An equation that debunks conspiracy theories

How deep does the rabbit hole go? (credit: Aurich and Eva Lawson)

For some, rejection of the human role in climate change reduces to a conspiracy: the world’s climate scientists are part of a socialist cabal falsifying research to justify energy regulations. Someone who has never met a climate scientist or looked closely at published studies can simply hold onto this idea rather than deal with the mountain of scientific evidence. Of course, it is patently ridiculous. The conspiracy would include an incredible number of scientists around the world, perfectly coordinating for decades, with nary a leak to give the game away—and that's before getting into all the socialists who would have to be involved.

In a recent paper, Oxford physicist and cancer researcher David Robert Grimes decided to try to create a mathematical measure for just how stupidly implausible that idea is—a sort of conspiracy probability equation. (Isn’t that exactly the kind of thing the cabal would use to throw the sheeple off the scent? Grimes must be in on it!)

The equation calculates the probability of a conspiracy-busting leak as 1-e^-tφ, where φ includes the (potentially changing) number of conspirators over time and the odds that one of those people leaks information in a given year. To estimate the odds that your average conspirator spills the beans, Grimes turned to some historical examples of events fitting the academic definition of “conspiracy”: the NSA’s PRISM program, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the FBI’s shoddy forensics uncovered by Frederic Whitehurst in the late 1990s.

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