Junk science takes many forms

The United States Department of Energy recently got a memo back from its Inspector-General, the internal auditor charged with making sure taxpayers’ money is spent sensibly. Like his counterparts in many other government departments all over the world, he fights an uphill battle.

The Inspector-General found fault with the Department’s US$400,000 tests of the Passive Magnetic Resonance Anomaly Mapping apparatus. The name may sound like a real geophysical system, but the details are revealing. It is a “bio-sensory unit,” whose operator claimed to be able to detect groundwater flow patterns, contaminant plumes, and buried objects. The Inspector-General’s report said “the technology relies on the ability of the world’s only qualified operator [who is able to] sense changes in magnetic fields.”

Yes, you may throw away those boring old proton-precession units. There’s a boyo out there who feels it in his bones. And not only does he feel it, he doesn’t even bother to take field notes: nope, his reactions are measured by a detector strapped to his back and wired up to his forearms.

Shrewd readers will perhaps have realized that this is nothing more than the old forked stick that Georgius Agricola burlesqued in De Re Metallica. But put a shiny metal case around it, and an LCD display on top, and some government agencies, with more money than brains, apparently will be impressed.

Meanwhile, news reports tell us that South African internet tycoon Mark Shuttleworth, who has paid US$20 million for a ride on the International Space Station, slept comfortably in his first night in space. We are much relieved.

Shuttleworth, who apparently told wire service reporters in Cape Town that he believes in space aliens, is the second tourist to take up space at the station. More places are being made by the space-station program in an attempt to defray its US$4-billion annual cost. (Of that, the Canadian contribution is about $70 million annually.)

A glance at the program’s releases about the scientific breakthroughs achieved on the station makes depressing reading for anyone who thought US$4-billion might do some good if put into programs for vaccination, providing safe drinking water, deciding whether the atmosphere really is warming up, or the unfashionably earthbound sport of resource evaluation. Money for the space station doesn’t exactly go down the drain, but then in zero gravity, what does?

While television and the popular press gushed about Shuttleworth’s “performing” zero-gravity experiments in stem-cell and AIDS research, it’s not likely Shuttleworth himself had anything to do with their design or will have anything to do with their interpretation.

Lori Garver, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s former Associate Administrator for Policy and Plans, and a hopeful space tourist herself, defended this as “our foothold to the cosmos. . . . We are explorers just like we were in the West.”

Rubbish. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark — the explorers whom space romantics are, for some reason, comparing to the station astronauts — made their own maps and took their own bearings. Shuttleworth is, in the phrase used for test pilots of the early manned space program, “Spam in a can.” Even the real mission specialists are little more than glorified lab technicians. The Lori Garvers of the world, some of whom have control over part of the public purse, confuse this with scientific progress.

Meanwhile, back on the ground, physicists at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory have succeeded in measuring the solar neutrino flux. Those not exercised by the problem of measuring the solar neutrino flux may yawn, but the measurements are important to the understanding of the structure of matter.

Neutrinos of three types are known: the electron type, which are generated by fusion reactions such as are believed to power stars, and the muon and tau-particle neutrinos. The Sudbury measurements show that the neutrinos from the sun are not all electron neutrinos — a result that can only be explained if the neutrinos change from one type to another on the journey from the sun.

Neutrinos could only do that if they had a mass. It ain’t much; but this result — which has significant implications for our understanding of elementary particles — did not come from a US$4-billion space station in low-earth orbit, but from a US$60-million observatory built on the 6800 Level of the Creighton mine in Sudbury. In science, as everywhere else, it helps to keep your feet on the ground.