The Doomsday Water, Part 2: Pathological Science

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe continue their discussion from last episode with a focus on so-called pathological science as well as other examples of hypothetical catastrophes either tied to or revealed by human technology and scientific advancement.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with the follow
up to last week's episode called the Doomsday Water, which
was about a totally non existent but historically very interesting
hypothetical substance called polywater. Now, if you haven't heard or
watched the last episode yet, this is one where I'd

(00:37):
really recommend you do the series in order you should
go back and check that one out. Today, I think
we're going to add a few more details on the
history of polywater and then have some discussion about ideas
that kind of bloom out of the ashes of this
failed scientific project.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
All right, let's do it.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah, So, to start with the condensed refresher on the
timeline of polywater, the story begins with some isolated chemistry
research taking place in the Soviet Union in the early
nineteen sixties, and this was carried out by a scientist
named Nikolai Fedyakin. Fedyakin discovers that by condensing samples of
what he believes to be pure water pure H two

(01:19):
inside extremely tiny glass capillary tubes. Under just the right conditions,
he can somehow cause the water to appear to separate
into two different substances. You've got regular water and then
something else, this other anomalous form of water which seems
to be denser than normal water and have weird properties

(01:42):
like an extremely high boiling point and a very low
freezing point. So this is kind of hard to imagine
because we normally think of water as just water. But
maybe the easiest way to do it is imagine another
phase of water that you've never seen before. So you
can think of liquid water, ice and steam, and no

(02:03):
imagine the same exact substance also has a form that
is something like the consistency of wax or vacilline. Rob
I was actually thinking about it in between when we
recorded the last episode and this one, Like, why is
it so hard to imagine this hypothetical alternative form of

(02:25):
water Because we watch phase transitions of water all the time.
It's like totally normal to observe that liquid water becomes
ice and then you boil it and become steam. These
different phases don't look or feel like each other at all,
and we would just watch them shift back and forth
and nothing is strange about that, But trying to imagine
this other phase is just kind of impossible. It feels like, well,

(02:49):
if it was this other way, if it had this
other consistency and feeling and appearance, it just wouldn't be water.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, that is interesting to think about. I mean, a
big part of it is just how mundane the realities
of the phases of water are. Like I think already today,
I've encountered water in and all three of its forms.
You know, I've put ice in my thermos, I've heated
up water for coffee and tea and produced steam, and

(03:18):
of course I've had liquid water and am mostly liquid water.
So yeah, I guess it's just part of it is
the world we live in, in the world we are.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
I think maybe that's right, And maybe it's because water
is so fundamental and central to our lives and we
encounter it so much that trying to imagine this other
form of it doesn't feel like it makes sense in
the way that it would be much easier to imagine
alternate forms of chemicals that we have less day to
day interaction with. But so anyway, this initial result by

(03:51):
Nikolai fed Yakin gets the attention of an esteemed Soviet
chemist named Boris de Yagan, who replicates the procedure for
making this anomalist water and then starts publishing papers on
it in Russian language journals. Derriagan believes this alternative, this
alternate form of water could be immensely important, of immense

(04:12):
scientific and technological significance, and then in roughly the years
nineteen sixty six to sixty eight, Derriogan gives presentations on
the anomalous water at international conferences and gradually starts to
get the attention of Western scientists, especially in Great Britain
and the United States. Several of these scientists begin their

(04:33):
own anomalous water research program, copying the initial methods for
making it from the Soviet Union, and then in the
year nineteen sixty nine, the anomalist water has a breakout moment.
There is one paper by a group of American scientists
showing infrared spectroscopy results from the substance that appear to

(04:54):
show a different signature than that of regular water, which
is interpreted to mean that well, it is water, but
it's got a different molecular structure than normal water, which
is what gives it this different spectrum. It is hypothesized
to be something like a polymer form of water. So
a polymer is a long, long or large molecule made

(05:16):
out of repeating units, and they hypothesize that maybe there
is a hexagonal arrangement of water molecules forming these kind
of like sheets or long, long structures. And here's where
you get the name polywater. It's like a polymer of water.
We also talked a bit last time about how important

(05:37):
it might have actually been in the reception of this
hypothetical substance, that it got a cool name, that it
was no longer being called just like you know, anomalous
anomalist behavior of water or various descriptive phrases. That it
got a name, and the name sounded interesting, that it's polywater.
You know, of course, poly means many, so it almost

(05:58):
implies a kind of mini splendor water, water that can
do many things or has maybe can do anything. And
in fact, lots of people in the media kind of
ended up treating it like it could do anything. There
was a frenzy of attention in the popular media, so
people start imagining all kinds of wild ways that polywater
could be applied. Maybe it's going to be the next

(06:20):
steam engine. It'll just you know, change everything in technology.
It'll do machine lubrication and nuclear power. It'll unlock the
secret of eternal youth. There is one article that was
quoted in one of our sources last time that was like, Hey,
your living room furniture, it's gonna be made out of water.
We never got to the bottom of how that works,

(06:42):
but I like it. But so there would be arguments
between polywater proponents and polywater skeptics. In these arguments, of course,
began in the scientific community and scientific literature, but this
eventually spilled out into the popular media around the year
nineteen s six nine, and it became a subject of

(07:03):
controversy that was being covered by the mainstream press, not
just in scientific literature. Also in nineteen sixty nine you
get this letter published in the journal Nature by a
chemist and named F. J. Donaho of Wilkes College in Pennsylvania,
which sketches out this really alarming idea. He says, maybe
polywater is not just a revolutionary discovery, it might be

(07:27):
the most dangerous substance on Earth, because, according to Donnaho,
it's possible that like the fictional Ice nine in the
novel Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. If a seed crystal
of polywater were to escape into the natural environment and
get deposited in the soil or the ocean, even if

(07:47):
you just flush it down the toilet, it's going to
end up in the in the environment, it could provide
a nucleation point that would cause all of the water
in the world to become polywater, which I admit is
a to me, a gripping image, a truly grotesque and
bizarre and amazing image, a vasaline apocalypse, or a kind

(08:11):
of like wax end of the world.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah, and also like kind of the ultimate technological whip
see like, oops, we broke water. Everyone water is now broken.
It doesn't work anymore, not the way that we were
accustomed to you.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
Now, it's very important to note that this is not
like the mainstream opinion on polywater at the time. Immediately
after this, several prominent pro polywater scientists respond to the
letter in Nature. They argue with good reasons, it seems
that this is not likely. For one thing, if polywater exists,
it must occur sometimes in nature. So if it could

(08:50):
turn Earth into a vacilline world, it would have already
done that. And you know, they had other arguments too.
Of course, the whole thing is made pointless by the
fact that we would later discover polywater does not exist.
But while this big frenzy of excitement and enthusiasm and
fear is going on in the mainstream media in popular culture,

(09:12):
there are also lots of skeptical scientists just chipping away
at the polywater project. The most common objection is, are
you sure you're not just seeing the effects of impurities
in your water samples. Derriagan and the polywater proponents were
always quick to say, no, that is not what's happening.
Maybe your samples of water are contaminated, but ours are pure,

(09:36):
And that's kind of hard to argue with. I mean,
all you can do is test the ones you have
access to. If somebody is saying the ones you don't
have access to are the good ones, that's like, oh,
that's a problem.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
But yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
So by the early nineteen seventies, the skeptical undermining of
the polywater project has made a lot of progress. It
starts to look more and more like the anomalous water
is anomal because it isn't water. It's a bunch of
contamination with leading candidates for the contamination being well. Some

(10:08):
people talked about particles of silica leaching from the glass
into the water and forming a kind of gel. Another
big contender is human sweat biological contamination from the probably
from the researchers themselves who were carrying out the experiment.
And then one famous blow to the polywater project comes
in the early seventies when an American researcher named Dennis L.

(10:31):
Rousseau does analysis on a bunch of sweat and gets
almost the exact same pattern that had famously appeared in
the big polywater spectroscopy paper in nineteen sixty nine. So
at this point, consensus starts to turn heavily against the
existence of polywater, and roughly nineteen seventy seventy one, most

(10:51):
scientists that were initially curious or open minded about it
start saying, no, I don't think this is real. It
takes the hardcore or polywater boosters a little more time
to come around, but by roughly nineteen seventy three, basically everybody,
including Boris de Riyagan, realizes and admits that it was
probably all just various types of contamination All along. The

(11:15):
stuff was not acting like water because it wasn't water.
So that's the story we talked about in the last episode.
Like I did in the previous episode, I want to
mention a couple of major sources here at the top.
One is an article called case Studies in Pathological Science,
published in American Scientists in the year nineteen ninety two
by Dennis L. Rousseau. This article is great because it

(11:38):
provides a historical overview of the polywater affair, a short one,
but from the point of view of someone who was
actually involved in it. Rousseau was initially very interested in
the possibilities of polywater, as he talks about in the article.
He's like, he and a collaborator of his, we're like, oh,
could it be the fountain of youth? Could it unlock

(11:59):
you know, longevity. But he eventually becomes very skeptical about it.
He becomes a polywater skeptic, and he leads some experiments
showing how it is almost certainly just caused by impurities.
Another big source I wanted to mention is an excellent
chapter in a book called H two O. A Biography
of Water by the British science writer Philip Ball, first

(12:19):
published in nineteen ninety nine. And to kick things off today,
I wanted to mention another article I was reading. Actually
I was reading this one in between when we recorded
the two episodes. This was a piece in Distillations magazine
from February twenty twenty called the Rise and Fall of
Polywater by the material scientist and science communicator Anissa Ramirez.

(12:41):
And this piece raised a few details about the story
that we didn't talk much about last time, but I
think would be good to dwell on for a moment
because they might inform the rest of our discussion today.
So one thing that Ramirez's account brings up is how
a lot of the early obsess about the weird properties

(13:02):
of polywater were visual observations made through a microscope. So
not getting a sample of this stuff, putting it in
a machine and getting a numerical readout on it, it
would be people looking through a microscope. So fed Yakin's
original experiments. They generated only a tiny amount of the

(13:22):
anomalous water. It was far less than a droplet, and
he had to study it through a relatively low resolution
optical microscope. When he made the original observations of properties
like the alleged greater density than normal water that was
like an inference made based on looking at how it
behaved through a microscope. And then once der Yoggan's team

(13:46):
took over, they also used microscope observation rather than bult
measurement to note a lot of things. They used that
to find that it allegedly expanded more than regular water
when it was heated, that it had a different pattern
of light refraction than normal water, and because of how
tiny the quantities of available anomalous water were, these were

(14:09):
visual observations of behavior through the optical microscopes in strange conditions,
like in these extremely tiny glass containers. So that's something
to remember for later. We'll come back to that later
in the episode. Another thing that we should dwell on

(14:35):
for a minute. We did sort of mention this in
the last episode, but it's worth revisiting is the strange
fact that while all of this frenzy was going on
in the late sixties, nobody had ever published a high
quality chemical analysis of a polywater sample to prove that
it was actually one hundred percent water. Philip Ball highlights

(14:57):
this in his chapter. Ramirez highlights this in the article too,
that this was in part due to how little polywater
could be made you're making these microscopic amounts of it
at a time, and so some researchers reported that they
just couldn't make enough of it that a reliable chemical
analysis was possible with their instruments. You know, as we

(15:19):
know from a lot of different domains, like you need
a reasonable sample size in order to have a reliable result.
You know, we often think about this in the context
of much higher levels of abstraction in the sciences, like
psychology studies. You know, if you have a psychology study
that's got twenty participants, that's usually not going to be

(15:41):
a very powerful result. You don't have a lot of
confidence that the same patterns would show up in the
general population. And you can say, in a way the
same thing about physical sciences, though obviously you're dealing with
different types of quantities there, but like extremely tiny quantities
are harder to measure reliable. Ramirez writes in our article,

(16:02):
quote chemicals, like humans, have unique fingerprints, and instruments called
spectrometers can identify the elements and molecules from a chemical
fingerprint or spectrum. Yet success hinges on the size of
the sample, where bigger is better. In published papers, anomalous
water believers lamented that there just wasn't enough of it,
certainly not enough to identify its molecular makeup. And I

(16:26):
think in the last episode we talked about the quote
from one of the guys who was working on polywater
at the time, one of the students of John Desmond Bernal,
who said, if only we had a thimbleful. So, while
this polywater research project was going on, because you couldn't
make enough of it to really get a good answer

(16:48):
to these core questions about it, the core questions like
is this really water, scientists kept nibbling around the edges.
They would measure what they could with the amounts available,
including physical characteristics like boiling point and viscosity, but even
these results were probably hampered in reliability by the tiny

(17:08):
amounts that could be tested at a time. Some skeptics
of polywater were sort of brought around to believing in
it by a paper that we mentioned last time. This
was the one published in the journal Science in June
nineteen sixty nine, which showed the work of scientists named
Robert Stromberg, Elis Lippencott, and Warren Grant, and they had

(17:30):
produced what looked like a high quality spectrometry result that
showed the absorption spectrum of polywater did not match that
of normal water or they claimed of any known substance.
But this was taken to indicate not that the sample
was not water, but that the water had a different

(17:50):
molecular structure than normal water, hence the idea of polywater.
Funny thing here is they also tried to do a
chemical analysis of polywater and they found some contaminants. They
found like sodium and silicon, but they were like, those
are there in the quantities observed are too small for
it to matter, so we don't have to worry about that.
And this is when you get that letter from Donahoe

(18:13):
to Nature writing about the dangers of polywater. Ramirez mentions
a detail here that I didn't encounter in any of
the other sources I was reading, where she says that
Robert Stromberg, you know, one of the authors of the
sixty nine paper, started getting angry letters from people who
said he was bringing about the end of the world.
So that's the public engagement we crave, you know. And

(18:34):
also I think this is maybe important. We didn't talk
about this enough last time. Ramirez mentions briefly how this
was affected by the Cold War context. We talked about
the Cold War context in the idea of the exchange
of information between East and West being limited in some ways,
not to say that there was no exchange of information,

(18:55):
because clearly the ideas were making it across. There were
international conferences, journals to get translated back and forth, but
there were, you know, just awkward things about how information
was shared around the world at the time because of
the Cold War context. Ramirez mentions that there are indications
that by nineteen sixty nine, the CIA was trying to

(19:16):
keep a close eye on polywater research in the Soviet Union,
and according to reports published in the Wall Street Journal,
the Pentagon started trying to fund polywater research. So it's
you know, it's like Doctor Strangelove, like, we cannot allow
a polywater gap. And people made this joke at the time,
you know, playing up on the idea of a missile

(19:36):
gap from the nuclear arms race. Now it's like, well,
if this is maybe going to be the most important
technology in the world, whether that's for good or for ill,
and the people were saying it could be for both,
we better get it first.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, hindsight is twenty twenty. We can
look back and see this as the race to become
the masters of sweaty water. But again, at the time,
if it's seemed like an adversary would have mastery over
some sort of new form of water that had all
these applications, then yeah, it was worth keeping an eye on. Yeah,

(20:13):
even though we know how it ended up.

Speaker 3 (20:16):
Right, So we know now for multiple reasons that polywater
was not actually dangerous. First of all, it didn't exist,
and even at the time people who thought it did
exist had good arguments against the idea that it was dangerous.
But if you strip yourself of hindsight, and you strip
yourself of access to the good arguments against the danger,

(20:36):
if you allow yourself to inhabit the vasilyne apocalypse mindset,
it creates, at least for me, a very familiar feeling, actually,
the feeling that people somewhere are doing something obscure that
could be very dangerous. It could even be the end
of the world, and I have no power to stop it,

(20:56):
except like trying to write letters or you know. Yeah,
And add to that the knowledge that there's pressure operating
in the opposite direction that's like driving toward this result
that you're now afraid of and that you don't have
power to stop that pressure, Like there's some amount of
international great power competition that is making people think, even

(21:18):
if this stuff is dangerous, we've got to have it first.
They can't have it first. Feel similar to the nuclear
arms race, of course, and also feel similar to if
people have talked about this a lot where we might
be with AI. You know, there are I'm constantly struck
by the idea that there are a lot of people
in the United States who used to argue that AI

(21:39):
is potentially very dangerous. We might need to make absolutely
sure it's safe before developing it, and it might not
be possible to make sure that it's absolutely safe. And
now some of the same people are saying, well, you
can't let China build it first. We've got to build
it first. So that consciousness we have of these pressures
pushing in the opposite direction against caution in these scenarios

(22:02):
where we don't know exactly how dangerous something could be.
You know, you've got these international competitive pressures, You've got
money making pressures. Money making incentives, of course, are leading
people down trails that we don't know could turn out
to be okay, could turn out to be disastrous and
we can't really know in advance. It's a maddening feeling.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
Absolutely yeah, this is this is going to be at
times fun to reflect on, at times maybe concerning, but
it is absolutely you know, a reality of our modern
age and our technological anxiety, and some of our anxiety
is about about science. A lot of it does come

(22:47):
down to this idea of containment, Like, if something is
we create something that is pidentially dangerous, how do we
keep it from getting out and getting places it shouldn't
be and falling into the hands of people who shouldn't
have it right? And then there's that added realization that,
no matter what, containment might not be possible for these things,
certainly not in the long run or in the short run.

(23:09):
And I keep coming across examples of this, you know,
the idea that you could look at a new technology
and think about like the absolute realization of the thing,
and how that could present some sort of existential risk
and some sort of huge danger to everything that we know.

(23:30):
But then there are also these short term possibilities where
the thing is not very advanced at all, It is
just advanced enough to get out of our hands and
quickly get out of control. So we'll look at some
examples of some of these, and a lot of it
also just comes back to the I think it's impossible
not to think of the tale of Pandora's Box in

(23:51):
all of this that there is there's except in the
sense that there's almost this certainty that these boxes will
be opened, and then once they are opened, we know
how it goes. Then the the the ill factors that
were contained within cannot be put back in the box.
The only thing that remains in the box is hope,
or at least we hope that's the case. Yeah, So, yeah,

(24:16):
I wanted to roll through some of these. We can
we can chat about these. A number of these involves
some form of runaway reaction, much like the hypothetical polywater
reaction or the fictional Ice nine reaction. We'll get to
some examples of that that are you know, a certain
amount of concern. We have any number of hypothetical apocalypses

(24:39):
based on science gone wrong, of science that could go wrong,
or science that could just get out out of our hands.
And yeah, like we've been saying, AI is certainly one
of the big ones, clearly the one that resonates the
most as we are currently living through the realization of
the thread, and we're going to cover a few specific
AI related scenario, but ultimately there are so many different

(25:02):
angles to take on AI and its threat, especially as
far as the democratization of AI tools goes for various
nefarious purposes. Many of these pose a significant contemporary threat.
And that's in addition to all of the various highly
observable ways that AI is impacting industries and ways of

(25:24):
life and hurting people's jobs already.

Speaker 3 (25:28):
Right, I mean, because AI is so broad as a
technology class, its effects could end up being so broad,
so it's almost harder to narrow the focus of the
conversation like it would be for some of these other
hypothetical substances or real substances that people have worried about
being a kind of runaway reaction or containment danger. But

(25:51):
it is also funny that if you go back, just
like ten or twenty years, you can regularly find people
in imagining the future of AI as AI is something
that would be developed in containment and then there would
be a question about is it safe to let it out? Yeah,
And that's just not what we got at all. It's

(26:13):
just like it's just it's out from the moment it exists.
It's all you know, it's just set loose always it's
been loose.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yeah, there was kind of a vision of AI and
its use in creative endeavors that I was exposed to
years back. You know. It's probably at a I want
to say, this was maybe a panel at the World
Science Festival in New York, and it presented this optimistic
idea of like in the future, in the near future,
and to a certain extent, contemporary examples you'll have certain

(26:42):
artists using AI and working alongside it to create new
forms of art or music or what have you, but
in a very collaborative way and in a way that
does that wouldn't feel icky. Instead, we have, like you know,
everybody out there using these tools, uh, creating a lot

(27:04):
of material that is that is ikey, a lot of
AI slop as we've come to call it, you know,
which is not to say that that original vision is
is isn't a possibility and there's not a lot of
value in it. I mean, especially since the tools are
not going away. I hope that that is what we
come back to and that is something that we can

(27:25):
return to. But but yeah, it is. It is alarming
to watch in real time all around us. Now not
everything regarding machines and AI is current or near term.
We also have the likes of the gray goo scenario.
This is, it's gray goo, not grey goose. That would

(27:45):
involve some sort of catastrophic event concerning vodka obviously, but
the gray goo scenario the idea here by which molecular
self replicating nanotechnology ends up consuming the entire biomass of
Earth and turning it into itself, so kind of like
a global T one thousand mass in its most literal sense,

(28:08):
you know, the idea that it would just turn everything
into silvery goo.

Speaker 3 (28:13):
Kind of similar to the Eisneine scenario or the vaseline
apocalypse in that it represents a consumption of the natural
environment around us, a transformation of substances in our environment,
substances we need, or the substances of ourselves, into something
that is not useful to us or is actively harmful

(28:36):
to us. And so yeah, it has that in common
with the Donahoe scenario or the Vonnegut scenario, except the
way I understood people imagining the gray goo obviously, this
was always just like a speculative, Yeah, kind of science
fiction thing because we don't have nanotechnology of this type.
But the way I understood it was that because you

(29:00):
would have these little tiny robots, nanotechnology robots that would
be designed to make copies of themselves or to turn,
you know, molecules into something that they're trying to produce,
if that ever got out of hand, there really wouldn't
be a good way to stop it. Is that the idea?

Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, yeah, you know. Obviously this idea has been around
for number of decades at this point. The term was
coined by molecular nanotechnology pioneer kay Eric Drexler and Engines
of Creation back in nineteen eighty six, and we could
easily do an entire episode on it. It's fascinating, I think,
not only in this kind of like worst case scenario

(29:39):
and cautionary tale sort of way, but it also feels
kind of metaphorically sound and intimidating because it is, again,
like you said, about the transformation of the natural world
into things, and we do this all the time. It's
a huge an alarming aspect of human culture. We turn

(30:03):
things into other substances that we need or we think
we need, and then those become garbage. And we take advantage,
of course of a lot of the resources of our
earth that are not easily replaced or are irreplaceable.

Speaker 3 (30:18):
Massively speeding up and automating something we do, you know,
from an alien's point of view, we do, which is,
we take natural substances and turn them into trash.

Speaker 2 (30:27):
Right right. And you know, we've in various ways always
done this. But we've also observed the way that technology
and technological advancements have taken something that has been a
part of human culture and made it even more destructive
and more problematic, which is, you know, not again not
to say the technology is bad, but it's about what
we do with the technology. So the other interesting thing

(30:49):
when you go back to T. Drexler's original idea for
the gray goose scenario is that the threat wouldn't be
bound to some sort of ultimate highly evolved version of
the thing, but rather, to quote early as similar based replicators,
they get out and wind up of supplanting advanced organisms

(31:09):
in the ecosystem.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
So is the idea that people working on this technology
in this sort of science fiction scenario, they would eventually
be able to make the nanotechnology safe, but before they
get to the fully refined safe version. An early version
breaks containment and gets out of hand and it's making copies.

(31:31):
So yeah, it's kind of a problem to do the
safety steps last, especially if you're dealing with something that
you know, if it broke containment could destroy everything.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Yeah, so it's my understanding that this has become less
of a realistic threat in the eyes of many technologists.
But it also, at the same time is taken on
a life of its own, such as in science fiction,
in the culture novels of the and m Banks, you
have the hegemonizing swarms, whereas just occasionally the culture and

(32:01):
or other interstellar powers have to deal with the fact
that machines will start doing this and decide and basically
treat it like life form. Like there's a lot of
the ethical discussions, like at what point does it make
sense to wipe it out? So you know, in science fiction, again,
there are a number of takes on it that are
rather fascinating. You also have these different spin offs their concepts,

(32:25):
like green Goo, in which engineered organic matter ends up
taking it ends up taking the place of the nanotech
in this particular scenario.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Okay, so something that would be based on organic chemistry
or maybe cells or something like that instead of just
tiny machines.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, like it would be gray goo, except Crone and Burgie,
you know that sort of thing life gou.

Speaker 3 (32:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
Now, coming back to AI, there is all also something
called information gray goo, a term that I believe was
coined by British technology journalist Ian Betteridge. Also, I've seen
it referred to as the text apocalypse. And this one,
this one feels a lot, a lot closer and a
lot more fearsome. In this scenario, AI generated content overwhelms

(33:21):
human discourse.

Speaker 3 (33:24):
That'll never happen.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
Yeah, I mean, this one feels a lot more like
a real world threat because we already see the impact.
I mean, this has just become part of our just
like standard informational intake, just having to be on guard
against AI generated material because you know, is it authentic?
Is it is it real or not? Like we want
to know.

Speaker 3 (33:46):
Or do we want to know? I mean, I think
one of the real danger is is that the the
scourge of AI slop interacts with our preferences and biases
such that you when you see something that you don't
like or don't want to be true, you can recognize
that it is AI generated garbage and fake and trying

(34:08):
to manipulate you in some way. And when you see
something that you do like or do want to be true,
very often you'll just be like, yeah, that's probably real.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yeah, I believe there's a real danger point and it's
an uneven boundary line because it kind of applies at
different parts of our life, these different areas where we decide, okay,
I don't care about authenticity in this area, and it'll
be something like I see it happening, you know, all
around me, where someone you know might well say, hey,
you know, I don't want AI doing this or that.

(34:39):
But then they might think, well, I'm okay with it
creating my next head shot. You know, I'm okay that.
You know. It's like maybe I have some you know,
I have some some hang ups about how my last
headshot look and I'm totally okay with AI just creating
something for me, even though it's not authentic. It's not
really what I look like, and it's not created via

(35:00):
authentic means. But you know, you say, all right, I'm
gonna check that off. But then what's the next thing
to fall? And then ultimately, what does the boundary line
end up looking like anyway, I want to read a
quote here from betteredge, he writes, and you can read
about this at ianbetterage dot com. He has a whole
post on the information gray Goo. He says, quote, this

(35:22):
is the AI grey goose scenario and Internet choked with
low quality content which never improves, where it is almost
impossible to locate public, reliable sources for information because the
tools we have been able to rely on in the past,
Google social media can never keep up with the scale
of new content being created, where the volume of content

(35:42):
created overwhelms human or algorithmic abilities to sift through it
quickly and find high quality stuff.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
You know, it's funny how when we talk about the
dangers of AI, people think about the terminator and Skynet
or I have no mouth that I'm scream And you know,
as I said earlier, like we can't really know where
we're gonna end up. You don't even know how likely
to rate those kinds of outcomes. You hope that they're

(36:10):
very unlikely because you know, but you don't really know.
With stuff like this, I almost feel like you could
make the case that we're already halfway there. We're sort
of edging into this scenario, are we not?

Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah? Yeah, I mean it really does feel like a
lot of the battle is on, you know, who's going
to win between like this effort to sort of like
break down the public to where we don't care about
authenticity and anything, we don't care about human creation. We're
just like, it sounds good enough to me, it looks
good enough to me, it feels good enough to me,
and then we're just okay with all of the jobs

(36:46):
that are lost, all of the meaning that is lost
in people's lives just because a particular image was a
little more pleasing to us, or a particular piece of
writing was just a little more calibrated to our tastes
and so forth, or something was we were able to
generate it quickly and easily through some sort of online interface.

(37:08):
So yeah, it's alarming. It's it's frankly terrifying because I
wish hope was still in the Pandora's box. I'm not
sure that it is. A lot of it just comes
down to like, what what are we going to put
up with?

Speaker 3 (37:22):
Yeah, And I guess the other thing being that the
example of AI is much more complicated, I think than
the other examples like so greygu is just essentially a
science fiction scenario at this point. There's nothing really like
it going on, at least that we know, So, you know,
it's just a hypothetical, and it is debatable to what

(37:42):
extent it is plausible. Polywater, of course was you know
that the fears about that are totally unfounded. It never existed.
Even if it did exist, it probably wasn't dangerous in
the ways that we're being imagined. I guess AI is
different for a number of reasons. I mean, for one, thing,
like it actually exists and is here. I guess you

(38:03):
could debate in terms of its existence. You can have
a debate about whether or not it actually constitutes intelligence
or not, and people do have that philosophical debate and intelligence.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
It's an AI that the term is sometimes used a
little loosely with what we're talking about.

Speaker 3 (38:16):
Yeah, so people argue about that, but there's no denying
that it is here and it's doing something. It's doing
a lot of things that I mean, I don't want
to sound too negative about it, like it does a
lot of things that are very useful. It's very useful
as a you know, as a search engine, as Yeah,
that kind of thing, like it makes information processing tasks

(38:38):
easier in a lot of ways. Of course, it's still
you know, has a lot of hallucination problems and all that.
But it is not an imaginary thing like like polywater
or like or you know, just a fully science fiction
speculative thing like gray goo. It's here. It does some
things that are undeniably useful, and it's integrated into the economy,

(38:59):
which makes it you know, harder to I guess it
makes the question of thinking about its potential danger is
even more fraud.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, yeah, I would agree. I want to throw out,
as is always the case, listeners, if you have differing
opinions on any of this and you would like to
rationally discuss them with us, you know, write in. We'll
have that email address at the end of this episode.
We're always happy to discuss. Now, I'm going to turn
the page a little bit, get away from the from

(39:29):
from the the AI concerns. Don't worry, they're not going away.
They'll be They'll be there when we come back to them.
But I want to turn to some examples of potential
you know, chain reaction catastrophes tied to advancements in science
that have turned out to not be the case cases
much like poly water, where someone was like, this might

(39:51):
happen and we need to be wary of it, and
then for a variety of reasons, that worst case scenario
turned out to not be the case. Yeah, so we
already mentioned atomic weaponry, like the advent of atomic weaponry
being being something that helped inform the understanding of the
potential threats of poly water and also ends up casting

(40:16):
a long shadow over any technology to come out after
the advent of nuclear weaponry, especially and the one I
want to focus on here is one that I believe
this I have not actually seen the Oppenheimer film, but
I believe this actually comes up in the film, and
that is the idea that, Okay, when we carry out

(40:37):
this first atmospheric detonation of a nuclear device, it might
ignite the atmosphere, resulting in a global chain reaction of
atmospheric fire.

Speaker 3 (40:48):
This is addressed in the movie. The characters do talk
about the possibility. It's been a while since I've seen it,
so I don't remember the specific scene, but my understanding
is that in reality and history they did consider this
as a possibility, but most of the experts who did
the calculations on it, rated the likelihood as very low. Again,

(41:12):
that raises the question of I don't know how low
does the likelihood of something like this have to be
for you to feel okay?

Speaker 2 (41:18):
Continuing, Yeah, yeah, especially when in this case where obviously
the goal is the creation of a weapon of mass destruction,
a weapon that's going to cast this long shadow over
human societies for ages and ages to come. A similar
possibility was apparently explored for underwater detonation as well, and again,

(41:41):
like you said, while technically possible, scientists of the day
agreed that it was terribly unlikely, and our current understanding
of it seems to fall in the idea that the
density of Earth's atmosphere is just much too low for
this to take place, as is the atmosphere of Venus.
Even jennif Flgarris did a nice write up on this

(42:02):
in twenty twenty four for Advanced Science News, I believe
in response to the Oppenheimer movie, interviewing a pair of
nuclear astrophysicist on the topic, and that seemed to be
where they landed on it. It's like, it's just, as
far as we understand it, this is not possible in
Earth's atmosphere. And of course all of this is just
in addition to the other obvious concerns over the potential

(42:26):
for the rollout of nuclear weaponry to enable humans to
destroy each other through devastating warfare, fallout, wide ranging fires,
and the chilling grip of nuclear winter. This is, of course,
it's just another just obvious and huge aspect of the
nuclear age. You know, we knew the world would not
be the same, and it has not been.

Speaker 3 (42:44):
Right, So there was concern about the possibility of a physical,
immediate runaway reaction that could destroy the world, and those
concerns were not founded, or at least it was considered
very unlikely and proved to not be the case that
a nuclear detonation would do that to the end atmosphere.
And yet there was a runaway, a destructive runaway reaction,

(43:05):
and we just don't know like on what time scale,
if at all, it could prove extremely destructive to the world.
I mean, the atomic weapons they were designing were used
in the immediate circumstance, and then you know, it's hard
to imagine that going through into the future, that we
could have nuclear weapons on Earth and they would never

(43:25):
ever be used ever again for you know, however many
you know, thousands or hopefully millions of years, humans continue
to exist.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
Yeah, I mean it would be great, That would be
great the case, but.

Speaker 3 (43:37):
The odds seem to be against that never ever happening.

Speaker 2 (43:40):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, have you met us, the human race?
This is sadly something we're highly capable of using. And
even you know, this is obviously a complex discussion. There
are a lot of ins and outs, and you can
get into various analysis of like where we are now
with various safeguards and so forth. But even if the

(44:02):
potential for their usage is low, if it's low year
to year, and then we have to just carry on indefinitely,
like what does that look like statistically? So yeah, continues
to be a matter of great concern obviously exactly.

Speaker 3 (44:18):
Yeah, I mean, what are the odds of flipping heads
on a coin eight times in a row? Is very low?
But just keep flipping the coin, I mean, you keep
doing it, Eventually you'll get there.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah. Now I want to cover a few more here.
The number of you may be reminded of some of
the discussions and science headlines and just general media headlines
around two thousand and eight, regarding the large hadron collideer
the LHC, specifically, as it smashed protons of greater and
greater speeds, it was brought up, hey, what if they

(44:51):
were to accidentally generate micro black holes that could potentially
grow and, I don't know, consume the entire planet Robi.

Speaker 3 (44:59):
You've looked into this more recently than I have. But
my understanding of this, just from my memory, is that
the main people talking about this were not well informed scientists.
It was more kind of a fringe conspiracy theory.

Speaker 2 (45:13):
Yeah, and it definitely one of those things that ends
up resonating at the headline level everywhere else because the
idea of like creating a black hole in a lab
and then eating everything, you know, that's an evocative idea.
It certainly jives with a lot of our science fiction, like.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
The Vasilene apocalypse or like the gray Goo. It's like
the consumption of the world around us by a strange substance.
It's impossible to deny how interestingly awful that idea is.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
Yeah, and just the idea of the black hole, even
if you only halfway understand it, and I think it's
probably less most I'm not going to pretend to completely
understand black holes, but you know they're evocative. It's a
fascinating idea. LHC scientists considered the possibility and concluded that quote,

(46:03):
if micro black holes do appear in the collisions created
by the LHC, they would disintegrate rapidly in around ten
to the negative twenty seventh power seconds. They would decay
into standard model or super symmetric particles, creating events containing
an exceptional number of tracks in our detectors which we
would easily spot. Finding more on any of these subjects

(46:26):
would open the door to yet unknown possibilities. In other words,
it wasn't happening, and it's not a real concern. Now
there's another related concern that also popped up. I think
it may be resonated in headline level a little less
strongly because not as evocative as black holes. But there

(46:50):
was also this idea that hypothetical clumps of strange matter
called strangelets could be generated in a particle accelerator, either
the LHC or or the relativistic heavy ion collideer. The
rhic and the extreme version of the scenario is that
it would set off a chain reaction that converts the
entire planet into a condensed lump of strange goop. However,

(47:15):
no strangelets have ever been observed at the RHIC or
the LHC, and the scientists contend that they're even less
likely at the LHC facility, the planet has not been gooped,
so we seem to be pretty good on this case
as well.

Speaker 3 (47:32):
I feel like these examples raise a different kind of
question about these containment fears, which is, you know, we've
been exploring since we're obviously talking about like very serious
heavy stuff like nuclear weapons and potentially AI talking about
stuff that quite clearly I think most reasonable people would
agree we should be concerned about, like there should be

(47:54):
levels of caution dealing with these things. On the other hand,
you really that anybody can raise fears about anything for
any reasons, good or not. So, like if people are
raising concerns, just the fact that somebody is raising concerns
about something doesn't necessarily mean those concerns are things that

(48:18):
are well founded or that we should take seriously. And
part of the problem is like in the realm of
cutting edge science, like most people if they hear about
a concern with something, oh, you know, they're doing an
experiment at the particle collider. You know, it could do
something that destroys the world. Ninety nine point whatever percent

(48:39):
of people have no idea whether they should take that
concern seriously or not. But the fact that somebody is
saying it makes you feel like, well, maybe I should
be concerned because you don't know, you know, you don't
have the background knowledge to evaluate these claims and understand
whether they're they're based on reasonable concerns or not.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean a lot of it comes down
to need trust in science. You need trust in scientific institutions,
and you need regulations in place, and you need all
of this sort of working together. Another thing I should

(49:19):
bring up, just briefly. I don't want to spend too
much time on strangelets and micro black holes, but kind
of getting back to the poly water. These often raise questions, Okay,
we're talking about creating something in a lab, but it's
the thing that we're hypothetically creating. Is it something that
is that is just occurring elsewhere in the world or

(49:39):
in the universe, And then we have to sort of
weigh those two things, you know, like, Okay, if this
is a possibility in a lab, then it is surely
a reality elsewhere in the universe. And what does that
mean for our fears?

Speaker 3 (49:52):
Right with the polywater comparison being that if we can
make it in the lab with you know, no especially
weird conditions, we're just like tiny quartz tubes. It probably
occurs in nature sometimes, so doesn't seem like it could
be just that some quantity of it in the environment
immediately leads, or not immediately at all, leads to worldwide catastrophe.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
Yeah. Another case that's interesting to bring up in this
conversation is the nineteen seventy five a Silamar conference on
recombinant DNA. This was a gathering of biologists, lawyers, and
physicians at a Silamar conference center near Monterey, California, a
lovely place I once attended a wedding there. Oh really Yeah,

(50:35):
I highly recommend visiting that area if you get the chance.
But the conference in question was centered around biohazards and
regulatory concerns regarding developing and as well as just near
future biotechnological advancements in general, especially recombinant DNA genetic material
created from two different sources to create all new sequences.

(50:56):
It was an advancement that at the time was highly promising,
and it has proven to be very beneficial in biotechnology
and medicine multiple research areas. But at the same time,
at the time, researchers also recognized the huge potential for
the creation of organisms with dangerous properties, not so much

(51:16):
like space were wolves, or anything, but more so like
the accidental creation of deadly pathogens that could conceivably wash
over the globe, like any number of real and imagined
plagues and doomsday scenarios. There was a lot of concern
regarding cancer viruses cancer causing viruses in particular. I read

(51:36):
a quote from French biologist Philippe Kouilsky about the conference,
in which he underlined the excitement surrounding it, but also
the confusion quote because some of the basic questions could
only be dealt with in great disorder or not confronted
at all. On the frontiers of the unknown, the analysis
of benefits and hazards were locked up in concentric circles

(51:57):
of ignorance. How could one determine the reality without experimenting,
without taking a minimum of risk. I read this quote
in a silomar in recombinant DNA the end of the
Beginning by medical researcher Donald S. Fredrickson. This came out
in nineteen ninety one, but I think that succinctly summarizes
some of the issues regarding a number of these scenarios.

(52:20):
Science advances, like I said in previous episode, kind of
like a swine mold navigating a maze of understanding. And
when do we decide to not let it explore a
particular corridor or to try and slow its pace down
in a particular corridor.

Speaker 3 (52:34):
Can you even effectively do that? I mean, science is
not a top down structure. I mean there are structures
and institutions within it that have some top down control,
but overall it is sort of like an organism in itself. Yeah,
it's a worldwide phenomenon where people can independently pursue things,
I mean, not totally independently. Cooperation is very important to

(52:57):
how science proceeds. But you know it's very hard to
you know, put put the lock on it and just
say nobody can look into this.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Yeah, especially if there's money to be made, or there
is a strategic advantage for like a nation state to.

Speaker 3 (53:14):
Acquire or people think either of those things.

Speaker 2 (53:17):
Yeah, if there's whether or not. Yeah, yeah, even if
there even if there's there's nothing substantial to it at all,
if there's a possibility of either of those things, it
may get a fair amount of attention. So the conference
in question, it resulted in a number of safety guidelines.
Some research was halted and biosafety levels were established. Some
of those are still in use today. Frederickson pointed out
in his paper, though, that some of these guidelines were

(53:39):
relaxed in seventy eight. By seventy eight, but at the
time of his writing, none of the more dire biotechnology
outcomes discussed had come to pass, while many great advancements
had been made. But he stressed that we shouldn't let
either factor wayh too heavily on our judgment of the
precaution exercised at the conference. And I think that is

(54:01):
something to keep in mind with all these scenarios, Like
we know that either you know, there were a lot
of benefits to be gained or there ended up not
being a threat, But we have to really put ourselves
in the shoes of the people in the trenches dealing
with the prospect of some sort of an advancement in
their given time.

Speaker 3 (54:20):
Well, like we talked about last time. I think it's
very important when we reflect on the polywater saga for
our takeaway not to be what a bunch of dummies,
you know that they like, they're fools, and I'm smarter
than them because I wouldn't have fallen for polywater. I mean,
that's silly. We have the benefit of hindsight. We can,
you know, read how the whole thing unfolded. We know

(54:41):
the end of the story. A lot of very smart
and very productive scientists got confused and led into this
research dead end. And fortunately, you know, we did eventually
figure it out. Like there was a clarification process that
went on in the scientific community and eventually it was
figured out that like, oh, polywater is not real. This

(55:04):
was mistaken all along in a way that is science
working the way it's supposed to. I mean, it is
inevitable in science that some incorrect ideas are going to
end up are going to be floated and in some
cases might attract a lot of attention and enthusiasm. But
the great thing about science is that it is this

(55:25):
vast collaborative process of gradual clarification where that stuff will
get sorted out over time. So it's not quite fair to,
you know, to flog people for having been mistaken for
some time. It might be fair to flog people if
they're like really stubborn, you know, and once the evidence
comes out they refuse to acknowledge it.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
Yeah. Now, another comparison I want to make here, this
is I think there's a strong comparison to be made
here between this and the hypothetical polywater scenario, and it
concerns an HIV AIDS medication by the aim of Retona vir.
It was originally produced in a crystalline form, and this

(56:07):
was called form one that was discovered in nineteen ninety six,
and it was offered in an unrefrigerated capsule. But then
a couple of years later, form two was discovered with
significantly lower bioavailability, so less useful as a medication, but
it also was more stable in this form, and the

(56:27):
problem quickly became clear that if form two came in
contact with form one, it would convert Form one into
form two, and even trace amounts could do this, you know,
trace amounts in production, and so the pharmaceutical company behind
it ended up apparently losing millions due to its impact

(56:47):
on production lines. Eventually, new formulations allowed them to avoid
the problem.

Speaker 3 (56:53):
So the comparison here would be that kind of like
the alleged polywater you know, the vasilene apocalypse and or
the Eisen nine thing, you would have a contagion by
touch of a chemical form. So like the one touch
is one comes into contact with the other and it
changes it and maybe changes property is that you don't

(57:15):
want changed or important. In this case, it wouldn't affect
the entire biosphere, but you know, would affect important properties
of a pharmaceutical as intended.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
Right, right, that's my understanding of it here. But again
it's also my understanding that they end up finding a
new formulation that allows them to avoid the problem. Now
there's another one I want to mention here, vacuum decay. Right,
So this one's complex and it entails quantum field theory.
But my best understanding of the idea is that our universe,
what if it actually has a vacuum state that you

(57:46):
could describe as a metastable false vacuum, and that suddenly
if a bubble of lower energy true vacuum were to
manifest in our university, a quantum tunneling, it would rapidly expand,
correcting our vacuum to a lower energy true vacuum, and
rewrite the fundamental laws of physics and alter the masses
of elementary particles in the process.

Speaker 3 (58:07):
I remember reading about this year's back. I also, of course,
don't understand the finer points of this, you know, the
physics involved. But yeah, I remember reading about this and
thinking like, well, that's kind of interesting, except like, what
would you do about it? Nothing?

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Yeah, I mean, if I'm understanding it correctly, it would unmake,
remake everything in our universe. Life as we know it
would no longer be possible. Nothing as we know it
would be possible. But the upside, according to astrophysicist doctor
Katie Mack, is that since the bubble would expand at
the speed of light, unmaking or remaking everything into an

(58:45):
unknowable new form, you would just never know what hit you.

Speaker 3 (58:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:50):
Yeah, things would just simply stop being and that's all
there is to it. So it's like, well, you know,
not really something to lose sleepover. And again it involves
like something from outside of our universe becoming part of
our universe. Like it's it's like a borderline outside context
problem here.

Speaker 3 (59:10):
Borderline that seems like the kind of definition of an
outside context problem, isn't.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
Well, I mean, if we've thought of it, then I
guess we have some context for it, but barely. I
feel like, yeah, and there's nothing we could do about it,
And it would be the last if we were to
worry about it. It would be the last thing we worried about. Yeah,
all right, And finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't
at least mention the scenario presented in the series one
pilot episode of Look Around You, the two thousand and

(59:37):
two parody of nineteen eighties British educational programming. This was
created by Robert Popper and Peter Sarah Finowitch. And this
is the Helvetica scenario.

Speaker 3 (59:48):
Didn't this come up on the show just recently?

Speaker 2 (59:50):
Well, it may have. I do love it and think
about it way too often. But yeah, in the pilot,
again this is all parody, and this is all surrealistic humor.
We learned that under certain unstated conditions, a change can
take place in the calcium molecule, causing molecular collapse. In
something called the Helvetica scenario. It's not explained, but we

(01:00:13):
see a faceless, agitated human scientist in containment kind of like,
you know, pawing at the wall and taking what we've
been discussing here. I guess we could loosely imagine some
sort of scenario by which cascading calcium collapse would have
dire consequences for us in our world, especially since it

(01:00:34):
plays a number of crucial roles in our bodies. So
I guess we might imagine that we would sort of
melt into blobs of some sort. I'm not sure if
we would turn into faceless scientists dudes beating on the wall,
but it wouldn't be good if it could happen. Luckily,
it cannot happen. But I can't help but imagine that

(01:00:54):
polywater and or ice nine partially inspire the Helvetica scenario
presented in this program.

Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
Yeah, I guess we keep imagining polywater the polywater apocalypse
as it gets into the environment, takes over everything in
the environment, and you get like the ending of Kat's
Cradle where the world is ice nine. But yeah, I
guess the other version to imagine is like doctor Manhattan
locked in the room and he gets the poly water

(01:01:22):
inside his body and you just get to watch what
happens to him.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Yeah, Yeah, and just hope it doesn't get out in
any way. Look around you. It gives us a best
case scenario for something like this, where it's happened, it's bad,
but we keep it locked away.

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):
Are you cool if we talk a bit about pathological.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
Science, Yeah, let's do so.

Speaker 3 (01:01:50):
A couple of the big sources that I mentioned in
the last episode, that chapter by Philip Ball and the
paper by Dennis Rousseau both frame polywater as a key
example of what's known as pathological science. I was trying
to understand the difference between pathological science and pseudoscience. I

(01:02:12):
don't think there are actually formal definitions that keep these
things separate, so instead I just have to infer the
difference in how they're usually used. So the distinction I
would make is this pseudoscience is fake science, and it's
fake science from the beginning. It might be esthetically disguised

(01:02:33):
as science. Maybe it is supposed to look and feel
like science to people who can't tell the difference, but
it is fundamentally not guided by an earnest search for
the truth. It is fundamentally not scientific in its methods,
and so it is sort of doomed from the start.
There's nothing really scientific about pseudoscience in how it works,

(01:02:57):
maybe only in how it looks, whereas pathological science, I think,
is usually referred to science that begins as real science
and does attempt to follow the scientific method, but it
refers to these projects or cases where genuine researchers are
led into error by things like unconscious bias and failure

(01:03:22):
to confront central questions or contradictions. A big thing in
how people talk about pathological science, at least as it
seems to me, is a failure to ask the right questions.
So maybe people are following the scientific method, but they
are forming their conclusions based on focusing on the wrong questions,

(01:03:44):
and so polywater seems to be a great example of that.
In this paper by Dennis Rousseau, he also uses the
examples of cold fusion, another pathological science project, and infinite
dilution properties in water principle behind like homeopathy and stuff.
What Russeau does in his paper is he tries to
identify three overriding characteristics of pathological science. Because of course,

(01:04:09):
you know, it's not entirely useless when people go astray
in searching for the truth. You can actually learn a
lot from looking how smart people get things wrong, it's
a very useful thing to study. So Rousseau first calls
to the attention he did not invent the concept of
pathological science. The term seems to come from, or at

(01:04:31):
least was made very popular by the Nobel Prize winning
chemist Irving Langmuir. Langmuir identified six symptoms of pathological science
in a famous talk that he gave in the nineteen fifties.
I think, but Russeau tries to condense them into three characteristics,
or he condenses langmuir six into two characteristics, and then

(01:04:53):
he adds one of his own. So the first one
I want to quote from Russeau here quote the effect
being studied is often at the limits of detectability or
has a very low statistical significance. So if what he's
getting at here is if the claimed effect is very
weak or hard to detect, errors of bias can creep

(01:05:16):
into the observation or interpretation process. He identifies especially effects
that are not measured by objective numerical readings on instruments,
but effects that require visual observation by the experimenter. So
if you have to rely on looking with your eyes
to see the effect, and the effect is very weak.

(01:05:39):
This is the danger zone for unconscious bias to take
over in observation. Also, when effects are very weak or
of low statistical significance, you might not be able to
establish a clear connection between the size of the effect
you see and the size of the very variable that

(01:06:00):
is supposedly causing it. So I don't know, you know,
I coat my body in three times as much tiger repellent,
and I see the exact same number of tigers, which
is zero.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:06:11):
So like if you're not establishing a strong correlation between
how much you're tweaking the supposed cause and how big
the effect is. When you don't see that correlation, that
should raise concerns. But also Russeau says, the experiment are
involved in pathological science can sometimes wave that concern away

(01:06:34):
by saying, you know, well, we're in the early stages
of discovering a new phenomenon. We don't understand all of
the variables yet. In some cases that could be true,
but that can also be an excuse that allows you
to keep believing in a false theoretical model. But I
think this is really important when you compare it to
the detail that we talked about earlier. Today where a

(01:06:55):
lot of these initial observations about the properties of polywater,
you know, the easing ways that stuff was different than
regular water. They're observed on tiny, tiny quantities of it,
and they're not measured with normal you know, bulk measurement instruments.
They're being inferred from visual observation through microscopes, So researchers

(01:07:19):
are relying on things they see through microscopes, acting you know,
properties of tiny amounts of something that they're looking at
through these lenses. That does seem to be like a
real danger zone where you might kind of see what
you want to see.

Speaker 2 (01:07:36):
You know, from the micro to the macro. This reminds
me of some of the pre photography errors in astronomy
that we've discussed in the show before, be it the
sighting of a potential planetary body, to even the supposed
identification of things like canals on Mars and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:07:57):
Perfect connection. Actually, because people often cite Martian canals as
a like a core example of pathological science. It's not
that it was fake pseudoscience. It was people trying to
use the scientific method and trying to be responsible but
getting fooled by you know, they were trying to see

(01:08:17):
things with these telescopes that they couldn't get the resolution
they needed, and they were making these inferences and then
building on that and that was the problem. Yeah, so
we got led into this false belief that Mars had
these canals.

Speaker 2 (01:08:30):
And it was you know, go back and listen to
our older episode on it. I forget the title off
it offn It might have just been canals of Mars
or something, but you know, it was an exciting idea
that wasn't impossible at the time. But yeah, it was
a lot of it was based on what do I
think I see with with well, not the naked eye,
but what do I think I see with my eye
through a telescope?

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):
Yeah, okay. Characteristic number two that Russo identifies of pathological
science is a readiness to disregard prevailing ideas and theories.
The way he puts it, it's when you know, my
new observation, Yeah, it conflicts with all previous experience and
with our current best theories. But you're too dogmatically wedded

(01:09:11):
to the past. I'm changing everything, you know. Within science,
there is always a balance between open mindedness and explanatory conservatism.
It is, of course true across the history of science
that older theories are superseded by newer, more accurate theories.
You know, you can talk about ways that Newton's model

(01:09:34):
of gravity was superseded by Einstein, though it also doesn't
really mean Newton was wrong, Like, at certain scales, Newton
is still incredibly useful. You know, you can still do
Newtonian calculations and make good predictions. But it turns out
that you can't use Newton to understand all gravitational phenomena
in the world, in the universe. And so you know,

(01:09:54):
Einstein provides an update and a refinement that gets more
accuracy in certain ways, and you know, you get that
all throughout science. So you have to remain open minded
that there might be better theories of reality than the
ones we're using now. At the same time, we have
the theories we have now because they're really good and
they consistently make good, accurate predictions. And most of the time,

(01:10:18):
when somebody thinks they've come up with a new model
that changes everything, they're probably wrong. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:10:24):
Yeah, it's exceptional moments and time and exceptional individuals have
proven the exception. You know, are you the one that
has reinvented things and broken through to the other side. Maybe,
but it is unlikely.

Speaker 3 (01:10:39):
Well, also, I think of your theory is revolutionary, and
it contradicts a lot of common experience or prevailing theories.
It should have a good a good account of why,
like what's going on there? Why did we get this
previous mistake? And result of this theory is actually better.
So and one thing I was thinking about is this

(01:11:01):
is one way that the social virtues of science come in.
In my view, what we mean when we talk about
science can't really be done by one person alone or
by one team. It is a diverse, global, professional and
social culture that strengthens itself by acting as a community

(01:11:23):
to process new ideas and information and sort truth from error.
And one of the tools in its arsenal, of course,
is replication or experiment. New ideas need to be tested
through critical experiments, and if somebody claims revolutionary experimental results
that don't fit with our best theories of the world,

(01:11:43):
other scientists try to repeat that experiment themselves and see
if they get the same results. And here we get
to Rousseau's third characteristic of pathological science. He says, essentially,
the investigator avoids decisive experiments that could potentially rule out
their revolutionary theory.

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (01:12:03):
To avoid confronting the truth, the investigator selects experiments that
do nothing except perhaps add another significant figure to the
result or measure a variant of the phenomenon. The investigator
never finds the time to complete the critical measurement, which
could bring down the whole house of cards. This connects
to what we were talking about with polywater, where all

(01:12:24):
this stuff's going on while there's never been a really good,
high quality chemical analysis of polywater to say, are we
sure we know what it is? Are we sure this
is just water?

Speaker 2 (01:12:35):
Yeah? Yeah, Like the one thing that could really answer
the question and determine whether we should proceed or not. Well,
let's not do that. Let's just keep proceding anyway. And
there may be more to that. As we've discussed with polywater,
there are other practical reasons of why that major step
hasn't been taken with polywater, being the amount of polywater

(01:12:57):
that is available.

Speaker 3 (01:12:58):
If it is practically difficult, that's almost kind that makes
it easier to perpetuate, you know, to move on without
asking this critical central question. Now, what if somebody else
does that critical experiment and reveals your new discovery to
be wrong. In some cases, you will get people ignoring
the finding or criticizing the method. For some reason your

(01:13:19):
results are not acceptable, maybe you did the experiment wrong again.
You know, this is not usually regarded as good behavior retrospectively,
but people can get really caught up, you know, in
trying to pursue their programs.

Speaker 2 (01:13:33):
Yeah, I mean there are a number of human factors
that go into this too, anyway, the ego, sun, time,
some costs, so much so, so many different factors.

Speaker 3 (01:13:41):
I would argue science is a superhuman process, but individual
scientists are humans. And one thing Rousseau points out that
I think I would totally agree with is that in
these historical examples where you get scientists getting caught up
in pathological science, they're usually not doing so consciously. They

(01:14:03):
are falling victim to unconscious bias while genuinely believing themselves
to be on the right track. You might get little
moments of doubt, like you could ask the question like,
why isn't more of an effort made to pursue that
one really decisive central experiment. But you know that kind
of our motivations can be unconsciously affected by biases as well.

(01:14:24):
You know, like what seems like the most important thing
to spend your time on can also be affected by
unconscious biases. You may get the occasional conscious fraud, but
I think it's like most people who have the will
and intent to do that sort of thing do not
end up working in scientific research. It's not a very
natural fit. And yeah, so Rousseau argues that argues that

(01:14:47):
in his experience, deliberate fraud in science is extremely rare.
It's the more dangerous cocktail is these kind of sketchy
areas where you're relying on these weak results and maybe
visual obs or it's this cocktail of self delusion and
sloppiness that can sustain a project like this. And again

(01:15:07):
it's important to note that, like, you know, unlike pseudoscience,
which tends to never go away, you know, the pseudoscience
comes up and it just keeps on going forever. One
distinction does seem to be that with these things identified
as pathological science, they are transient phenomena. They pop up
for a few years and people get excited about and

(01:15:28):
eventually everybody's like, oh, yeah, that's that's not that was
all wrong, and they move on.

Speaker 2 (01:15:33):
I guess one of the dangers is that you have
pathological science. But then what if pseudoscience comes a long
and says like, hey, what do you got over there?

Speaker 3 (01:15:41):
Well, I think that does happen?

Speaker 2 (01:15:42):
Yeah, and then they latch onto it or or you
know someone who's like, this is a great story. It's
an entertaining story. Let's tell that story and people will
love to hear it. And now it's taken on life
of its own outside, completely removed from the science system,
and therefore now it will live on and for an
extended period of time no matter what science decides on it. Yeah,

(01:16:05):
and of course the other factor is on top of that, Well,
if I buy into this story, if I buy into
the pseudoscience, does it make something easier for me? Does
it like, does it give me some sense of hope?
Does it sort of distills some anxiety or fear that
I have about the world or my place in it?

(01:16:26):
You know, if it becomes useful in that regard to
the individual or to corporations or to nation states, then yeah,
that just feeds into it more.

Speaker 3 (01:16:37):
Or is it entertaining or does it does it flatter
my biases? Or yeah, yeah, this may be counterintuitive, but
framing it within thinking about the superhuman qualities of the
scientific process as a whole, apart from just the individual
human qualities of each researcher as a person. I kind

(01:16:58):
of find the whole Polywater store a bit inspiring. You know,
it's weird to think of a story of a you know,
several years long enterprise of error as inspiring, but I
do think of it as kind of inspiring because it
shows that, you know, you can have a lot of
sunk costs, you can have a lot of error and

(01:17:19):
people fooling themselves into following something that isn't real, but
you also get to see how the process eventually corrects
itself and see what that involves, Like, how is it
that we soort fact from fiction? And we can learn
a lot from this kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
Yeah, yeah, again, the idea that the system ultimately worked
the way it was supposed to with polywater, that we
figured out that it wasn't a thing and we moved on,
and at the same time we can still look back
on it and find the concept and the story of
it entertaining and thought provoking. You know, it doesn't did

(01:17:58):
diminish that at all. So so yeah, I agree, this
is a fascinating journey, and it serves as an interesting
model again to compare to these various other scenarios and
hypothetical scenarios. All right, well, shall we go ahead and
close it out there?

Speaker 3 (01:18:14):
I think so?

Speaker 2 (01:18:16):
All right? Just a reminder to everyone out there that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
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and years at this point, So if you go to
wherever you get your podcasts, look up Stuff to Blow

(01:18:38):
your Mind, you'll find pretty deep audio archive there. You
can go back and find topics we've discussed in the past.
You can also find topics that we've referenced here in
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you can.

Speaker 3 (01:18:55):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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a topic for the future, or just to say hello.
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