Motherboard

In the ’90s, A Brief History Of Time may have satisfied our cultural need to reduce science to soundbite. But in the aughts, science banged into fiction like a pair of protons in the Large Hadron Collider, with home brewed black holes, time traveling particles, cats with wings, and a legion of armchair meteorologists pointing at the snow and declaring global warming a hoax, just to name the biggies. Welcome to Pop Science 101, a class without a teacher, a textbook, and a series of Wikipedia entries updated more often than Michael Jackson.

Here are six pop science ideas that popped over the past decade that we hope will die — or get sucked out of our collective system and into a black hole — before the new year (and one we actually like).

Polar Shift Theory or Something With Magnets Is Going To End the World In 2012
2012 turned into a big spazz party in large part because there’s not one thing that’s going to end the world, there’s actually like three or four things and that damn calendar. Most of them you could chuck just reading a sentence or two: undetected mystery planet Nibiru is going to collide with us; Earth is going to cross something called the “galactic plane,” and that sounds bad; NASA’s covering up an impending meteor strike. But, the somehow realer sounding one is “polar shift theory.” (Ironically, it’s probably the word “theory”.) NASA calls it a bait and switch with real science that predicts the magnetic polarity of the Earth will shift a small number of times over its lifetime—which won’t kill off all life, but could fuck up a lot of compasses—and that switch will make the Earth start spinning. . . backward. Let’s please kick amateur astronomy back to sky charts and Tasco.

Flying Cats
Since the History and Discovery channels started chasing the Maxim crowd—rather than the Sea Wings loving boomers—we’re left with a load of end-of-days programs like “Life After Humans.” There’s probably a crock of misleading pop science that goes on in them, but you’ve gotta love flying cats. See: housecats will move up into skyscrapers to avoid predators, and they’ll have this cat community in the sky, and they’ll get from building to building on flappy sugar glider-ish wings. Some writer really, really loves his or her kitty. At the same time, you have to admit: evolution did come up with crazy shit like us.

Vaccines and Autism
If you’ve wisely avoided this, here it is in capsule: a mercury-containing preservative called thimerosal is used in many vaccines, it was found to be maybe dangerous to very young children—which skeptics tie to a spike in autism over the past two decades—and has since been mostly removed from vaccines used in young children. Of course, this was dredged up around the time the government was pushing the H1N1 vaccine (of which there was a thimerosal-free version for kids), and hysteria ensued.

Freakonomics
Maybe it brought economic theory to the people, but, more likely, Freakonomics, the thought-school of sorts that gets a rise on applying economic theory to things (sumo wrestling, the KKK) that don’t have much to do with weighty topics like global poverty and why we’re all totally goddamn doomed, is going to wind up remembered something more like creationism-as-science. In the words of London-based analyst and stockbroker Daniel Davies: “When future generations ask the economics profession ‘What were you doing while the great bubble built up ahead of the Second Great Depression?’, and we have to reply ‘Lots and lots of quirky little working papers about sumo wrestling and speed-dating’, it is going to be really, really, fucking embarrassing."

Everything To Do With the Large Hadron Collider
The largest particle accelerator ever built cost 8 billion American dollars, is 17 miles long, and has been in process for nearly a decade and a half. It’s purpose: finding the end of physics. But, it’s funny: the LHC is so massive and so expensive, it can’t not be in the public’s eye — and yet at the same time, it’s really, really hard to grasp what it exactly it does. It crashes tiny stuff into other tiny stuff and great, but even most non-science college educations don’t get much past a three-particle atomic model, let alone try to parse quantum mechanics. So we get pop science being dragged out of where there isn’t any.

Remember the Earth-eating black holes? Much worse was an article that went viral this fall suggesting that a crew of Higgs particles (unfortunately dubbed the “God particle” by those that should know better) is colluding in the future to travel back in time to create bad luck, thus sabotaging the LHC—which at the time was breaking down on the regular. Apologies to the world’s time travel hard-ons: theLHC appears to be functioning as intended now.

The Natural Global Warming “Trend,” Or “Climate-gate”
“But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can’t say with assurance that man’s activities cause weather changes,” wrote Sarah Palin in a Washington Post op-ed earlier this month. How’s this for a theory: Global warming is really caused by particles traveling back in time to punish us for even acknowledging this climate-changing creep-o.

Kevin Bacon Theory
We are all connected—human-to-human, group-to-group—in describable networks. It’s not a game: our actions have meaning across those networks in ways we’re just starting to understand. Actually, we like this one: it doesn’t breed hysteria, isn’t twisting facts or research, and can be understood in terms of common sense and, oddly enough, was born from common sense. And it proves, scientifically, the value of community.

Except of course in the case of those communities that spontaneously emit pop science theories.

— MICHAEL BYRNE