How the Mainstream Science Press Failed Us in the Crucial Early Months of COVID-19

In the post here and the post here I documented how leading health agencies such as the WHO, the CDC and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases made crucial blunders during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similar blunders were committed by the mainstream science press. 

The thought overlords of the ruling class of mainstream biology orthodoxy have so many privileges and advantages. Such a mainstream controls all the biology content on various slick publications, printed and online. These include things such as Discover magazine, Science magazine, New Scientist magazine, Scientific American and some newer online sites such as Quanta Magazine, the Conversation, Nautilus and Aeon.  But the mainstream science news press blew it in the crucial early months of the COVID-19 crisis.  Such a press should have acted as a watchdog, alerting us loud and clear when our national house was invaded by a very infectious pathogen. Instead, it seems the watchdog was largely asleep when our national house was invaded. 

Let us look at the performance of one of the leading mainstream  science publications, the slick online site called Quanta Magazine. It is easy for us to track that performance, because we can view chronologically the articles published in different categories. Quanta Magazine has no Medicine category and no Health category. But it does have a Biology category, so let's look at the articles published under that category during the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Here were the Biology category articles that Quanta Magazine published in January 2020 as a pandemic started to rage in China:

Unscrambled Eggs: Self-Organization Restores Cells’ Order

Biodiversity Alters Strategies of Bacterial Evolution

Hidden Computational Power Found in the Arms of Neurons

Why I’m Hosting The Joy of x Podcast

Secrets of Math From the Bee Whisperer

An Ethical Future for Brain Organoids Takes Shape

Glial Brain Cells, Long in Neurons’ Shadow, Reveal Hidden Powers

We had in these stories no mention of the COVID-19 crisis. On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization had officially declared coronavirus a "global health emergency."  Here were the Biology category articles that Quanta Magazine published in February 2020:

The Contrarian Who Cures Cancers

Immune Cell Assassins Reveal Their Nurturing Side

New Clues About ‘Ambigram’ Viruses With Strange Reversible Genes

In Brain Waves, Scientists See Neurons Juggle Possible Futures

The Animal Origins of Coronavirus and Flu

It was only in the last of these articles, published on February 25, 2020, that COVID-19 or coronavirus was mentioned in any substantive way.  Did the article raise an alarm bell telling us about the gathering storm that would eventually kill more than 750,000 Americans? No, the story failed to do that.  The story was mainly devoted to dogmatically asserting the theory that COVID-19 had naturally spread from animals to humans, as if such a theory was fact. That theory is now very much in doubt. In a recent survey of US intelligence agencies, a few of the agencies voiced support for such a theory, but only with "low confidence." An alternate theory that COVID-19 arose from some kind of lab leak or lab leak activity was supported with "moderate confidence" by one US intelligence agency. So the only theory now supported with "moderate confidence" or higher by a US intelligence agency is one contrary to the claims of the February 25, 2020 Quanta Magazine article. 

The article (written by a Professor Smith) failed to raise alarm bells about the severity of the crisis facing the United States on February 25, 2020. The article made it sound as if COVID-19 was some distant remote threat on the other side of the globe. On that date the virus was starting to spread like wildfire in the United States. The article contained only one very short paragraph devoted to the topic of how people can protect themselves from COVID-19, the paragraph below: 

"First of all, keep yourself safe by washing your hands, and avoid touching your face and eyes — practices that help avoid infection with either virus. You can catch a virus by directly breathing in virus-laden droplets in the air or by touching contaminated surfaces and then infecting your nose and eyes, whose mucous membranes serve as entry sites."

Our professor author failed to tell us to wear face masks, something very necessary for people to be wearing before vaccines were available. The author also failed to tell us to practice social distancing to reduce our chance of catching COVID-19.  We hear nothing about the importance of avoiding crowds to reduce the chance of catching COVID-19. The same mistake would be made by authorities throughout the US biology and medicine world until about April 3, 2020, when the CDC suddenly announced that everyone should be wearing face masks in places like stores, planes, trains and subways.  This was at an early crisis point before any vaccines were available. Very many tens of thousands of lives (and possibly hundreds of thousands of lives) could have been saved if biology and medical authorities had done their jobs properly during the crucial early months of February and March 2020. 

During the month of March 2020 hospital beds in New York City were starting to be filled with COVID-19 patients, and there would be more than 4000 US COVID-19 deaths by the end of that month, with US COVID-19 deaths rising to a total of about 14,000 by April 7, 2020.  Here were the Biology category articles that Quanta Magazine published during that month of March 2020:

Biodiversity May Thrive Through Games of Rock-Paper-Scissors

Machine Learning Takes On Antibiotic Resistance

Nature Versus Nurture? Add ‘Noise’ to the Debate.

The Brain Reshapes Our Malleable Senses to Fit the World

A Rapid End Strikes the Dinosaur Extinction Debate

Billion-Year-Old Algae and Newer Genes Hint at Land Plants’ Origin

None of these articles made any substantive mention of the COVID-19 epidemic that was spreading like wildfire in the US.  Around April 3 the crisis had got so bad in the US that the CDC had started to advise that face masks be worn. In the first two weeks of April 2020, the death toll more than quintupled, rising from about 5000 on April 1 to more than 30,000 by April 15, 2020 (according to the source here). Here in chronological order were the Biology category articles that Quanta Magazine published during that month of April  2020:

Where Do New Genes Come From?

Some Animals Have No Microbiome. Here’s What That Tells Us.

Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations.

What Other Coronaviruses Tell Us About SARS-CoV-2

The last of these articles appeared on April 29, 2020, and was written by the same Professor Smith who wrote the previously mentioned February 25, 2020 article. Although the article was written on the topic of coronavirus and COVID-19,  Professor Smith still failed to give the public much of any clear useful advice about protecting themselves from the deadly virus that was by this time skyrocketing out of control in the United States.  No advice is given in the text about the benefits of social distancing or avoiding crowds.  We read only this in the way of protective advice: "This only emphasizes the importance of protective measures — masks, gloves, hand washing — for people who face prolonged exposure to the virus."  But what does that mean? Does "prolonged exposure" refer only to people like hospital workers or grocery workers, or does it refer to people going shopping for a half-hour or going on a 60-minute train trip? We can't tell, so the advice isn't very useful.  

The article did not do much to alert us to the gravity of the crisis at the time the article was published. The text says, "The disease could become milder with time." Instead of grave headlines or sentences alerting us that the death rate had risen in the US by roughly ten times (from about 5000 to more than 50,000) during the past month, we have two images of Professor Smith that both show a big happy-looking smile.  Included in the article is a 56-minute video in which Professor Smith talks about COVID-19, apparently without giving any useful advice on how to avoid catching it.  Her talk is all extremely dry wonky jargon-filled professor talk in which she answers very technical questions that only professors or doctors might ask. 

An alternate way of searching for Quanta Magazine's articles on COVID-19 is to use this link to search for all of their articles with a tag of COVID-19.  The link does not reveal any important articles other than the ones I've mentioned during the first six months of 2020. Only in August of 2020 do we find a Quanta Magazine article with a headline that sounds very concerned about COVID-19. The article is entitled 

"COVID-19 Is Raging. How Safe Is Your Backyard Party?" Why did it take 140,000 US deaths before we got a "gee, we have a serious pandemic here" article title in Quanta Magazine?  When it came to alerting the public of the peril of COVID-19 in the first four months of 2020, and providing useful advice preventing infection, Quanta Magazine's performance can be described as "way too little, way too late."

I could go on and discuss at length similar failures that occurred in other mainstream science publications in the first four months of 2020, but it would probably be too depressing for you to read.  Using a Google search phrase of "COVID-19 site:www.scientificamerican.com" and using the Tools option to limit queries to a time between January 1, 2020 and April 1, 2020, I got about 10 pages of search results giving links to about 100 articles or news items on COVID-19 published in Scientific American. Not one had any kind of title anything like "How to Protect Yourself from COVID-19" or "How to Avoid  COVID-19." When I change the Google search to make it  articles on the Scientific American site between January 1, 2020 and October 31, 2020, and look through ten pages of search results, I get about 100 articles, but none of them have titles suggesting that they will tell you how to protect yourself from COVID-19. Finally on the eleventh page of search results I find an article from October 2020 entitled "How to Avoid COVID When Voting."  Where were all the "How to Avoid COVID" articles in Scientific American in the first eight months of the pandemic?

The First Photo Ever Taken of a Mysterious Orb?

Mysterious orbs were recently in the news. A mainstream news report from a few weeks ago has this title: "Mysterious 'flying white circles' reported over New Jersey." We see a baffling video showing strange orbs in the sky. According to the page here, in the records of the National UFO Reporting Center there were 7900 descriptions of UFOs as "spheres," 12,456 descriptions of UFOs as "circles," and 9016 descriptions of UFOs as "fireballs," versus only 7414 descriptions of UFOs as "disks." 

Mysterious orbs have been around for decades. For decades orbs have appeared in photos taken by ordinary people. Such orbs have appeared abundantly in indoor photos and outdoor photos.  Typical indoor photos of mysterious orbs are taken in normal clean dry air.  

Claims that such orbs only appear under dusty conditions or moist conditions are not at all true. I have got many thousands of mysterious orbs in a rich variety of colors (including white, green, yellow, blue, pink, and purple) when I took photos both outdoors in clean dry air and indoors in clean dry air.  A careful analysis of the size of dust particles indoors and outdoors (such as the one here) will provide no support for claims that mysterious orbs in photos are mainly produced by the dust particles in air.  The average dust particle size indoors is about 10 microns, less than a millionth of the fingernail-sized area right in front of a camera lens -- way too small to make a decent-sized orb in a photo, regardless of whether a flash is used.  The average dust particle outdoors is only 1 micron, way, way too small to produce an orb in a photo, regardless of whether a flash is produced.  In normal air dust particles are basically invisible to still photography, and the only way you can photograph them in normal air is by  taking a video and sticking a high-beam flashlight under your lens (a technique that neither I nor any other sensible orb photographer uses).  Water vapor particles are no bigger than dust particles in normal air (although in heavy fog or misty weather such particles are way bigger and may appear in photos). 

One remarkable aspect of mysterious orbs is the appearance of very rapid motion, an effect I have got over 700 times (mostly indoors in normal dry air that had no insects).  Below is an example of a photo I took in 2015, in which we seem to see five different position states of an extremely fast moving pink orb in Grand Central Terminal in New York. You can see more than 700 of my photos of speeding orbs by using the link here and continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right.  For a smaller subset showing 97 photos of a "string of pearls" effect like the one shown below, use this link. This phenomenon of speeding orbs has been photographed by many other photographers.  Speeding orbs often appear in vivid colors such as blue or pink. Using the link here you can see nearly 200 photos I took of speeding blue orbs. 

Another remarkable aspect of mysterious orbs is the appearance of dramatically striped orbs. I have published more than 800 photos of mysterious striped orbs with very clear stripes (which you can view very conveniently by reading the free online book here or by looking at the blog post series here and continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right). Prior to the time I started publishing such photos, no one ever stated, predicted or insinuated that stripes would appear in photos of dust particles or water vapor particles. So we cannot at all explain such photos through any dust or water particle hypothesis.  What we have in such photos is a dramatically novel and very unexpected observational phenomenon beyond current explanation. 

A particularly dramatic aspect of the orb phenomenon is pattern repetition, where we see a distinctive pattern repeating in a way that we would never expect to occur by chance. I have got such an effect in two ways:

(1) I have got a moderately abundant repetition effect in which striped orbs that I photograph in clean dry air tend to repeat the same distinctive stripe pattern multiple times, sometimes with ten or more repetitions (on different days) of the same very distinctive pattern. You can see that effect by looking at the summary post here. 

(2) I have also got a super-abundant pattern repetition effect occurring during the photography of ordinary falling drops of pure, clean water, in which some very distinctive and extremely noticeable orb pattern will start appearing three or more times (usually five or more times) in the same photograph, with such a very conspicuous effect usually  persisting most massively through most of dozens, hundreds or thousands of consecutive photos, with there occurring a degree of pattern repetition so improbable we would expect no observer in the observable universe to ever get so many repetitions by chance.  I have got such an effect on several hundred different photography days. You can see such an effect by looking at the thousands of photos in the free online book here, or by using the link here and continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right. 

But enough about what is happening these days in the strange world of orb photography. Let's look backwards, and ask: what was the first mysterious orb that ever showed up in a photo?

Hippolyte Baraduc was a paranormal investigator. At www.archive.org we can read in English his book The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights and Its Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible, a book with some interesting photos mixed with lots of dogmatic speculative metaphysics.  Baraduc also wrote a book in the French language, one entitled "The vibrations of human vitality: biometric method applied to sensitive and neurotics." The 1904 book can be read here. (The www.archive.org site incorrectly lists Baraduc's death as occurring in 1902, but he actually died in 1909.)

In that book on page 271 we see what may well be the first photo of a mysterious orb ever published. It is shown below:

At the top of the photo we see a mysterious orb floating, one looking like the orbs so often showing up in modern photos. The author makes comments that seem to be largely his own speculations. 

Below is the translation of the photo caption I get using Google translate: "Experimental release and momentance of the Azure ball of the spiritual body out of the Ether and the flesh showing the persistent link with the body, the thread of existence." The photo in the book is black and white, but the caption refers to an azure ball, meaning the orb was apparently blue. We don't know whether the blue description came from the photographer seeing a blue orb with his eyes, or having a blue orb show up in a color photo.

Blue orbs are one of the most common colors of mysterious orbs. I have personally photographed more than 1400 blue orbs in clean dry air, as you can see by using the link here, and continuing to press "Older Posts" at the bottom right. Below is an example I took in 2019 (as reported here), one showing a blue orb near an office building. Getting orbs from dust particles during outdoor photography is particularly unlikely, because average particle sizes are very much smaller outdoors, with an average size of only about 1 micron, much less than a millionth of the fingernail-sized area right in front of a camera lens. A typical dust particle outdoors will be invisible, because it blocks less than a millionth of the total area right in front of the camera lens.

Very many of the blue orbs I have photographed have had prominent stripes. At the link here you can see 65 photos I took of mysterious striped blue orbs. Below is an example, a photo I took at Grand Central Terminal in New York City. The orb not only has a stripe, but a very distinctive type of stripe called a shadow stripe, a type of stripe I have photographed 90+ times (as shown here). The site here defines a shadow stripe as "a main stripe that is surrounded by one or more other, thinner stripes, creating the effect of a shadow."

Returning to the topic of Baraduc and his photo shown above (possibly the first mysterious orb photo ever taken), here is how Google Translate translates the book text above the very old photo shown in the book page above:

"The experiment was made in May or June 1903; it lasted a few minutes; then ethereal forces acting for 5 minutes re-invade M "** S. cold, icy; without being touched, she is infused with new telepathic and invisible forces; she wakes her unconscious, ignorant, quickly revived by her cerebral energy. It is one of the most curious experimental studies made of the Super-Being, above the body, outside the Ether, in a person who is both an excellent spiritualistic medium and a great artist of temperament."

Baraduc was very interested in getting photographic evidence of the human soul. He photographed the death of his son and the death of his wife. In both cases the photos show mysterious clouds over the bodies at the time of death. You can see the photos here.

Observers have sometimes claimed to have seen such a cloud or mist at the time of death. On page 33 of a volume of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, we have an account of a woman who saw a vaporous form seem to emerge from her father-in-law's body when he died (following the link may require a Google login):

"He smiled , but said nothing, gave a sort of a sigh and puffed his breath out through his lips . The breath seemed to form a cloud, as breath does often in cold weather, and floated upward and away from him . She followed the cloud, which was of no definite shape,  for a few seconds with her eyes, and then turned to look down again at Mr . Baldwin and noted a sort of settled look that had come over his face and body . She had seen few people pass out , but felt that he had done so , and she called to Mr. Baldwin, Jr ., her husband , to come in,  for she thought their father had died , which proved to be the case."

In the extremely interesting year 2000 book One Last Hug Before I Go by Carla Wills-Brandon, we read on pages 12-13 the following account:

"The paramedics had arrived, but Dad and I knew they were too late. I sat there with my mother as she died and watched this gray wisp of vapor leave her body. As it disappeared, I knew Mother was gone."

On the same page we read of a witness reporting "a swirl of pastel color" arising from the chest of a dying person. 

Similarly on page 215 we hear an account by a nurse who claims to have seen "a white cloud sort of hanging over the woman's bed," a woman who was dying of a terminal illness.  On page 385 of the long and very interesting paper here, we read of a gravely ill man who was "conscious of something like a fleecy ball releasing itself from his physical form," with the man reporting he "distinctly saw my dead body lying upon the bed."  On page 386 we read this:

"While waiting for the return of his companions, Mr. Bertrand apparently began to freeze to death, such that he was unable to rouse himself. After a brief moment of acute pain, he suddenly found himself  'a ball of air in the air, a captive balloon still attached to earth by a kind of elastic string and going up and always up. How strange! I see better than ever, and I am dead.... Looking down, I was astounded to recognise my own envelope.' "

Similarly on page 108 of Sir William Barrett's Deathbed Visions we read this account:

"He says that at about 3.30 p.m. he and his wife were standing one on each side of the bed and bending over their dying son, when just as his breathing ceased they both saw 'something rise as it were from his face like a delicate veil or mist, and slowly pass away.' He adds, 'We were deeply impressed and remarked, ‘How wonderful! Surely that must be the departure of his spirit.' "

Baraduc threw around his metaphysical speculations with dogmatic confidence, but I cannot confidently offer any explanation for the multiple mysteries of mysterious orbs. I regard the source of such anomalies as something beyond our current understanding.  

Postscript: At the site here you can see a large collection of remarkable photos taken between 1918 and 1945. We are told the collection "details Dr. T.G. (Thomas Glendenning) and Lillian Hamilton's investigations of psychic phenomena in their home in Winnipeg, Manitoba between 1918 and 1945."  A photo I find very interesting is the photo below (click here to see the original source). It is entitled "Katie's Shining Garment." 

What I find interesting here is what we see on the bottom right. It looks exactly like an effect I have got 97 times, and have labeled as an "orb string of pearls" effect. It resembles what we might expect to see if an orb was moving very fast, so that the camera caught multiple position states of the orb. In this photo the line of the orb reaches the edge of the photo, but in almost all of my 97 photos of such an effect the line does not reach the edge of the photo; and such photos cannot be explained as a hair protruding in front of the camera. See the first photo in the post for an example of one of my "orb string of pearls" photos, and note how it resembles what we see in the bottom right of the photo above.  

When Cosmology Clickbait Uses a Silly Switcheroo

Scientists have told us innumerable times that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, a mysterious event in which the universe kind of exploded into existence, expanding from a point of possibly infinite density.  But nowadays we will sometimes read an article in our science news feeds (or our science news sites) claiming that the Big Bang was not the beginning. 

Some of these articles are articles describing some new super-speculative paper describing some wildly imaginative scenario that has yet to gain appreciable acceptance among cosmologists.  Such "hot-off-the-presses" theories are of very little significance, since they are 99% speculation. 

But more than one of "the Big Bang was not the beginning" articles published in mainstream media in recent years have been authored by a single person: Ethan Siegel, a cosmology PhD who works as a tireless writer on science topics.  The latest example of Siegel's dubious reasoning on this topic may be found here, an article entitled "We now know the big bang theory is (probably) not how the universe began."

Siegel tries the same old trick he has tried in similar articles:

(1) Going against what cosmology professors have been teaching for decades, Siegel effectively redefines the term "Big Bang" so that it does not refer to the very beginning of the universe, but to something that only started the tiniest instant after the beginning of the universe, at a time a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the beginning of the universe. 

(2) Switching the chronological order that cosmologists have taught for decades, that a hypothetical "cosmic inflation" phase occurred the tiniest fraction of a second after the start of the Big Bang, Siegel speaks as if such a hypothetical "cosmic inflation" phase occurred the tiniest fraction of a second before the start of the Big Bang. He refers to "the state that occurred prior to the hot Big Bang: cosmic inflation." 

Having made this little switcheroo involving such shady redefinition, Siegel then claims that the Big Bang was not the beginning, his reasoning being that the Big Bang did not occur until after some "cosmic inflation" phase lasting a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.  This kind of word parsing and hair-splitting and semantic skullduggery is as silly as the claim below:

"My client Waldo Wipkins denies that he caused the accident by pressing down on the accelerator of his car with his foot. He says the movement of the car was first started by the the rolling of his car downhill produced by the force of gravity, which preceded his pressing down of the accelerator by a tiny fraction of a second."

In his article, Siegel speaks (as he usually does) as if the "cosmic inflation" theory was a single theory that has been predictively successful.  It is no such thing. There are many hundreds of versions of the cosmic inflation theory. Most of these are mathematical models with input parameters that can be varied. What is predicted by any of these models always depends on what input parameters the model is given.  Each of these models predicts a very wide variety of things, like some political theory that predicts that the next election might be won by either the Republicans or the Democrats or the Green Party or the Libertarian Party (depending on what input parameters you give the theory). Given many hundreds of versions of the cosmic inflation theory, each predicting a wide range of outcomes depending on what input parameters they receive,  the truth is that the predictions of cosmic inflation theory are all over the map. 

There are no observations establishing any cosmic inflation theory, and since the predictions of the cosmic inflation theory are all over the map, there is no basis for claiming that it has any impressive record of predictive success.  To the contrary, scientists have failed in their attempts to find evidence for the main prediction of the theory (primordial b-modes). Noting the complete failure of searches for the primordial B-modes, a scientist recently stated, "If, however, future measurements continue to find no gravitational-wave signal, it will likely imply that we must seriously reconsider our inflationary models or perhaps dismiss inflation altogether, which would be a significant paradigm shift." 

Below is a NASA visual giving a chronology of cosmic events, one of countless visuals I could produce to show that the long-standing habit of cosmologists has been to describe the Big Bang as coming before an alleged "cosmic inflation" phase, not after such a phase as Siegel claims. 

Credit: NASA

Should we trustingly bow to the authority of Siegel, when he makes boasts about the cosmic inflation theory being predictively successful or supported by observations? I see no strong reason why we should. Although he is a cosmology PhD,  Siegel is not a cosmology professor, and he has apparently never authored or co-authored any scientific journal paper dealing mainly with the Big Bang, the universe's beginning, or the theory of cosmic inflation.  A search for his scientific papers on the physics paper server (https://arxiv.org/) gives us the following scientific papers, all written before 2009:

• Dark Matter in the Solar System
• Non-linear structure formation and the acoustic scale
• What Millisecond Pulsars Can Tell Us About Matter In The Galaxy
• Probing Dark Matter Substructure with Pulsar Timing
• Dark Matter In Minimal Trinification
• Dark Matter on the Smallest Scales
• Can Electric Charges and Currents Survive in an Inhomogeneous Universe?
• Cosmological Structure Formation Creates Large-Scale Magnetic Fields
• Effects of Inhomogeneities on Cosmic Expansion
• A Thermal Graviton Background from Extra Dimensions
• Towards a Precision Cosmology from Starburst Galaxies at z>2

None of these papers deals mainly with the extremely specialized topics of the Big Bang theory or the cosmic inflation theory.  Since Siegel has no published scientific journal papers dealing mainly with the Big Bang theory or the cosmic inflation theory, it seems there is no strong reason why we should think that he is qualified to be redefining the term "Big Bang" so that it comes after some proposed "cosmic inflation" phase (contrary to the majority of cosmologists), and also no strong authority-trust reason why we should put much weight on his claims about the cosmic inflation theory being well-grounded.  Siegel has written many articles on cosmic inflation theory, but on this topic he tends to keep repeating the same old dubious cheerleader talking points over and over and over again from one article to the next, just as he keeps repeating over and over and over again in different articles a set of selling points trying to get us to believe in the dubious hypothesis of dark matter, something never observed.  We see in such articles an uncritical repetition of very dubious triumphal legends of the cosmologist tribe. 

One such legend is that the cosmic inflation theory reduced the amount of fine-tuning needed at the universe's beginning, by eliminating the need for an initial expansion rate fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the fiftieth power.  The claim was never true, because cosmic inflation theories require so much fine-tuning of their own (in at least three places) that the need for fine-tuning of initial conditions is not actually reduced.  A 2019 paper states "the theory of inflation requires finely tuned initial conditions" and that it "is therefore far from clear that inflation truly solves the fine-tuning puzzles that it was designed for." Another paper (referring to fine-tuning required by the cosmic inflation theory) says, "The staggering amount of fine-tuning which is required disturbs many cosmologists."

What writers such as Siegel do is endlessly repeat boasts that the cosmic inflation theory solves several problems. We will never know whether such boasts are just tribal folklore of the small tribe of cosmologists. This is because no can ever reproduce the imagined cosmic inflation to verify that it actually solves any problem.  For example, would cosmic inflation (exponential expansion) actually result in a smooth universe? There's no way to ever know.  We can't reproduce cosmic inflation and see how smooth a universe results.  We can also never look back far enough in time to verify that cosmic inflation actually occurred, because the density of matter and energy was so great during the universe's first 300,000 years that nothing can be observed from those years (all light being scattered a billion times by such density). 

I may note that the scientific papers advancing versions of the cosmic inflation theory are some of the most obscure and hard-to-read papers that have ever appeared in scientific literature, rivaled in obscurity only by the papers of string theory.  An example from last month is here. Such papers are typically filled with huge numbers of obscure mathematical equations that are very poorly documented.  All kinds of obscure italicized symbols will appear that are almost never explained.  It is as if most of the writers of such papers were thinking that the only people who can ever understand such cosmic inflation papers are people like themselves who write cosmic inflation papers.  But since Siegel is not a writer of published scientific journal papers on cosmic inflation, what confidence can we have in his pronouncements about such a theory? 

Relying on an appeal to a never-observed "inflaton field" as imaginary as werewolves, the ever-changing cosmic inflation theory is like a continually shape-shifting monster. The very great obscurity of papers presenting versions of cosmic inflation theories is one of the major reasons for thinking that cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the Big Bang theory) should be dismissed as pseudoscience.  When there are many hundreds of versions of a theory, presented in papers written in the most hard-to-decipher text and the most intractable and poorly documented mathematics, then it can rightly be said that no one can justifiably claim to know that the predictions of the theory tend to be successful. Similarly, the works of the philosopher Hegel are so very obscure that no one can convincingly claim that  Hegel did or did not correctly predict the general features of modern society. 

Speaking about the cosmic inflation theory, Cal Tech physicist Sean Carroll says here, “When perturbations are taken into account, inflation only occurs in a negligibly small fraction of cosmological histories,” and then spells that out as a fraction less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The leading cosmologist Roger Penrose has described cosmic inflation as a thermalization process, and has stated, “There is, however, something fundamentally misconceived about trying to explain the uniformity of the early universe as resulting from a thermalization process.” He states that any thermalization process doing anything would have “been even more special before the thermalization than after” (The Road to Reality, page 755). Princeton cosmologist Paul Steinhardt says this:

"The irony is that our understanding of inflation has changed dramatically. We no longer believe that inflation makes any of those predictions so that none of the magnificent observations made over the last 30 years can be viewed as supporting inflation. Since 1983, it has become clear that inflation is very flexible (parameters can be adjusted to give any result) and generically leads to a multiverse consisting of patches in which any outcome is possible. Imagine a scientific theory that was designed to explain and predict but ends up allowing literally any conceivable possibility without any rule about what is more likely. What good is it? It rules out nothing and can never be put to a real test."

Why does Siegel keep writing these articles claiming that the Big Bang was not the beginning, on the basis of some semantic hair-splitting claiming that something starting a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the beginning of the universe was not the beginning? I suspect the reason is that such claims facilitate sensational-sounding clickbait headlines causing high readership of poorly reasoned articles.  Such articles create the impression that something new and very important has been discovered, which is not at all true. In this century gravitational waves were observed for the first time, but only from freak cosmic events with no major relevance to cosmology. There have been no really major discoveries in cosmology this century.  If scientists ever start modifying their definition of the Big Bang, that will not be a discovery, but merely some semantic jiggling. 

Siegel's article contains an ad, which gives us a clue as to why so many clickbait false alarm articles appear in the science press these days.  Web sites get ad revenue money when people click on sensational-sounding headlines to reach web pages containing ads.  A good rule might be: be less trustful of any dubious-sounding online science story whenever the story contains an ad.  

Five Sleazy Ways Professors Inflate Their Personal Metrics

There are two numbers used nowadays to judge the performance of a scientist: a paper count representing the number of papers published, and a citation count representing the number of citations such papers count (each such citation being a reference to a paper occurring in some other paper). There are five sleazy ways in which the modern scientist may attempt to increase these numbers.

Method #1: Author Inflation 

Over the decades there has been a phenomenon under which the average number of authors listed on a scientific paper has grown higher and higher. A paper this year states the following:

"Escalating author counts in science are a longstanding phenomenon. The average number of authors per published article has risen steadily for decades.  From the 1930s to the 1970s, the average number of authors on a published article was 2 and since then has escalated sharply.  Between 1970 and 2010, the number of articles with 6 to 10 authors increased more than 10-fold. By 2000, the average number was 7, and the number of articles with 11 to 20 authors increased more than 20-fold.  Multiauthorship (more than 10 authors) and hyperauthorship (more than 100 or even 1,000 authors) are now common."

What is going on is that more and more names are wrongly being listed as authors of scientific papers, so that scientists can brag about higher numbers of papers they authored.  The problem is referred to by the euphemistic term "author inflation," although it really should be plainly called "lying about authorship." Referring to metrics such as the number of papers a scientist has authored and the number of citations such papers have got, the same paper states, "The pressures from institutional metrics have spawned an entire ecology of academic misconduct and manipulation."

A 2015 anonymous article is entitled, "My professor demands to be listed as an author on many of my papers."  Describing a culture in which a type of deceit has been normalized, the author writes this:

"There’s one instance where it’s acceptable for scientists to lie: when fraudulently claiming authorship of a paper. Too often, researchers attach their names to reports when they have contributed nothing at all to the work. The problem gets worse the higher up the academic ladder you go."

This type of deceit works both ways. A scientist who had no real role in the production of a paper may pressure a junior scientist into adding him as an author. Or, the real author of the paper may add the senior scientist as an author, in hopes of increasing his chance of getting the paper published. 

A paper distinguishes between "gift authorship" and "guest authorship," both of which involve putting names on the author list of scientific papers when the people did not help write the paper:

"Gift authorship may involve reciprocating favors for previous co-authorships (quid pro quo), helping a colleague obtain tenure or promotion, for romantic favors extended, or to assist the graduate student who might have only provided minimal administrative assistance to assist the student’s job search. In some cases, a colleague’s name is added on the understanding that s/he will do the same simply to swell an individual’s publication list.... Another form, guest authorship, may be used for multiple purposes, including the belief that by adding a well-known name the guest will increase the likelihood of publication, credibility, or status of the work, or to conceal a paper’s industry ties by including an academic author....Interestingly, research conducted by Eastwood, Derish, Leash, and Ordway (1996) found one-third of respondents would credit an author who had not contributed to the publication. Typically, this is done in order to increase the likelihood of the research being accepted for publication or in other cases, as a means to promote their career."

Another scientific paper gives us some idea about how common misleading "guest authorship" is:

"Guest authorship has been defined as 'the designation of an individual who does not meet authorship criteria as an author.'  Guest authorship includes the practice of naming as authors individuals in senior positions (e.g., the director of a laboratory) in recognition of their perceived 'support' of the project, even if they did not contribute to conducting the study or writing the paper (sometimes referred to as 'honorary authorship'). Guest authorship has been found in 16% of research articles, 26% of review articles, 21% of editorials, and 41% of Cochrane reviews."

From the figures above we can make a plain deduction: gigantic numbers of scientists are claiming to have co-authored papers they did not actually co-author.  We should not assume that a "guest author" is not aware that he has been listed as a co-author of paper he did not co-write. We should assume that the "guest author" is complicit in the fraud. 

Method #2: Counting All Papers You've Authored or Co-Authored As Papers You've Written

The most outrageous type of misstatement involving the authorship of scientific papers occurs when scientists make patently misleading summaries of how many scientific papers they have written, something which happens very often.  There are two rules of honest communication that apply to summarizing your contribution to scientific papers:

(1) A scientist should claim to have "authored" or "written" a scientific paper if and only if he or she is the sole author of that paper.

(2) In all other cases (such as there being two or more authors) the scientist should only claim to have co-authored or co-written the paper. 

Any violation of these rules is dishonesty plain and simple.  For example, if a scientist has solely authored 50 papers and co-authored 100 papers, it is blatantly dishonest for the scientist to claim that he has "authored 150 scientific papers" or "written 150 scientific papers." Such a claim creates in the reader the idea that the scientist is the sole author of 150 papers, when he was the sole author of only 50 papers.  There is only one honest way for a scientist to describe such a situation: to make a statement such as "I have authored 50 scientific papers and co-authored 100 scientific papers."

 A check of the web page of a high-profile Harvard scientist finds the claim that the scientist has written "about 800 papers." Following the link that appears with this statement, we find that almost all of these papers were not solely written by the scientist, but were co-authored or merely partially authored by the scientist.  In most of these papers the scientist is not listed as the primary author.  Accordingly the claim that the scientist has written "about 800 papers" is extremely misleading.  Innumerable similar examples could be provided of scientists who misled us about the number of scientific papers they authored, by creating the idea that they were the main author of a certain number of papers, when they were only the main author of a small fraction of that number of papers. 

It is easy to find very many similar examples of scientists lying to us about how many scientific papers they have authored, by just doing a Google search for phrases such as these:

"author of more than 300 scientific papers" 

"author of more than 400 scientific papers"

"author of more than 500 scientific papers"

"author of more than 600 scientific papers"

"author of more than 700 scientific papers"

"author of more than 800 scientific papers"

It will generally be found that the scientist referred to did not individually author even half of the number of papers cited, and it will be very often found that the scientist was not even the primary author of half of the number of papers cited.  

Some of the leading web sites for tracking scientist publications help contribute to these deceptions. For example, if you go to the Microsoft Academic web site, and search for a particular scientist, you will see a graph showing a number of publications. The graph will give you the impression that the scientist wrote some particular number of scientific papers. But in almost all cases the scientist has merely co-written the number of papers listed. And very often he may have made no contribution at all to the paper, and merely appeared as a "guest author" when someone else incorrectly listed him on the list of authors. 

Let us look at a very typical example of such misrepresentations. Here is a graph I got at the Microsoft Academic web site when looking up a particular scientist:

The graph gives the very misleading idea that the scientist wrote nearly 80 papers in 2020. But the scientist in question was merely a  co-author of all these papers (most of which had more than 4 listed authors), and was neither the exclusive author nor the primary author of any of them. 

Such deceptive impressions appear all over the place in academia and on the Internet, where we are countless times given false impressions (visual or verbal) that particular scientists have done vastly more work than they have done. 

Method #3: Schlock for Stats

We can use the term "schlock for stats" for the extremely common practice of producing worthless junk papers, mainly for the sake of increasing an author's paper count. "Schlock" is a word meaning "cheap or inferior goods or material; trash."  There are many types of schlock scientific papers being produced these days. Some examples:

• Cosmology papers which involve some excessively speculative, enormously improbable and impossible-to-verify scenario, which is described in incomprehensible mathematical formulas, without the writer even bothering to tell us what the obscure mathematical symbols mean. 
• Very many evolutionary biology papers involving only unverifiable and extremely far-fetched speculations about things that might have happened hundreds of millions of years ago, often postulating events astronomically improbable or impossible because of limitations of DNA.
• Speculative chemistry papers giving chemical reaction equations only worked out on a blackboard, with the possibility of such reactions never even physically tested. 
• Neuroscience papers describing poorly designed experiments that used Questionable Research Practices, meaning the papers fail to provide robust evidence for anything.  
• Innumerable papers on topics of no importance.
• Innumerable papers so filled with jargon or obscure mathematics that they cannot be comprehended by anyone outside of some very tiny group of professors.

Under the assumption that schlock scientific papers will often get very little or no readership, we can get some ideas about the amount of schlock scientific papers by looking at statistics about readership and citation. We read here, "We estimate that an average paper in a peer-reviewed journal is read completely by no more than 10 people." The same source estimates that 27 percent of the papers in the natural sciences are never cited.  At the source here we read this:  "According to one 2007 study...half of academic papers are read only by their authors and journal editors, the study's authors write." 

Ironically, at sites such as Microsoft Academic there will be no coverage of blogs, even though a blog (such as this one) covering academic topics may get very many times more readership than the entire science paper readership of the average scientist.    

Method #4: Inaccurate Titles and Inaccurate Abstract Statements Chosen to Increase Citation Counts

An extremely common practice nowadays is for scientific papers to make inaccurate claims in their titles and abstracts, claims not actually matching anything in the paper below such titles and abstracts. Scientists sometimes confess to doing this. At a blog entitled "Survival Blog for Scientists" and subtitled "How to Become a Leading Scientist," a blog that tells us  "contributors are scientists in various stages of their career," we have an explanation of why so many science papers have inaccurate titles:

"Scientists need citations for their papers....If the content of your paper is a dull, solid investigation and your title announces this heavy reading, it is clear you will not reach your citation target, as your department head will tell you in your evaluation interview. So to survive – and to impress editors and reviewers of high-impact journals,  you will have to hype up your title. And embellish your abstract. And perhaps deliberately confuse the reader about the content."

A study of inaccuracy in the titles of scientific papers states, "23.4 % of the titles contain inaccuracies of some kind."

Method #5: Self-Citation and Inappropriate Citation

Self-citation is what happens when some author cites scientific papers that he authored or co-authored, probably to increase his paper citation count. Self-citation is frowned upon, but extremely common. 

Inappropriate citation is when some scientific paper cites some other paper as support for some claim, when the paper does not actually support such a claim. A recent scientific paper entitled "Quotation errors in general science journals" tried to figure out how common such misleading citations are in science papers.  It found that such erroneous citations are not at all rare. Examining 250 randomly selected citations, the paper found an error rate of 25%.

We can reasonably suspect a sleazy "old boy network" at work here, in which Professor X has lots of professors he has encouraged to cite his papers (regardless of whether the citation is appropriate), with the understanding that such a favor will be reciprocated by that professor citing the papers of those professors (regardless of whether such citations are appropriate). 

We read here, "According to one estimate, only 20 per cent of papers cited have actually been read." Clearly there is a gigantic amount of sleazy citation going on the sake of artificially ballooning citation counts.