HIGHLIGHTING HOAXES: NE professor Donald Olander says that preparing for his freshman seminar, Scientific Frauds and Hoaxes, was fun. Among his topics are the Apollo moon landing “hoax” and the debacle of cold fusion.

Freshman seminar delves into historical frauds and hoaxes and teaches presentation skills

Berkeley Engineering prides itself on teaching the latest, most accurate scientific theory, but NE professor Donald Olander is doing just the opposite. In his spring semester freshman seminar, entitled Scientific Frauds and Hoaxes, Olander is helping students identify viable science by giving them a historical survey of dubious scientific dogma and outright lies.

“The idea of this seminar is not to teach students something in the classical sense, but to teach them how to think critically about what is and isn’t solid, logical science,” says Olander.

Freshman seminars were started several years ago to give Berkeley freshman, who often don’t see a professor for their first two years, intimate contact with Berkeley professors. The classes are typically fun, pass/fail, round-table affairs taught on the professor’s favorite topics. Engineering freshman seminars have been taught on bicycle and car mechanics, gadgets electrical engineers make, materials and weapons of war and the World Trade Center bombing.

NE professor E. Morse turned his seminar into a role-playing forum with the class divided into three groups: one of scientists developing fusion technology, another of politicians trying to assess whether the cost is justified by the benefit, and the third of environmentally aware organizations leery of large, new technologies. The groups then confronted each other in mock public hearings.

The structure of Olander’s class does more than just teach students about fallacious science; it also seeks to polish their presentations skills. In the class syllabus, Olander gives public speaking tips on making eye contact, speaking up, and not focusing on just one person in the audience.

For the first two classes, Olander lectured on hoaxes such as perpetual motion machines (which violate the laws of thermodynamics); and the alleged Apollo moon landing hoax, which claims that NASA never landed men on the moon in the 60s. He also covered the “science” of extrasensory perception, telekinesis, and parapsychology. The rest of thesemester is devoted to student presentations.

Last week, NE freshman Nathan Obermiller presented on a claim by a Russian-born scientist that the world momentarily stopped its revolution many eons ago.

“So far I have learned a lot of pseudoscience. All the things that the professor has disproven are things that I used to believe myself,” says Obermiller.

NE freshman Andrew Wysong said he took the class because he thinks it’ll help when he does his own research.
“If my claim sounds like any of the claims in this class, then I will know that I need to reevaluate it,” he says. Wysong’s presentation was on homeopathy, or medicine that’s so diluted that one molecule of it in a glass of water is curative.

Other topics included wild theories of antigravity, faith healing, and phrenology, whereby personality is revealed by bumps on the skull.

Freshman seminars are popular among both students and professors. They give faculty the rare opportunity to lead small class discussions on fun topics of their choice and the opportunity to teach classes on their hobbies and interests.

“Engineering seminars are given as popularized versions of technical subjects. Professors can use their imaginations and do things that are out of bounds in a lecture class,” says Olander. For a list of freshman seminars go to fsp.berkeley.edu/flist.html

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