Any way you slice it

In my days, I have spent time with all manner of people, including some very, very intelligent scientific types...people who discuss string theory and evolution and the neuropsychiatric spectrum and how yeast rises to make bread for us, and there is one thing that such people tend to have in common - they are usually dead serious about their science, and never joke about it. At all.

So, it was to my pleasure to read that a French scientist tweeted a photo of a slice of chorizo sausage, claiming it was a picture of a faraway star as taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Double humor points for me, because James Webb was the name of my 7th-grade phys ed teacher at the now-dismantled Towsontown Junior High School. Mr. Webb was a man given to looking up at the sky and saying, "No rain today, boys. Let's run out there!"

The Frenchman involved here is one Étienne Klein. He's a well-known physicist and director at France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and something of a zany wit. He is now apologizing for sharing the photo of spicy Spanish sausage on Twitter.  At the time, he went out of his way to praise "the level of detail" it claimed it showed.

"Picture of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away from us. It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This level of detail... A new world is unveiled everyday*" is what he said on Twitter to his 91,000 twitterers.

Naturally, everyone in the science community broke their necks to retweet and share the picture, so that everyone could see a good picture of the notably camera-shy Proxima Centauri.

But before they could even finish slicing up the sausage, Klein had to admit that it was all a fausse photo ("fake photo" in French) (I did pay a little attention at Towsontown) of tubular meat.

 "Well, when it's cocktail hour, cognitive bias seem to find plenty to enjoy... Beware of it. According to contemporary cosmology, no object related to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere else other than on Earth" was his first comment, and  "In view of certain comments, I feel obliged to specify that this tweet showing an alleged picture of Proxima Centauri was a joke. Let's learn to be wary of the arguments from positions of authority as much as the spontaneous eloquence of certain images" was his second.

And then, his third followup said that his intention was "to urge caution regarding images that seem to speak for themselves."

Next, he showed the Cartwheel galaxy, vowing over and over that it was legitimate. 

The question of whether the scientific community will now shun Klein has yet to be answered, and the chances are, we will never know, or even care.

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*As any Towsontown graduate knows, the biggest problem was that he used the adjective "everyday" in the adverbial sense, where "every day" would be correct.