Among the scientific publications, some make you smile, seem futile or a little crazy. Pierre Barthélémy, unlikely science columnist for the newspaper The world, shares some of these nuggets since 2011, brings together these texts in the book Chronicles of improbable science, to editions Dunod.
There are two ways of defining this very particular area of improbable science. The first, sour or even nasty, throws in it apparently grotesque work and research that we should never have undertaken or published. And that should not be reproduced under any circumstances. As if this were a waste of time and a caricature of science.
Improbable science: learning while having fun
But it can also be argued that all questions, even the most apparently stupid ones, are good to ask and that improbable science serves precisely to answer these questions. If the toast falls more often from the buttered side, it is because there is a reason and this one is much deeper than you think … I prefer this second definition and to see improbable science as a comic way of questioning the scientific method.
This is all charm of this discipline: provoke a smile first (because under the researcher’s white coat, there is also, sometimes, a potential clown) and the reflection then. And realize that, beneath the apparent stupidity of a crazy test, there is above all the deep desire to advance research.
Football on March, the pains saber swallowers or the wrong queue on the highway are among the offbeat subjects discussed in this dossier. Good reading.
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