Baddeley's Body Temperature and Time Perception Is One of Science's Rare Singles | Hacker News Reader

Baddeley's Body Temperature and Time Perception Is One of Science's Rare Singles

brainworldmagazine.com

30 pointsareoform7 comments

The original paper is here, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1420890 and it's one of the masterpieces of science. The blog's author makes it seem quite ridiculous, but these experiments were done for a very important reason — it was hypothesized that the body's internal clock was chemical, but it wasn't known for sure that was the case.

If we told time via a chemical process, then clearly that reaction rate must be temperature dependent. How do you figure that out? How do you tease out what is an error due to a small sample size v. a noticeable effect? Thus the experiments began.

I unfortunately cannot read the full paper (I am not affiliated with university anymore), but from the abstract alone, "one of the masterpieces of science" seems a bit exaggerated. I do not want to argue that it is a bad paper without reading it, but from the abstract, it seems to say "two attempts were made at replicating the result that speed of counting seconds is linked to body temperature, and one of them failed to replicate the results", which on the face of it is important (see the debate about the replicability crisis) but not that exciting.

Am I missing or misinterpreting anything?

This should have a (2014) in the title.

It's also a very weirdly written article.

Sounds like Terry Pratchett used this study as inspiration for his trolls.

Of course, until there is replication and independent verification, this remains junk science

I always assumed that trolls being made of (among other things) silicon, supercomputers were the inspiration.

Yeah, it's pretty explicitly mentioned in some books, such as Men At Arms, when Detritus the troll is having self-epiphanies about silicon-vs-heat after being trapped in a freezer.

You might be surprised to learn that Baddeley is a) still an active scientist and b) still turns up to undergraduate seminars (although now on zoom).

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