Don’t Quote Me: The Best of 8 Years of the Journal of Irreproducible Results

Description

Our modern scientific literature abounds in the application of the rule so well expressed by Professor Bjønfjørd: “Simple things in science should be said in so many complicated and polysyllabic words”. Scanning some scientific publications in the fields of our interest we often come across examples that fully vindicate Bjønfjørd’s rule. We have collected these delightful bits of information, added some illustrations to them so as to make them even more attractive to the illiterate reader, and present them here to those scientists who like from time to time to laugh at themselves and to those laymen who live under the impression that there is nothing like science.This collection contains genuine quotations from scientific articles in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, biology and psychology. We apologize for a perhaps too strong a bias toward biological sciences, but this happens to be our interest (as well as bread and butter), and we did not have a computer that would do a more thorough job.Almost all the quotations reproduced in this collection have appeared during the past eight years in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. They were actually the only reproducible items published in this Journal. As a matter of fact they were reproduced in thousands and tens of thousands of copies of the scientific journals in which they originally appeared. Their genuiness may easily be checked by anyone who has an access to a good scientific library. Although some quotations come from more obscure sources, they still may be traced and verified by any reader who is persistent and diligent enough.The illustrations were prepared by A. Kohn and R. Barzilay.