Long standing rumours on the internet - some food for thought
Oct 30, 2024 2:07:05 GMT
georg, Dry Paint Dealer Undr, and 4 more like this
Post by Raf on Oct 30, 2024 2:07:05 GMT
I actually considered sharing this video in one of the Queen sections of this board. Although I've decided against it, as it's not directly Queen-related, I'd like to explain why I considered it and why I think pretty much everybody should watch this video and sleep on it.
Given how niche this forum is, it certainly attracts people who are obsessed with all sorts of small detail about Queen's work, Queen's history etc. Some people here are just spending some spare time when bored at work, while others have done serious, actual research on concert dates and setlists, which instruments were available at a given studio session, and so on.
Over time, this mix of fans sharing their own opinions or speculation with researchers sharing actual facts can get a little messy. An expert on a given topic might speculate on something - for example, "considering this solo song was recorded around the same time Queen were recording that one studio album, perhaps this song could've been first offered to the band but they discarded it" - and get misquoted later on. Over time, that becomes "according to That One Queen Expert, Queen probably recorded song XX". Then, as people cite secondary sources, the original source gets lost and the facts get simplified. After a few years, it's just common knowledge that there's a version of a given solo song with the whole band from the sessions of a certain album, and people obsess over it being released in a hypothetical future box set or leaked by some collector who's supposedly sitting on a box of stolen tapes from that era.
There are SO MANY tiny little facts about whether a song exists or not, whether there are different versions of it or not, whether it was played live or not, whether a certain concert was scheduled to happen and then got cancelled or not, whether another tour would've happened or not etc and simply don't seem to have any actual source, but everyone here just seems to accept them simply because they've been repeated forever. Some of those I remember reading on Queenzone around 2005 and people still talk about them here in 2024, and I'm sure people talked about them before that.
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Well, what has this video got to do with any of that? It was made by science communicators who got asked for a source when they mentioned a well-known "fact" in one of their videos: if you stretch a single person's blood vessels, they'll be around 100,000km (60,000 miles). This "fact" is mentioned in endless sources, from pop science videos and magazines to serious research papers. However, all of them cite secondary sources, nobody seemed to know the original source.
The oldest mentions they could find were a popular science book by a Canadian science communicator from the 80s - who can't remember his source anymore - and an old textbook. On this textbook they found a citation for a research paper from the 1920s written by an actual Nobel Prize winner. However, he never measured anything, but rather made speculative calculations based on loose information he had and some unreasonable and unrealistic assumptions.
So, to sum it up: an expert made some speculations almost 100 years ago, someone credible quoted him decades later taking his results as a fact, a whole generation was educated with this new "fact" and started sharing it without any reference to the original source (which does explain the speculative nature of that "fact") and at some point it just became widely accepted as true.
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How many Queen "facts" might've started as speculation on a forum, wishful thinking that was either poorly worded or got misquoted, or even as just plain lies from someone trying to brag about knowing something, and then got spreaded so often that we just stopped questioning it?
I see this particular forum's moderators are often very strict about people sharing "facts" without sources, and some people seem to get annoyed by it. I'd say this video alone should be enough to convince anyone our mods are just asking for the bare minimum, and if we're unsure about where we've heard some info, we should make it very clear we're just sharing unreliable information from memory that should absolutely not be taken at face value unless someone else shows up with a credible source for that info.
Given how niche this forum is, it certainly attracts people who are obsessed with all sorts of small detail about Queen's work, Queen's history etc. Some people here are just spending some spare time when bored at work, while others have done serious, actual research on concert dates and setlists, which instruments were available at a given studio session, and so on.
Over time, this mix of fans sharing their own opinions or speculation with researchers sharing actual facts can get a little messy. An expert on a given topic might speculate on something - for example, "considering this solo song was recorded around the same time Queen were recording that one studio album, perhaps this song could've been first offered to the band but they discarded it" - and get misquoted later on. Over time, that becomes "according to That One Queen Expert, Queen probably recorded song XX". Then, as people cite secondary sources, the original source gets lost and the facts get simplified. After a few years, it's just common knowledge that there's a version of a given solo song with the whole band from the sessions of a certain album, and people obsess over it being released in a hypothetical future box set or leaked by some collector who's supposedly sitting on a box of stolen tapes from that era.
There are SO MANY tiny little facts about whether a song exists or not, whether there are different versions of it or not, whether it was played live or not, whether a certain concert was scheduled to happen and then got cancelled or not, whether another tour would've happened or not etc and simply don't seem to have any actual source, but everyone here just seems to accept them simply because they've been repeated forever. Some of those I remember reading on Queenzone around 2005 and people still talk about them here in 2024, and I'm sure people talked about them before that.
---
Well, what has this video got to do with any of that? It was made by science communicators who got asked for a source when they mentioned a well-known "fact" in one of their videos: if you stretch a single person's blood vessels, they'll be around 100,000km (60,000 miles). This "fact" is mentioned in endless sources, from pop science videos and magazines to serious research papers. However, all of them cite secondary sources, nobody seemed to know the original source.
The oldest mentions they could find were a popular science book by a Canadian science communicator from the 80s - who can't remember his source anymore - and an old textbook. On this textbook they found a citation for a research paper from the 1920s written by an actual Nobel Prize winner. However, he never measured anything, but rather made speculative calculations based on loose information he had and some unreasonable and unrealistic assumptions.
So, to sum it up: an expert made some speculations almost 100 years ago, someone credible quoted him decades later taking his results as a fact, a whole generation was educated with this new "fact" and started sharing it without any reference to the original source (which does explain the speculative nature of that "fact") and at some point it just became widely accepted as true.
---
How many Queen "facts" might've started as speculation on a forum, wishful thinking that was either poorly worded or got misquoted, or even as just plain lies from someone trying to brag about knowing something, and then got spreaded so often that we just stopped questioning it?
I see this particular forum's moderators are often very strict about people sharing "facts" without sources, and some people seem to get annoyed by it. I'd say this video alone should be enough to convince anyone our mods are just asking for the bare minimum, and if we're unsure about where we've heard some info, we should make it very clear we're just sharing unreliable information from memory that should absolutely not be taken at face value unless someone else shows up with a credible source for that info.
