HeatherD

Edit: This is quoted from the e-mail version of the Physics News Update, #648. The HTML version hasn't been posted yet but when it is, its URL will be Physics News Update, always the latest one posted. It should be #648 soon.

notMichaelJackson

Science fails again. This must mean that the world was created 6,000 years ago, there was a world-wide flood, and we are all descendents of Adam and Eve.

Shadowy Man

This is the kind of science reporting that drives me insane!!

As if people don't already have enough problems understanding science.

ex-xian

Easy, you mad, mad astrophysicist!
It's stuff like this that gives all popularizers a bad name.

HeatherD

notMichaelJackson, Shadowy Man, did you two guys get up on the wrong side of the bed?

I posted this, as I thought that people with an interest in science would find this, well, interesting!

Oh, why even bother! :banghead:

Shadowy Man

It is interesting, but it just shouldn't be reported as "water is not really H2O".

That's highly misleading, and exactly the kind of thing that will make the scientists look foolish in the eyes of laymen.

Jesse

Was "water really not H2O" anywhere in the article, or was it just HeatherD's joking title for this thread?

HeatherD

I wasn't joking, what I posted was a copy & paste of the first paragraph from an e-mail newsletter sent out from "The American Institute of Physics"

The very first line is: "A WATER MOLECULE'S CHEMICAL FORMULA IS REALLY NOT H2O, at least from the perspective of neutrons and electrons interacting with the molecule for only attoseconds (less than 10^-15 seconds)."

I changed the formatting slightly, the part in bold though will become the link and the title of the article when it is posted on the web. One has to remember that this newsletter isn't aimed at the general public. I suppose it is possible for some dim-witted local newspaper science editor to subscribe and totally mess up the meaning or intent of the article in a public paper.

I suppose if Shadowy Man is going to have an aneurism over the title he should take it up with:

From now on I'll refrain from posting anything of interest that just, might, possibly, be read by people with an IQ below 100. Certainly wouldn't want to confuse the laymen, although I would hazard a guess that any lay-people, who are confused by the title, are just going to be more confused by the entire article.

Shadowy Man

Yes, look at her original post. Those are the very first words in the sentence.

Shadowy Man

I'm not mad at you, Heather. I'm mad at whoever wrote that first sentence.

And I totally expect this to happen!! That's the problem.



Luckily, most of the people who read this bulletin board are intelligent enough to figure this out, or at least understand when one of the scientists who post here explain it.