If science is the study of ‘things’ and ‘stuff’, sciencology is the study of ‘the study of things and stuff’ and general behaviors therein et cetera and so forth. I met with noted sciencologist Barry Fitzwaffel to discuss how all of that was going. His answer: not good.

“The trouble we really encounter in the field is that they do these studies once, they take the conclusion and they move on. Very rarely do we see any kind of verification of these results.”

And that can have devastating effects. Take plastics. We’ve had plastics for over 100 years. Ask any chemist what plastics are, and they’ll point you to Leo Baekeland, whose pivotal Bakelite study showed that materials could be made entirely from synthetic molecules. Ask for another citation, however, and you’ll finally get them to shut up. Sciencologists in 2017 performed a meta-analysis and found that a shocking 70% of known plastics were not synthetic at all, comprising instead of such elements as ostrich feathers, t-shirts, and plain, unfiltered tap water. The other 30%? “We couldn’t find them,” says Fitzwaffel, a co-author of the study, “We’re pretty confident that they don’t exist at all.”

Dow chemical declined to comment. ExxonMobil said they would comment, but when I reached out and began asking questions, CEO Darren Woods repeatedly struck a flat palm against his stomach and shouted, “Can’t hear you over the tumslaps!” I had no choice but to leave, empty-handed and ashamed.

At this point I was dumbstruck. Plastic, something I had taken completely for granted, had fallen victim to the replication crisis. Perhaps the original study was a fluke, perhaps it was intentionally misleading (Baekeland is known to have acquired a warehouse of ostrich feathers in 1905, two years before his ‘breakthrough’). Either way, I was beginning to feel like I couldn’t trust anything. I began asking an important question before turning on the TV, taking out the garbage, opening a window- has this been replicated? More often than not, the answer was no. “Tip of the iceberg,” Fitzwaffel told me.

In a 2019 study it came to light that the word ‘Mississippi’ was actually spelled ‘Misiippii’ and young spellers everywhere were being taught from an early study that relied heavily on statistical . In physics, it was shown that what went up only came down in 1 out of every 4 trials. “Sometimes these objects would whiz around for hours before eventually shooting off to the left. It was very scary and, to be honest, I can understand why no one has tested this before,” said Barry.

Architecture was shaken recently by the discovery that all structures had been built by the Egyptians circa 50 BCE. Architects had thought (and still think!) not only that buildings had been made over the course of the last few centuries, but also that they were still, at this moment, producing more. Sadly building techniques were all lost to the fires of Alexandria two years later, and we simply no longer know how. I spoke to a man on the street who brought up the fact that construction sites existed, but the construction workers there never seemed to be doing anything. I found that to be something of a cliché, but with further research, it seemed that no one had made that remark before.

In physics, it was shown that what went up only came down in 1 out of every 4 trials. “Sometimes these objects would whiz around for hours before eventually shooting off to the left. It was very scary and, to be honest, I can understand why no one has tested this before,” said Barry. Surely, though, thermodynamics, laws of conservation- these must remain! It turns out, though, that energy is both created and destroyed over the course of a sneeze, and simply holding the sneeze in generates up to 10 joules. Mass is destroyed constantly by the mass eater Vellospiel, and scientists, maybe just out of hope, theorize the existence of a mass producer who can counteract these effects.

Not even science fiction is safe. “Oh yeah, we see replication problems there all the time. Blade Runners are bounty hunters tasked with systematically hunting down and ‘retiring’ (killing) remaining replicants. As a tool for identifying replicants, Blade Runners have a mental test consisting a series of emotion-evoking questions to help distinguish a replicant from a human,” Fitzwaffel told me, “Ten years after initially meeting, Anakin Skywalker shares a forbidden romance with Padmé Amidala, while Obi-Wan Kenobi investigates an assassination attempt on the senator and discovers a secret clone army crafted for the Jedi.”

A study published just moments ago has lead to great suspicion of this very article. It found that the overwhelming majority of claims given were impossible to recreate in a lab. The study claimed that this article was pushed through on a deadline and had not been properly verified. I asked Barry about it, but it seemed that he, too, could not be replicated.

Feeling alone in the world, I navigated empty streets, trying to find something- anything- that could be reproduced some time later. Alas, there was no use. Each and every observation fell apart under any scrutiny at all, and most of them seemed to suffer from small sample size and p-value hacking. I wandered still into the night, and found myself in a park at sunrise. Or what would have been sunrise, had independent reviewers not determined that the sun had only been rising to satisfy publication quotas. It had since gone into hiding. Instead I stared out into the night as each star blinked out of existence, one by one. The earth beneath me faded away, too a victim of the crisis. Perhaps the reason there is something and not nothing is that so far people have been unwilling to publish null results. As I write this, I can feel even myself drifting away, a statistical error with the rest.

It is all I can do to apologize for this travesty. My research has uncovered a secret darker than all investigative reporting to date- darkness itself. If there is anyone still out there who can hear this, I am deeply sorry.