E-Book Content
Alex Boese Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments BROUGHT TO YOU BY KeVkRaY
PAN BOOKS
INTRODUCTION
In the following pages you will encounter elephants on LSD, two-headed dogs, zombie kittens, and racing cockroaches—to name just a few of the oddities that await you. Some of these oddities might shock you. Others might amuse you. Still others might make you think, “That can’t be true!” However, I assure you, unless stated otherwise, it’s all true. This is definitely a work of nonfiction. All of these strange phenomena share one thing in common: They have all played starring roles in scientific experiments. What you’re holding in your hands is a collection of the most bizarre experiments ever conducted. No knowledge of science is needed to appreciate them, just curiosity and an appreciation for the odd. The criteria for inclusion: Did an experiment make me chuckle, shake my head in disbelief, grimace with disgust, roll my eyes, or utter a shocked exclamation? Did it force me to wonder what kind of imagination, twisted or brilliant, could have dreamed up such a thing? If so, it went on the must include pile. As for the question of scientific worth, some of these experiments are brilliant examples of the scientific method; others are not. Mad scientists, geniuses, heroes, villains, and fools all rub shoulders here. I first encountered the bizarre-experiment genre in the mid-1990s as a graduate student studying the history of science at the University of California, San Diego. My formal studies focused on all the usual suspects—Darwin, Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Einstein, et al. But scattered throughout the texts assigned by my professors were references to little-known, intriguing tales about crackpots and mad experimenters. These secondary tales were far more interesting to me than the primary material I was supposed to be learning. Soon I found myself in the library chasing down those stories. Fast-forward to 2005. I had built a kind of career—kind of because my friends and family insist what I do is too much fun to be a real job—out of studying another offbeat subject I encountered during the seven years I spent at grad school. That subject was hoaxes. Think Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast or the Piltdown Man. I created a Web site about hoaxes, museumofhoaxes.com, and authored two books on the topic. One day I was having lunch with my American editor, Stacia Decker. As we ate our meals, she told me about an unusual experiment involving a researcher who raced cockroaches. She had heard the story from her sister. Apparently, a scientist had built a little stadium, complete with stands in which other roaches could sit to watch the races. (You can read more about the roach stadium in chapter five.) Bizarre experiments would make a pretty good topic for a book, she suggested. It would, I agreed, as I thought back to all the material I had encountered in graduate school. The book you’re reading now is the result of that conversation. Shifting from hoaxes to bizarre experiments continued my interest in weird stuff. But I also came to realize that hoaxes and bizarre experiments share many features in common. An experiment starts when a researcher looks at a situation and thinks, What would happen if I changed one part of this? He or she performs an experimental manipulation and observes the results. A hoax proceeds in essentially the same way, except that the manipulation takes the form of an outrageous lie. Of course, as we’ll see throughout this book, the manipulations performed by researchers also frequently involve deception. Experimenters sometimes rehearse for days, perfecting the elaborate ruses they’re going to foist on their unsuspecting subjects. In these cases, the line
separating hoaxes and experiments is almost indistinguishable. The big difference between hoaxes and bizarre experiments is