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The recent two experiments done at the Geneva-based research centre, CERN, which showed that sub-atomic particles, called neutrinos, travel faster than light, will, in course of time, be proved wrong, says Dr Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, the Nobel laureate.
Delivering the S. V. Narasimhan Memorial Oration here on ‘The sceptical scientist', Dr Ramakrishnan spoke about how the scientific system of belief was data and verification based, not infallible but self-correcting. In this context, he referred to the discovery of ‘cold fusion' in 1989, which generated a lot of excitement but was later proved to be wrong.
“I predict the CERN experiment will meet the same fate as ‘cold fusion',” Dr Ramakrishnan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009 in Chemistry for his work on ribosomes, said.
However, he added that one never knew. “Don't take my word just because I got a Nobel Prize,” he later told a person who referred to CERN in his question.
Faster than light
Particle physicists at CERN recently said that in an experiment that they conducted, neutrinos travelled 60 billionth of a second faster than light —inverting the century-old Einsteinian principle that nothing can travel faster than light.
Dr Ramakrishnan pointed out that in the last one hundred years, life expectancy had doubled, while it had been constant from time immemorial. He attributed this to the ‘miracle of modern medicine'.
He described in detail how medicines were being tested for ‘placebo effect', which refers to the phenomenon in which a patient is cured just by his faith in the medicine, rather than by the medicine itself. A new drug has to be proved to be better than placebo, otherwise, it would not be let into the market, he said.
Dr Ramakrishnan dismissed ‘homeopathy' as unscientific, but said ayurveda was different, and fell under a range of systems of medicine in which the efficacy of the drugs were empirically established. He, however, said that those who practised systems like ayurveda should subject themselves to ‘double blind' tests to prove their medicine.
‘Double blind' tests are tests in which neither the doctor nor the patients know whether what is given to the patient is the ‘medicine' or ‘dud', so as to prove the efficacy of the drug beyond placebo and randomness.
When a questioner referred to faith in God, Dr Ramakrishnan said that while science was one aspect of human beings, things like religion were other aspects and they were unconnected. He said that while the scientific community had more atheists than other communities, it was also true that a lot of excellent scientists were religious people.
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