The researcher David Robert Grimes, a physicist at the University of Oxford (UK), is also a science journalist and broadcaster, so he is used to listen to many people who believe in conspiracies related to science. This has led him to develop a simple mathematical model which calculates the probability of failure or viability of a scheme and whether it can sustain.
“To think that it is not true that man has reached the moon can not be harmful, but have misconceptions about vaccines can be fatal,” says Grimes. “However, not all ideas that seem ‘Conspiranoids’ are necessarily wrong, as demonstrated by the revelations of Edward Snowden to confirm certain theories about the (illicit) activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States.”
The researcher explains that usual rule directly these conspiracies and ningunear its defenders, “but I wanted to take the opposite approach, to see if it could be possible, so I focused on a fundamental requirement for a conspiracy is feasible: the secret “.
The details of the PRISM project National Security Agency in the US, the Tuskegee experiment and forensic scandal FBI used as reference
The study, published this week open access journal PLoS ONE , shows that while everyone can keep a secret, if share with a large number of people end up uncovering. Only a matter of time and number of people involved.
Grimes began creating an equation to express the probability that a conspiracy was made public deliberately by a complainant or disclosed inadvertently by a clueless of conniving group. That probability depends on factors like the number of conspirators, the amount of time, and even the effect involved the death of a natural or ‘accidental’ death.
As the equation requires realistic estimates of the chances of any individual reveal the secret, the author used data from three case studies. One was the PRISM project itself -desvelado by Snowden- about massive electronic surveillance that made the NSA to record communications internet users.
The other two cases were the Tuskegee experiment, a clinical study the effects of untreated syphilis in African-Americans held for decades by the Public Health Service of the United States; and FBI forensic scandal, related to many errors in analysis of his hair samples -in which condemned to death innocent people.
With the data from these three real events, Grimes raised the ‘best case scenario’ for the conspirators, overestimating their number and the time required before an information leak occurred, until there were only four chances in a million that someone off the tongue.
The more people, the more difficult secrecy
After physical estimated the minimum number of people needed to keep four alleged conspiracies to check if they could be viable. Thus, the theory that the moon landings on the moon USA were a hoax would need at least 411,000 silence of NASA employees who worked at the US space agency in the mid-60s.
Similarly, if climate change is a fraud would be involved 405,000 people of various international scientific institutions, other 22,000 (WHO and the Centers for Disease Control) to hide that vaccines are not safe, and some 714,000 (the employees of large pharmaceutical companies) if there was a cure for cancer and did not want to say.
“I hope to show how unlikely they are the conspiracies, proponents reconsider their unscientific beliefs, “says David R. Grimes
With this information and using your equation, Grimes calculates that deception of the moon landings had to be revealed in three years and 8 months, the lie of climate change in 3 years and 9 months, a conspiracy on vaccination in 3 years and 2 months, and the suppression of a cure for cancer in 3 years and 3 months. In short, any of the four plots already should have uncovered long ago.
The researchers then focused on the maximum number of people can be involved in a plot to keep it. For a plot to last five years, the maximum is 2,521 individuals. To keep the secret for more than a decade must have fewer than 1,000 people, and in a deception that will last a century nop have to exceed 125 employees. Even a simple cover-up of a single event, requiring no machinations beyond everyone keep his mouth shut, is likely to be a blow if they involved more than 650 people.
The results of model suggests that large plots, which are involved more than a thousand agents, “quickly become unsustainable and prone to failure,” according to the study, whose proposals could be useful “to counter the potentially damaging consequences of false arguments and anti-science and to examine the hypothetical conditions that could be viable a conspiracy “.
” Not everyone who believes in a conspiracy is thoughtless or unreasonable, but I hope to show you some that are extremely unlikely conspiracies, proponents reconsider their unscientific beliefs, “says Grimes.
” Although of course this will not convince everyone he adds. There is enough evidence to believe in conspiracies is often more ideological than rational. If we want to solve the many problems we face as a species, from climate change to geopolitics, we have to accept that reality fictions about ideologically motivated. To do this, we need to better understand how and why some ideas take hold and persist among certain groups, despite the evidence, and how we could counter this, “says the physicist from Oxford.
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