Complex Numbers

I'm Not Saying It's Aliens

Science is cool.

Science reporting needs some work.

https://www.cracked.com/article_27801_sorry-but-discovery-parallel-universe-bs-t...

Sorry, But 'WE DISCOVERED A PARALLEL UNIVERSE' Is A BS Tabloid Headline

This crap was making the rounds before the riots, and then, understandably, got buried. Though, I suppose, it could be argued that we all woke up on January 1 in a parallel universe, where nothing makes sense anymore. But I still have my goatee, and everyone else doesn't, so there's that argument against it.

Breaking: Scientists have 100% proven that parallel universes exist and that there's one out there where time runs backward, whatever that means. So instead of COVID, they've got a Benjamin Button pandemic ... Except scientists didn't actually prove that at all.

Yeah, that's the story that was circulating, or close enough.

The study revolved around the movement of high-energy particles called neutrinos. They pass through solid objects all the time and even pass through us trillions of times a second (At least buy us dinner first.)

Neutrinos are weird, and they're interesting enough without having to make stuff up about them. For instance, in addition to not interacting very much with the matter we're made of, they're shapeshifters, able to change mass as they travel. I, too, change mass as I travel, but not as quickly, and unlike me, neutrinos don't pick up the extra weight from McDonald's but (probably) from the Higgs Field.

There's this part of a lot of scientific studies where the researchers propose explanations for the unexplainable phenomenon they've observed. Other researchers around the world understand that it's just spit-balling to get everyone's minds churning with possibilities.

Yeah, this is where we get the disconnect between reality and speculation. It's like when you see weird lights in the sky and say "maybe it's aliens" and you tell your friends and they scoff at you for believing in aliens. I didn't say it was aliens; I said that's a possibility, the same way the poop in your yard is maybe from unicorns but it's way more likely it's from the neighbor's dog. Does it look like a rainbow and smell like roses? No? Okay, discard the unicorn hypothesis and put up a fence already.

Tabloid newspapers don't understand that, so they publish the purely theoretical musings as established fact.

It's not just tabloids. Even some respectable publications like Cracked make this mistake sometimes.

Don't get me wrong; parallel universes are not outside the realm of possibility, if you pay attention to certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, or start wondering why it is we're here and not somewhere else or nonexistent. Hell, it might even explain why neutrinos shift they way they do (but then again it might not).

I was reminded of this recently when, plastered all over some site that Google keeps sending me to because it thinks I'm interested in science for some odd reason, was another "Astronomers Discover An Earth-Like Exoplanet!!!" headline.

No. No, they did not. First of all, to an astronomer, Venus is Earth-like. But reporting on it like that makes the reader think they've found Gallifrey or Risa or some shit, and we finally have a goal for when this planet becomes unbearable to live on, sometime later this month. But a little digging told me that, while the planet in question does indeed seem to orbit within its star's habitable zone and might be relatively Earth- or Venus-sized, it might not exist at all, and there's nothing in there about showing any signs of actually harboring life. Right now it's just a blip in the data, and that's all.

I've little doubt that, somewhere in the galaxy, there's at least one other planet with conditions we'd think of as Earth-like. But no, we still haven't found one.

This sort of thing only increases the general public's distrust of science, and that shit needs to stop. I get that you want readers so that you'll get ad revenue, but in the long run it's going to bite you in the ass.

But hey, then you can always blame aliens.