I believe I’ve heard that they were only proven to be real in the 90s.
I saw this headline a few days ago:
Modern-day alchemy! Scientists turn lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider
For centuries, alchemists dreamed of turning lead into gold — not through magic, but by unlocking the hidden potential within metals themselves. While their methods never panned out, those of modern science finally have.
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator — have observed a real-life transmutation of lead into gold. But this transformation didn’t come from direct collisions, as was previously observed. Instead, it emerged through a new mechanism involving near-miss interactions between atomic nuclei.
…
“The electromagnetic field emanating from a lead nucleus is particularly strong because the nucleus contains 82 protons, each carrying one elementary charge,” officials with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known by its French acronym, CERN) wrote in a statement.“Moreover, the very high speed at which lead nuclei travel in the LHC (corresponding to 99.999993% of the speed of light) causes the electromagnetic field lines to be squashed into a thin pancake, transverse to the direction of motion, producing a short-lived pulse of photons,” they added.
This pulse can trigger a process known as electromagnetic dissociation, in which a photon interacts with a nucleus, inducing internal oscillations that eject neutrons and photons. In the case of a passing lead atom, the loss of three protons through this process results in the formation of gold.
An advance for sure - my wife worked on the studies of Tagamet before we were married and made a good bit of money buying SmithKline stock - but I don’t think woo and bacteria go together well.
I have an idea - lets shoot him up with germs for that really big disease, / Firesign Theatre. How could he object?
He went bathing in raw sewage. What more could you do to him?
The idea that the canyon lands around Missoula had been created in short time periods was ridiculed for decades.
Harlen Bretz spent a life in professional purgatory until he was proven correct and got the accolades he deserved.
The geologist who was initially right about the massive floods that shaped the Pacific Northwest, including the Missoula Floods, was J. Harlen Bretz. While Bretz’s theory was initially met with resistance, later evidence, including the discovery of Lake Missoula as a water source, proved his ideas to be accurate. Geologist Joseph Pardee also played a significant role in confirming the Lake Missoula as the source of the floods.
BRETZ AND PARDEE – SOLVING THE ICE AGE FLOODS MYSTERY
Determining what caused the Columbia Basin’s weird landscape of scablands and coulees generated four decades of bitter scientific controversy. If modern high-resolution aerial photography had been commonplace in the 1920s, the issue might have been resolved quickly and amicably. Instead, geologist J Harlen Bretz had to persuade his critics the hard way.
In 1979 Bretz was awarded the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America, the most prestigious award in the field of geology. He was 96 years old at the time.
After receiving the award, he reportedly told his son:"All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over."
As the thread has gone on we’ve gotten some things that aren’t woo exactly, at least not as I use the word. but more like crackpot or minority science. @Macdoc’s Missoula Traps example being pretty canonical.
As to @TriPolar & H. Pylori: Well said. I take your point. I’m just not sure we should label that woo.
I like @Measure_for_Measure’s taxonomy of examples.
My working definitions:
- Woo: doubletalk aimed at the incredulous. Generally created by con artists or at least the intellectually dishonest. Someone who confuses strength of belief with strength of truth.
- Crackpot science: physics is wrong and here’s a wall of words (not math) to prove it. The late Mr. TimeCube.
- Minority science: Folks who dismiss my new idea haven’t looked at the actual evidence as closely as I have, believing that effort pointless. But once they do, and additional evidence accumulates over time, they (or their generational replacements) become converts.
- Progressing science: Until we developed theory X and instrument Y we couldn’t detect phenomenon Z and were unaware of its existence. Although maybe not unaware of its mysterious second order effects. Once unequivocally detected, Z forced a rethink and now we have new theories A & B to supplement, and occasionally supplant, existing theories I, J, & K.
Woo is definitely a bit of “I know it when I see it” and also “woo is in the eye of the beholder.”
The existence of viruses or prion diseases, or all the things RNA really does in the cell, were not woo when they were first speculated about.
So he did get the last laugh. But yeah, getting the last gloat is often more satisfying.
Lamarckism or Lamarckian Inheritance - the notion that traits acquired by an organism during its lifetime, in response to conditions, would be inherited by that organism’s offspring - was a notion completely discarded in favour of natural selection of favourable mutations.
But it turned out to be not quite completely false - there is the modern discovery of Epigenetic Inheritance - where traits are still driven by genes, but the expresssion of those genes can be moderated by mechanisms that are responsive to environmental stimuli and the effect can be inherited.
It’s not quite the same thing, but it’s also sort of a similar thing and if Lamarck had done the right science (which would probably have involved being born in a different century at least), and had done it empirically instead of just stopping at the point of hypothesis, Lamarck might have ended up discovering epigenetics.
ETA: Oops - this doesn’t meet the OP’s definition of ‘modern’ - ignore me.
I waited until today to come in and give my thoughts. And then I found that @LSLGuy summarized them almost perfectly. What a time saver! Want to do all my posts for me?
Just a couple of notes in addition. As with most things, the distinction between the extremes - crackpottery and solid consensus science - are immediately identifiable, yet the borderland between is a broad fog of varying densities.
At a minimum, though, I think woo has to be something with no clear scientific backing that nevertheless has widespread acknowledgement by the lay public, not merely a scientific finding that is disputed internally and barely known outside a field. “The experts are wrong” is always a battle cry.
The Dope is a good place to cut through that fog. Woo doesn’t show up often, but when it does plenty of posters step in to knock it down.
I’m not sure that any of the examples above clearly meet that definition of woo. They seem to be minor points of science that don’t get documentaries made about them and don’t overturn entire fields of research. I think the big game - flatearthers, antivaxxers, ancient aliens advocates, the ones who are dangerous and totally wrong - are the definitions of woo that need to be endlessly fought.
I agree with endless battle - had quite the time when Exxon was funding the climate denial crims.
Maybe a companion thread on serendipity in science would be fun.
Decades ago, when I was lifting weights seriously, branched chain amino acids (BCAAs) were a popular supplement. I took them for a while, but didn’t see any results.
Later, there were numerous studies claiming that BCAAs were worthless. One of the bigger manufacturers (Joe Weider) got slapped with a false-claims suit by the FTC and was forced to pay refunds.
Decades later, I read about other studies which found that BCAAs could help reduce and reverse muscle loss in older and/or immobile people (sarcopenia).
As with many seemingly contradictory results, it’s possible that the experiments finding BCAAs worhless weren’t inclusive enough (e.g., no old people).
Supplement manufacturers are of course notorious for pitching snake oil. I recall a curiously cyclical nature to the popularity of specific products: a supplement would sell big for a few years, before people concluded it was worthless. A few more years down the road, it would be reintroduced and begin selling big again, after a new crop of suckers customers had emerged.
Acupuncture, despite its defenders, is still widely regarded as woo.
Myth aside, Helicobacter pylori as the major cause of stomach ulcers never fit the category of woo. The theory was actually accepted by mainstream medicine within a relatively short time.
Not sure if it fits the description, but, IIRC some mental things like meditation or psychedelic drugs are being shown to indeed have real, tangible effects on the brain - both for good and bad.
Cochrane (2020) on acupuncture for chronic non-specific low-back pain, emphasis added:
We found that acupuncture may not play a more clinically meaningful role than sham in relieving pain immediately after treatment or in improving quality of life in the short term, and acupuncture possibly did not improve back function compared to sham in the immediate term. However, acupuncture was more effective than no treatment in improving pain and function in the immediate term. Trials with usual care as the control showed acupuncture may not reduce pain clinically, but the therapy may improve function immediately after sessions as well as physical but not mental quality of life in the short term. The evidence was downgraded to moderate to very low-certainty considering most of studies had high risk of bias, inconsistency, and small sample size introducing imprecision. The decision to use acupuncture to treat chronic low back pain might depend on the availability, cost and patient’s preferences.
That’s not what I would have guessed (I would have guessed effective pain relief in short term, nothing after that) but that’s what the lit review showed.
And the nocebo effect as well
So it’s a tricky question to answer as Most theories were at some point an unpopular minority opinion, that were criticized even ridiculed by mainstream scientific opinion. Also once you go back far enough the dividing line between “woo” and serious science is pretty much non existent (e.g. Issac Newton was about as out there and “woo” as you get)
I think we’d have to put a cutoff date sometime in the modern era. Newton was big into alchemy even if that’s not what we remember him for. And now I’m wondering if alchemy is less woo than homeopathy. At the very least it does seem as though you might accidentally discover something useful with alchemy.
Yep. That’s why I gave a cutoff of 50 years ago in the OP, since “woo-woo” seems to have been coined in 1971.
For varying definitions of “science”, I offer you the field of Economics.
For example, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton won the 1997 Nobel Prize for their work in developing models used to determine risk. These models turned out to be absolute shit (aka “woo”), being a direct contributor to the 2008 market collapse. But they were definitely accepted!
OTTOMH One alchemist failed to make base metals into gold. But he discovered a way to make them glow in the dark. He went on to wealth and fame. His discovery is still used in many products today. The only real changes have been recent tweaks allowing glows of colors other than greenish yellow. But those glow in the dark star and moon stickers you can buy at dollar stores use a method invented by an alchemist centuries ago.