In this section, Professor Michael Short discusses how debunking junk science demonstrates for students that they need to think critically about published scientific literature.
During the last couple of days of 22.01 Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation, I didn't teach anything. I made the students use their knowledge of nuclear physics to debunk a lot of the garbage science floating around nowadays. If you ask the students, “Do you know that everything published isn't true?” they'll say, “Hell yeah, of course!” But they don't know it. Or they know it, but they don't practice it. So I give them each a paper. I tell them to read it critically and highlight all the logical flaws. And they're like, “Oh, my God, these are hilarious.” I said, “Yeah, look where they're published!” The Lancet, Nature … just because it's there doesn't mean it's right.
Every student had to find an article about cellphones giving you cancer, or food irradiation giving you cancer, or power lines giving you cancer, and deconstruct the physical arguments why it's not true.
In a lot of cases they just found terrible writing, like the abstract for a paper was the opposite of its conclusion. The abstract said, “Cellphones cause cancer.” Conclusion: in a statistically insignificant population of six cases!
Other articles linked to studies that don't exist, so the writers made up references to make it look like they had references. Other people linked to studies and didn't read them because the study said the opposite of what they said it did.
This exercise was really to show the students that, just because it's published, doesn't mean it's right.
— Michael Short
So this exercise was really to show the students that, just because it's published, doesn't mean it's right. You've got to use your brain reading every paper. I had each of them go through these garbage journals and articles and had them tell me what's wrong.
On the very last day of class, we had an irradiated fruit party. I went to H-Mart [a Korean grocery store] and got all the imported Asian fruits that are only allowed in the country once they’re irradiated. And while eating all this irradiated fruit, we talked about what is the food irradiation process, and what residual radioactivity and biological by-products are left. And yeah, there are no ill effects.