• Question: what is the craziest theories you heard about science?

    Asked by anon-201981 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily, Andy on 5 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Like conspiracy theories? I think the “moon landings were faked” conspiracy is a bit silly. It would literally be impossible to get an entire government department to keep a secret that immense! Plus it really undermines all the good science, computing and engineering many very clever (and often under-recognised) people did! Also the “vaccine debate” infuriates me, but that’s because of poor scientific study design and bad data analysis, along with conflicts of interest with the involved persons

    • Photo: George Fulton

      George Fulton answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Probably the worst is that the world is flat!

    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Conspiracy theories: that CERN makes earthquakes; that we have a statue of Shiva dancing at CERN because we’re part of a death cult (actually, it was donated by the govt of India); and that we’re going to make black holes or strangelets that will destroy the earth. Although…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INodNZY5ytE

      In actual science, I really like extra dimensions theories, where there are extra space dimensions that we’ve not noticed yet because they’re all curled up, like the paper around a really teeny toilet roll. That’s pretty far out. The neato thing is that you can make predictions about this, like how particles could resonate like a drum around the extra dimension and produce so-called Kaluza-Klein towers of excited states. Or how this connects to gravity: this is where the micro-black holes come from. We’re searching for this stuff, which is also needed by speculative Theories of Everything like string theory, but I don’t think there’s much chance…

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      There are loads of crazy theories in physics! I read a paper the other day that was using fluid mechanics to prove that cats behave like liquids (it was written as a bit of a joke though). I still find the whole theory of dark matter and dark energy crazy. There are so many different calculations that show that it needs to be there but I think the idea that 96% of the universe is made of stuff we can’t explain yet it crazy!

    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      There are real physics theories which predict that there are many parallel universes, not just ours! Each time there are several possible ways a physics process can happen, the universe we see splits into several universes, each with a different outcome to that process. Imagine you flip a coin. If you see heads, there is a parallel universe in which an exact copy of you has seen tails! But you’ll never to be able to see this copy of you!
      Though this sounds crazy, it could be the most natural way for things to happen when we consider quantum physics, the rules deciding how particles behave.

    • Photo: Emily Lewis

      Emily Lewis answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      There seem to be loads of conspiracy theories around these days! Flat earth, fake moon landings… I like reading about them because I find them interesting but I do worry about the harm they cause to people who actually believe them.

      The best way to avoid getting caught up in them is to be honest and look at the evidence to try and understand for yourself. Also understanding how science generates knowledge and what is good evidence and what is just made up silliness… We test our theories against experimental data and are always willing to change our theory if they disagree. Conspiracy theorists tend to stick to their beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise.

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