What is the fraud in this article about dancing bees: http://science.box.sk/newsread.php?...

Question

Please help expose. You are also welcome to defend it, if you think it merits that.

Answer 1

Where did you dig that up?  (It's three years old).

Like duh, everything interacts with quantum fields. But the article goes beyond that implying that the bees are somehow atune to quantum fluctuations.

I would apply Occam's razor.  Go for the simplist explanation first.  Like the magnetite in the bee's belly.  That is a good explanation for the bee sensitivity to magnetism.  Other animals use the same material.  But to ascribe it to NMR is pushing the envelope a lot.  It takes a pretty big field to allign all of those spinning electrons, and it takes some pretty sensitive stuff to measure the unflipping.  I doubt that the local fluxuations in the magnetic field would be sufficient to cause this phenomena on a scale that could be measured by the bee.

And the bee's ability to measure quarks?  Pushing the envelope again.   Quark interact primarily via the strong force and are confined to the atomic nucleus.  (They also interact via the em force, but so do electrons and the electron's interaction would overwhelm the quarks interaction in any measurment)  It is implausible that a simple elctromechanical system (which bees are) would have the sensitivity to pick up fluctuation in the nucleus caused by quarks.

The bees dance may have similarities to the randomness of quantum mechanics.  But that, in no way, means that there is a causal connection.  The difference in scale is too great.  Better look at something like fractals or statistics to figure this one out.

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Actually, it is an 11 year old article from Discover Mag.  Here is the cite:  http://discovermagazine.com/1997/nov/qua...

Given that it is Discover Mag, I think it is just a matter of the writer overstating the case to make it more interesting.