Thursday, September 30, 2010

World's Worst Physicist?

University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou's work debunks pseudoscientific ideas, such as vampires and zombies, in an attempt to enhance public literacy.  Legend has it that vampires feed on human blood and once bitten a person turns into a vampire and starts feasting on the blood of others.   Efthimiou's debunking logic: On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was 536,870,911. If the first vampire came into existence that day and bit one person a month, there would have been two vampires by Feb. 1, 1600. A month later there would have been four, and so on. In just two-and-a-half years the original human population would all have become vampires with nobody left to feed on.  If mortality rates were taken into consideration, the population would disappear much faster. Even an unrealistically high reproduction rate couldn't counteract this effect.

Wow!  Leaving aside that his work debunking pseudoscience is NOT what we as a society expect our well-paid physicists to be working on, let's look at his own pseudoscientific work...

536,870,911 - really?  and he knows this how?  Has he ever heard of significant digits?

"once bitten a person turns into a vampire" - false; anybody with even a passing understanding of the vampire myth knows this to be wrong; dude needed to do some basic research

He's essentially assuming (a) vampires are immortal and (b) vampires must feed at least once a month on a human.  These assumptions are mutually contradictory.  If vampires were immortal then they would not have to feed every month to stay alive.  If they must feed every month to stay alive then the well-known predator-prey model (based on the Lotka-Volterra differential equation) can predict all sorts of end-states, including extinction of humans, extinction of vampires, equilibrium, oscillation, or chaotic swings in the vampire and human populations, depending on the various parameters that can be used in the equations.  Seriously, what on earth was this guy thinking when he tackled this problem?  I wonder how long he worked on his "solution"?  I've seen better thought-out logic on freshman physics papers.

Actually, on second thought, maybe it's better that this guy isn't doing physics.  That could be dangerous!