This is from page 392 in my copy:
The machine did look a bit like the transparent incubators for premature babies one saw in hospitals. This machine, however, was adult size--a long, airtight, clear plastic capsule, like some kind of futuristic sleeping pod. It sat atop a large piece of electronic gear.
"See if this helps you guess," Katherine said, plugging the contraption into a power source. A digital display lit up on the machine, its numbers jumping around as she carefully calibrated some dials.
When she was done, the display read:
0.0000000000 kg
I counted. That's ten zeroes after the decimal. (Calibrating dials looks scientific!) It goes on...
Katherine took a tiny scrap of paper off a nearby counter and laid it gently on top of the capsule. The numbers on the display jumped around again and then settle on a new reading. .0008194325 kg
We'll assume that the lack of a leading zero in the second case is just a typo, and not the instrument going crazy. Or can we assume that?
Let's think about this for a second. The machine is settling--settling-- on a reading between 0.00000000045 kg and 0.00000000055 kg. Those are staggeringly small numbers. What does your breath weigh? What about air currents in the room? She just moved her hand near the scale: that's going to set off all kinds of air currents! And they're breathing. And there is still air circulating from when they opened the door to enter the room. And so on.
It is my experience with balances (and I have used many), that measuring anything under about a milligram (0.000001 kg) is not possible unless you seal the thing off in an airtight compartment and let it sit untouched for a long time. Things at a tenth of a milligram almost never stabilize in most labs. But we're supposed to believe that this scale is stable enough in an open room to measure something 10000 times lighter, in real time!
Later on, it is revealed that the scientist in the book put a guy into this capsule. The reading was stable at 51.4534644 kg. Not sure where the extra decimal places went. Anyway, the guy was dying, but still alive. And the scale stabilized at a tenth of a milligram! Nuh-uh, no way, no how. There were even people in the room with the scale. The guy's wife had just closed the lid. The motions of the man in the capsule alone would overwhelm any readings you might get, causing fluctuations in the scale even at the gram level (0.001 kg).
Then the guy died, and shortly after the number on the scale dropped a tiny bit. This was supposed to be conclusive, irrefutable evidence that the human soul had mass. Ugh.
"But Glen," you say, "surely this kind of thing does not happen in real life?" Sadly, it does. There was a researcher and 2-time Ig Nobel winner named Jacques Benveniste who specialized in this stuff. He invented a device for measuring electromagnetic emissions, like radio waves or light. (Benveniste used his device to transmit medicine over the Internet. Like, you'd hold up your modem to a vial of water, and it would turn into Viagra or something. He claimed success. Most of the rest of the world mocked him.)
The device is a glorified microphone, really, hooked up to a powerful amplifier. Now, what happens when you hook up a mic (or a record player) to an amp? You get a hiss, of course. It may be a big hiss, or it may be small, depending upon your equipment, but there is always some noise.
Occasionally there are loud blips. A bit of dust falls on the mic. You shift the cord. The power supply into your house fluctuates a tiny bit as your neighbour turns on the vacuum cleaner. Noise is a part of life, and a part of any scientific data collection.
Trouble arises when you try to interpret that noise. One of last year's Nobel Prize winners, Luc Montagnier, appears to have fallen victim to this. Read that article. It's good.
From a scientifically-minded reader's perspective, that's what happened to the scientist in The Lost Symbol. She used a similar device for measurement, with all the same problems, and she wanted to believe, so she (subconsciously) rigged her experiment, cherry-picking the data she wanted to see. And everyone else believed it, too. Maybe that's partly why I didn't like the book. I don't mind rooting for characters who aren't perfect, but when every single one is that gullible.... In a story where critical thinking is supposed to save the day, things like make the protagonists' succes completely unbelievable.
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