cardiac problems
Smoking will aggravate cardio-thoraxic problems.

But I was being more specific, where some break thru is hailed as a miracle with muchfanfare, but the negative results are kept quiet for commercial reasons. Or miracle drugs are promised that are not so miraculous and given a ridiculous price tag to recoup the investment on all the other tens of failed drugs and research. This is not ‘good’ science, unless you call marketing and economy science. But as we know econometrix and economic & political sciences are not precise sciences, in that they can be ‘false’ truths upheld by inertia, vested interests, shareholders profits or if necessary armies of lawyers, and when necessary as with other resources Oil, gas, land or other interests by the military abroad & the ‘police’ at home.

Yep inevitable all research and funding, especially big league is dependant on political will & government, whether NASA, space exploration, colliders, Boeing, Airbus, bullet trains, nuclear power, large hydro electric damns or wave power (estuaries, deltas, river mouths) because of the scale of the project. Private enterprise just plays an administrative role to bankroll projects. Incidentally despite allusions to the contrary the pharmaceutical industry and medical research is wholly dependant on state funding, it is just that private companies syphon as much away to pay bonuses and pie in the sky dividends (smoke + mirrors) to make them attractive to investors and pension funds. Whereas a lot of that money could actually be better spent on personal care of patients. But that is more costly and time consuming and not as profitable, as precribing some magic bullet or pill. Talk about gold dust or added value. Something that costs less than 10 cents per pill to make can be prescribed for $14,000 a year and you don’t even have to sugar coat it.

WOW! Am I missing something?

Science; I expect I am consistent, but don’t see why you’re asking me. The rest of your comment is just a rant, aimed at string theorists (which I am not, by the way). I get it – you feel maligned that people don’t pay attention to your ideas and are annoyed at string theorists. Once again though, I’m asking you not to clog up my comment threads with comments like this – they are very out of place in this particular discussion.

Also, after using the word “bitter” twice in such a comment, I would suggest looking up the word “irony”.

In the future I will be deleting such comments on threads where they are off topic.