Dubious scientific formulae

Russ Swan grows weary of the insatiable appetite of the gullible media for pseudoscience wrapped up in bogus formulae and equations. But fret no longer he says, help is at hand… You may have noticed the rapid growth of this phenomenon in the last few years. Some mundane aspect of everyday life is suddenly in the news, because "scientists have discovered the perfect formula for" it. It might be the equation for the (purportedly) most depressing day of the year, or the formula for the perfect face, or handshake, or cup of tea, or the equation for how to eat an Easter egg. In these days of apparently endless austerity, the development of these equations and formulae has become a rare example of an industrial boom. The fact that they are all, without exception, complete and utter male bovine solid waste has done nothing to halt their progress. Thus we can find, in a few moments searching the web, the scientific basis for the perfect pizza or cheese on toast (I can’t help thinking there might have been a little duplicated research there), or a book by an implausibly photogenic author revealing the scientific formula for the perfect sex life, or some meaningless mumbo-jumbo wrapped in brightly-coloured paper which describes the equation for the ultimate Christmas tree. Your scientific spider-sense will probably start tingling as soon as one of these stories is mentioned, but as the true investigators of the universe we can begin to define the parameters that confirm the hypothesis. These stories regularly have certain features in common. First, they appear in the sort of newspapers that are not famous for their rigorous approach to scientific reporting. They are presented as the new answer to an age-old problem, when in fact no actual problem has been solved. A disproportionately large number concern foodstuffs. Call me old-fashioned, but isn’t a formula for a food product just a recipe? Specific tell-tales are equations which contain no equals sign (and are therefore not equations), and outputs which cannot be expressed in terms of any known unit of measurement. The clinching evidence, though, is the appearance of the name of a commercial organisation in the description of this latest scientific breakthrough. That scientifically-perfect pizza? Amazingly, the cutting-edge research was done in partnership with a well-known chain of pizza restaurants. Cheese on toast? That's the official sounding (but also made-up) British Cheese Board. These stories usually rope in an academic to lend a gloss of apparent respectability to what is of course nothing more than a clichéd marketing exercise. Look a little closer at the credentials of some of the scientists who lend their names to these publicity stunts, and all is not always what it seems. That formula for the most depressing day of the year was created for a holiday company by a part-time instructor at Cardiff University. The equation for the perfect Christmas tree was dreamed up for a department store by a student society at the University of Sheffield. Dig around and you will find some actual professors and tenured academics lending their diminishing reputations to the PR wonks, but most often it will be somebody way down the career ladder, or even in an unrelated discipline. Crucially, they can still be described as a university scientist. Keep digging, and you may observe that there seems to be one particular focus for these scientific rent-a-brains, forging a new industrial heartland for this new industry in dubious scientific consultancy. Time and again the University of Sheffield is associated with perfect equation stories, from that Christmas hokum to the online calculator for the perfect pancake, the recipe (sorry, formula) for pizza, and more. And within that august institution, it is the mathematics society that seems to have cornered the market for pseudoscientific claptrap. Now, I'm inclined to be indulgent towards this particular gaggle of geeks, mainly because of the unimproveable acronym of the Sheffield University Mathematics Society, but I do hope they aren't selling themselves too cheaply. The marketing wonks at the local shopping centre are exploiting their boffinry in order to sell more stuff, and will discard them like a used pipette tip as soon as that aim is achieved. Perhaps they will join me and lend their support to the latest and undoubtedly most important new formula to emerge from the Lab Babble Labs: the scientific formula for the perfect scientific formula. This can be expressed as               Where PFS =  Perfect Scientific Theory RA = Random academic USL = unpaid student loan DM = desperate marketer AE = annual event D(AB) = diminishing advertising budget