450 GB data on paper, Scams in India and Science

For the last few days one story has been making headlines in Digg. It is about an Indian student who developed and demonstrated a technology to store 450 GB of data on a sheet of paper. First it was this news which was based on the original article here. Now the second digg news is based on a blog calling it a scam .

Both these stories have got lot of diggs and has generated a lot of discussion. You may follow the links above to make an independent judgement. But what Iam planning to discuss is about scams.

There is a saying in Tamil which roughly translates to

“Anything that you hear with your own ears and anything that you see with your own eyes is false, complete analysis only can bring out the truth”.

In this particular case, I feel that analysis has not been done. There is some amount of information that is available, but that is from the journalist not from Sainul . In this scenario it would not be right to characterize it as scam or not a scam. Further scam as defined here indicates wrongdoing. I dont think it is a scam because it looks like he has not fooled people and made money in this process. He will not be able to do that also because what he claims is measurable. Even if his claims are wrong, he has only just managed to get attention. Well if managing to get attention is crime then many of us are criminals.

It has become fashionable to brand things as Scam. What I did not like about that article is a mention of India as a Scam Nation.

These types of scams happen regularly in India, a guy claimed he got alien cells from rain, someone developed gasolene from leaves in started selling it in large quantities

I dislike sweeping generalizations, particularly when it is made to shore up a logic. In the over zealousness of our scientific mind, we tend to forget the basic tenet of Science. Science is all about observation and attempting to explain why a certain thing happened.

I came to know about this Red Rain Story from above reference. If we follow that link we get the pdf of the original publication. It is a serious document that uses scientific principles to analyze the cause of this phenomenon. There is no denying the fact that Red rain occured. So how can it be a scam. Now if the conclusions are wrong, as scientists we have to propose another theory and justify it and refute the original conclusion. Calling it a scam and taking an escape route is injustice to Science.

Now take the case of Ramar Pillai Petrol. Sure he has accepted that he was a scamster. But scientists then told that fuel to run automobiles cannot be extracted from plants.

Now the new story is that there is a plant called Jatropha and bio diesel extracted from its seeds can run a Mercedes-Benz C 220 CDI. So where do those arguments stand now.

Over the period of years, basic assumptions in Science have changed. Afterall once upon a time the common belief was Earth was flat. Then we believed that light travels in straight lines. The basic assumption on which most of modern science is built, is that speed of light is a constant. Australian physicists propose that it may have slowed over the course of billions of years.

So Scientific beliefs have evolved over a period of time based on our capability to observe and ability to interpret those observations. So it is better that we observe and then analyze the observation to find out why/how something happens. Calling things that we cannot understand or explain as scam/superstition will not further the cause of Science.