It looks like the results are in question, which is expected, but also the much less interesting explanation compared to microbial life.
"In the second paper, the authors use a system that models what absorption spectra will look like given different atmospheric concentrations of sulfur dioxide and phosphine. They also find that having sulfur dioxide in the mesosphere produces a signal that's indistinguishable from the one the original research assigns to phosphine. And the conditions in the mesosphere would also suppress the other signals of sulfur dioxide that the first report had used to argue it wasn't present."
"Phosphine in the mesosphere could produce a similar signal, but the researchers calculate that the different environment there means that a typical phosphine molecule would have a half-life of one second. To produce enough phosphine to keep the mesosphere supplied, it would have to be made at a rate higher than the production of oxygen by all the photosynthetic organisms on Earth. Given that's just a tiny bit unlikely, the authors suggest we're just looking at sulfur dioxide."
This is how scientists verify their finds. They observe something, make some tests to see if their hypothesis holds up. If it does, they publish their findings, and let other scientists evaluate their claims. This is exactly what is supposed to happen.
I'm a former astronomer and I've talked to some of my friends who are still in astronomy about this. One way they've put it is that there are some papers that end up being wrong for some subtle, non-obvious reason which gets worked out over the course of a series of publications. This is fine, this is how science progresses.
Then there is work where the authors made basic, sloppy mistakes that other specialists in the field could have immediately caught. This work falls in the latter category, which is bad enough, but then it managed to get accepted to Nature (which tends to select for hype over rigor) and received breathless media coverage.
I don't think anyone in astronomy is so concerned about this mistake not getting corrected. People in the field were immediately skeptical of the results and after some digging pretty conclusively showed that they must be wrong. The problem is more that extensive media coverage of sloppy work propagates a perception among the general public that scientists can't be trusted. The media does a poor job at communicating what results are speculative or disputed, and what results are solidly accepted by a large amount of evidence. If scientists are changing their mind about this and whether chocolate and wine are good for you, how can they be trusted on matters like climate change or even whether the Earth is round? Why give them billions of dollars to build telescopes if they're changing their mind every other day and can't seem to figure anything out?
So I think most scientists tend to be very conservative about their results and only to try advertise results that they have a lot of confidence in so as to uphold this sort of social contract with the public. When they see other scientists go on a media blitz with some shoddy work, they view it as a violation of that social contract.
I guess the challenge is that the recognition that the work was sloppy can have a number of explanations:
- the group was collectively honest but incompetent, including reviewers. So, no way to self identify the problem.
- the group was deliberately leaving errors unfixed to get press and attention. If so, they should be shunned but this seems unlikely in this case.
- the group worked honestly, in good faith, and was competent but made honest errors, which are easier to see once the effort is exposed from a few people to the whole community. Many eyes make all bugs shallow and so on. In that case, it’s important to unpack how it’s possible to say with certainty certain mistakes were “sloppy” and it not being just the kind of thing one says once the mistakes are identified.
In general my point is that criticisms like the one you mention often seem valid but leave me unsatisfied by not offering a fully explanatory theory, or having one but not voicing it.
In this case my understanding is that the group was basically new to the particular topic and data analysis technique that they were studying. At some level their errors were understandable, it would have been easy for anyone new to it to make similar errors. But when you start on a new topic as a researcher it's really incumbent on you to do your background reading and make sure you understand the field you're contributing to. In addition to that, Nature clearly did not assign reviewers who were knowledgeable about that topic.
So I would say that the first situation you laid out most accurately described what happened here. Obviously there can always be some Dunning-Kruger effect going on and it's hard to know what you don't know, so I don't think there's any easy solution. The main things that help when you're entering a new field are:
1. Doing a lot of background reading. A lot.
2. Showing a preprint to others in the field for their feedback.
Of course if you're sitting on what you believe to be big results, it's hard to do these things because they will slow you down.
There's not a global secret cabal of scientists who can meet in the absence of media attention. If a paper is presented in a conference to other scientists, journalists can (and will) write breathtaking headlines about it.
Anyone who talks about scientific conspiracy theories really astonishes me because it is so obvious they do not know any actual scientists all that well.
And no one here spoke of any scientific conspiracy theories.
What was talked about was making statements too quickly to the media in excitement; the rebuttal to that was somehow that no scientific conspiracies run amok.
I must say that I find that that in the vast majority of cases that a “conspiracy” is rebutted, no conspiracy was alleged at all.
Someone, this morning, was also about a website that promoted the idea of the corona virus being a government conspiracy; all I could find on that website was the belief that mandatory curfews and closing ships went too far and curbed the citizen's freedoms too much. I found no alleged government conspiracy on it, and he could not point me to where to find this.
Generally I've found that the problem is not breathless scientists, it is breathless journos.
They're looking for the "next big scoop" and so mostly misinterpret findings in order to come up with the most sensational headline possible.
Don't get me wrong, science has it's own (major) problems, such as losing sight of reproducibility, falsifiability, etc, but usually when it comes to "I read about a discovery that sounded fabulous but didn't pan out", the heightened expectations are usually coming from the media, not the other way around.
This is correct. To add to your point, it's also the respective institute's media departments. In a university for example, there's a strong incentive to hype up your research to attract young, impressionable undergraduates to your school.
Not just a journalist looking for the "next big scoop", but often a journalist looking for that at an institute that wants to also have "the next big thing".
It's better to put it out and let others take a glance, isn't it? I don't think scientists actively seek media attention. I think it's other way around, media looking for hot stuff in science.
Publishing results that, to the best of your knowledge, are correct is a crucial part of the scientific endeavor. The fact this their results have been drawn into question is therefore a good thing.
A hypothesis that has been proven to be false is a net positive to humanity as a whole.
This reminds me of a excerpt from the opening line of my undergraduate thermodynamics textbook:
"The theories presented in this work are true due to the absence of contrary evidence"
Venus still deserves another atmospheric probe. The last time we sent an atmospheric probe was 1985[0] and tech has greatly improved since then. Still, it is hard to get funding for such missions because such missions do not last much more than a couple hours. However, even such a short mission could have great scientific return.
Sending better and more sensitive instruments could solve long standing questions about Venus even if the instruments do not live long. For example, a big question is whether Venus had large amounts of water this could be answered by determining if Venus has granite.
Granite can only form in the presence of water. We have found terrain on Venus that could maybe be granite. Just sending back enough data to confirm for sure that it is or not answers many questions about Venus.
Unfortunately, such terrain is quite extreme so sending a mission there is risky[1]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_2
[1]http://ia800304.us.archive.org/35/items/VenusIntrepidTessera...
It would be cool to have a scientific balloon on Venus. At the height where the pressure is 1 bar, at 50km, the temperature is mild, and the winds there would carry a balloon around the planet every 4 days. Perhaps a long tether could be used to pick up due to study. O2 is a lifting gas on Venus, which could be made in situ from the CO2 in the Venus atmosphere.
It would be incredible if we could pull this off, but the probe would still be floating in an 85% sulfuric acid concentration. Since H2SO4 is highly reactive with most metals, as well as an oxidizer, it’s an enormous challenge.
The sulfuric acid on Venus is not that concentrated in the air. The clouds on Venus are much thinner than you would think and the thickest ones are believed to be similar to cirrus clouds on earth. Not to mention, we've already sent balloon probes to Venus[0]. The limiting factor was battery life.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon
We unfortunately get more scientific value out of a falling probe because you can get atmospheric composition from deployment all the way to the ground. Some quite strange phenomena may be happening closer to the ground. There is evidence that Venus' atmosphere is not uniformly mixed, which may be a result of the lower atmosphere being supercritical CO2[0]. The lower atmosphere is also hotter than the melting point of some metals, so it may be possible to find them in the air.
26 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 71.8 ms ] thread"In the second paper, the authors use a system that models what absorption spectra will look like given different atmospheric concentrations of sulfur dioxide and phosphine. They also find that having sulfur dioxide in the mesosphere produces a signal that's indistinguishable from the one the original research assigns to phosphine. And the conditions in the mesosphere would also suppress the other signals of sulfur dioxide that the first report had used to argue it wasn't present."
"Phosphine in the mesosphere could produce a similar signal, but the researchers calculate that the different environment there means that a typical phosphine molecule would have a half-life of one second. To produce enough phosphine to keep the mesosphere supplied, it would have to be made at a rate higher than the production of oxygen by all the photosynthetic organisms on Earth. Given that's just a tiny bit unlikely, the authors suggest we're just looking at sulfur dioxide."
It feels like almost every exciting discovery is being quietly walked back a month or two later.
Then there is work where the authors made basic, sloppy mistakes that other specialists in the field could have immediately caught. This work falls in the latter category, which is bad enough, but then it managed to get accepted to Nature (which tends to select for hype over rigor) and received breathless media coverage.
I don't think anyone in astronomy is so concerned about this mistake not getting corrected. People in the field were immediately skeptical of the results and after some digging pretty conclusively showed that they must be wrong. The problem is more that extensive media coverage of sloppy work propagates a perception among the general public that scientists can't be trusted. The media does a poor job at communicating what results are speculative or disputed, and what results are solidly accepted by a large amount of evidence. If scientists are changing their mind about this and whether chocolate and wine are good for you, how can they be trusted on matters like climate change or even whether the Earth is round? Why give them billions of dollars to build telescopes if they're changing their mind every other day and can't seem to figure anything out?
So I think most scientists tend to be very conservative about their results and only to try advertise results that they have a lot of confidence in so as to uphold this sort of social contract with the public. When they see other scientists go on a media blitz with some shoddy work, they view it as a violation of that social contract.
- the group was collectively honest but incompetent, including reviewers. So, no way to self identify the problem.
- the group was deliberately leaving errors unfixed to get press and attention. If so, they should be shunned but this seems unlikely in this case.
- the group worked honestly, in good faith, and was competent but made honest errors, which are easier to see once the effort is exposed from a few people to the whole community. Many eyes make all bugs shallow and so on. In that case, it’s important to unpack how it’s possible to say with certainty certain mistakes were “sloppy” and it not being just the kind of thing one says once the mistakes are identified.
In general my point is that criticisms like the one you mention often seem valid but leave me unsatisfied by not offering a fully explanatory theory, or having one but not voicing it.
So I would say that the first situation you laid out most accurately described what happened here. Obviously there can always be some Dunning-Kruger effect going on and it's hard to know what you don't know, so I don't think there's any easy solution. The main things that help when you're entering a new field are:
1. Doing a lot of background reading. A lot. 2. Showing a preprint to others in the field for their feedback.
Of course if you're sitting on what you believe to be big results, it's hard to do these things because they will slow you down.
Anyone who talks about scientific conspiracy theories really astonishes me because it is so obvious they do not know any actual scientists all that well.
What was talked about was making statements too quickly to the media in excitement; the rebuttal to that was somehow that no scientific conspiracies run amok.
I must say that I find that that in the vast majority of cases that a “conspiracy” is rebutted, no conspiracy was alleged at all.
Someone, this morning, was also about a website that promoted the idea of the corona virus being a government conspiracy; all I could find on that website was the belief that mandatory curfews and closing ships went too far and curbed the citizen's freedoms too much. I found no alleged government conspiracy on it, and he could not point me to where to find this.
They're looking for the "next big scoop" and so mostly misinterpret findings in order to come up with the most sensational headline possible.
Don't get me wrong, science has it's own (major) problems, such as losing sight of reproducibility, falsifiability, etc, but usually when it comes to "I read about a discovery that sounded fabulous but didn't pan out", the heightened expectations are usually coming from the media, not the other way around.
Not just a journalist looking for the "next big scoop", but often a journalist looking for that at an institute that wants to also have "the next big thing".
This reminds me of a excerpt from the opening line of my undergraduate thermodynamics textbook: "The theories presented in this work are true due to the absence of contrary evidence"
https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-rise-and-fa...
Sending better and more sensitive instruments could solve long standing questions about Venus even if the instruments do not live long. For example, a big question is whether Venus had large amounts of water this could be answered by determining if Venus has granite.
Granite can only form in the presence of water. We have found terrain on Venus that could maybe be granite. Just sending back enough data to confirm for sure that it is or not answers many questions about Venus. Unfortunately, such terrain is quite extreme so sending a mission there is risky[1] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_2 [1]http://ia800304.us.archive.org/35/items/VenusIntrepidTessera...
[0]https://www.sciencenews.org/article/unlike-earth-venus-gases...
I guess one person can be more agile than the monolithic scientific community. But I don't really buy into that theory.
https://youtu.be/yO2mVHcSDCo