Today, scientific images circulate urbi et orbi without an explanatory comment always accompanying them. It therefore happens that they are misinterpreted or misunderstood, and it is therefore easy to make them instruments of deception. In the vague intention of demonstrating this growing trend, I had, on July 31, 2022, the absurd idea of post on Twitter the photograph of a slice of chorizo claiming it was an image of the star Proxima Centauri taken by the James Webb Telescope.
I was careful to recall that this star was located 4.2 light-years from Earth. In my mind, that must have been enough to indicate that it would be futile to hope for a clear image of its surface. Also, the shot I chose didn’t come out of nowhere. It is, in a sense, a classic: Jan Castenmiller had already used it in July 2018 pretending that it was a “Red Moon” photographed in Spain during an eclipse. It was then used to fabricate several other hoaxes in astrophysics. In my mind, this clue could only help, by reminiscence effect, to quickly guess that it was a joke.
To my great surprise, this was hardly the case, even after I specified, only three quarters of an hour after my first post, that “according to contemporary cosmology, no object falling within the Spanish charcuterie exist[ait] in the Universe elsewhere than on Earth”. Obviously, I had not taken the full measure of what social networks have become: the affair, quickly baptized the “chorizogate”, got carried away to the point to travel around the world, generating in the weeks that followed hundreds of articles and comments in all languages. By making the effort to read them all, a multilingual ethnologist would have material to study the reception of this type of jokes in different cultures (I understand that at least the Italians and the Japanese had a good laugh).
On the usefulness of hoaxes
We have known for a long time that the way we receive and interpret information depends on the context in which we find ourselves. But it now appears that there are as many contexts as there are people, so that this banal hoax, as it spread, provoked all sorts of analysis and criticism, suffered countless distortions and gave rise to many misinterpretations. While I was completely overwhelmed by the turn of events, I remembered this sentence from the novel Joke (1967), by Milan Kundera, who made Ludvik, the main character, author of a benign joke which will earn him the worst trouble, say: “At that moment, I understood that it was impossible for me to revoke my own joke, when I am myself and my whole life included in a much larger joke (which is beyond me), and totally irrevocable.”
Because it seemed to me too that the real joke had been not mine, but the vast echo that was given to it. And also the seriousness of certain comments. Under the pretext that we live in the era of post-truth, some have gone so far as to proclaim loud and clear that scientists should henceforth stop joking on the grounds that any joke would ruin the credit given to science. . As if pastiche, parody, hoaxing, playing with ideas were not part of a most precious tradition!
It is tempting – I am tempting, therefore – to object that there is a clever way of using the hoax, which has the virtue of allowing everyone to sharpen their critical mind, to become aware of the cognitive biases that deceive them, and also and above all to pay a good slice of it (sic). Post-truth may be a very real phenomenon, but it cannot nullify our right to practice humor. Especially since such hoaxes have irreplaceable educational virtues. These are certainly fake news, but fake news ephemeral, since any hoax is sooner or later admitted or recognized by its author. They teach us to be wary of “real fake news”, which themselves aim to deceive us and are never admitted by those who spread them. The enemy is not the hoax, but what it highlights: our errors of judgment, our intellectual laziness and our taste for the sensational.
* Etienne Klein is a physicist and research director at the CEA and a philosopher of science