Posted on 03/12/2003 9:21:09 AM PST by gomaaa
The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science By ROBERT L. PARK
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is investing close to a million dollars in an obscure Russian scientist's antigravity machine, although it has failed every test and would violate the most fundamental laws of nature. The Patent and Trademark Office recently issued Patent 6,362,718 for a physically impossible motionless electromagnetic generator, which is supposed to snatch free energy from a vacuum. And major power companies have sunk tens of millions of dollars into a scheme to produce energy by putting hydrogen atoms into a state below their ground state, a feat equivalent to mounting an expedition to explore the region south of the South Pole.
There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it. And many such claims end up in a court of law after they have cost some gullible person or corporation a lot of money. How are juries to evaluate them?
Before 1993, court cases that hinged on the validity of scientific claims were usually decided simply by which expert witness the jury found more credible. Expert testimony often consisted of tortured theoretical speculation with little or no supporting evidence. Jurors were bamboozled by technical gibberish they could not hope to follow, delivered by experts whose credentials they could not evaluate.
In 1993, however, with the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. the situation began to change. The case involved Bendectin, the only morning-sickness medication ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It had been used by millions of women, and more than 30 published studies had found no evidence that it caused birth defects. Yet eight so-called experts were willing to testify, in exchange for a fee from the Daubert family, that Bendectin might indeed cause birth defects.
In ruling that such testimony was not credible because of lack of supporting evidence, the court instructed federal judges to serve as "gatekeepers," screening juries from testimony based on scientific nonsense. Recognizing that judges are not scientists, the court invited judges to experiment with ways to fulfill their gatekeeper responsibility.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer encouraged trial judges to appoint independent experts to help them. He noted that courts can turn to scientific organizations, like the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to identify neutral experts who could preview questionable scientific testimony and advise a judge on whether a jury should be exposed to it. Judges are still concerned about meeting their responsibilities under the Daubert decision, and a group of them asked me how to recognize questionable scientific claims. What are the warning signs?
I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate.
1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media. The integrity of science rests on the willingness of scientists to expose new ideas and findings to the scrutiny of other scientists. Thus, scientists expect their colleagues to reveal new findings to them initially. An attempt to bypass peer review by taking a new result directly to the media, and thence to the public, suggests that the work is unlikely to stand up to close examination by other scientists.
One notorious example is the claim made in 1989 by two chemists from the University of Utah, B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, that they had discovered cold fusion -- a way to produce nuclear fusion without expensive equipment. Scientists did not learn of the claim until they read reports of a news conference. Moreover, the announcement dealt largely with the economic potential of the discovery and was devoid of the sort of details that might have enabled other scientists to judge the strength of the claim or to repeat the experiment. (Ian Wilmut's announcement that he had successfully cloned a sheep was just as public as Pons and Fleischmann's claim, but in the case of cloning, abundant scientific details allowed scientists to judge the work's validity.)
Some scientific claims avoid even the scrutiny of reporters by appearing in paid commercial advertisements. A health-food company marketed a dietary supplement called Vitamin O in full-page newspaper ads. Vitamin O turned out to be ordinary saltwater.
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work. The idea is that the establishment will presumably stop at nothing to suppress discoveries that might shift the balance of wealth and power in society. Often, the discoverer describes mainstream science as part of a larger conspiracy that includes industry and government. Claims that the oil companies are frustrating the invention of an automobile that runs on water, for instance, are a sure sign that the idea of such a car is baloney. In the case of cold fusion, Pons and Fleischmann blamed their cold reception on physicists who were protecting their own research in hot fusion.
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection. Alas, there is never a clear photograph of a flying saucer, or the Loch Ness monster. All scientific measurements must contend with some level of background noise or statistical fluctuation. But if the signal-to-noise ratio cannot be improved, even in principle, the effect is probably not real and the work is not science.
Thousands of published papers in para-psychology, for example, claim to report verified instances of telepathy, psychokinesis, or precognition. But those effects show up only in tortured analyses of statistics. The researchers can find no way to boost the signal, which suggests that it isn't really there.
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal. If modern science has learned anything in the past century, it is to distrust anecdotal evidence. Because anecdotes have a very strong emotional impact, they serve to keep superstitious beliefs alive in an age of science. The most important discovery of modern medicine is not vaccines or antibiotics, it is the randomized double-blind test, by means of which we know what works and what doesn't. Contrary to the saying, "data" is not the plural of "anecdote."
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries. There is a persistent myth that hundreds or even thousands of years ago, long before anyone knew that blood circulates throughout the body, or that germs cause disease, our ancestors possessed miraculous remedies that modern science cannot understand. Much of what is termed "alternative medicine" is part of that myth.
Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match the output of modern scientific laboratories.
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation. The image of a lone genius who struggles in secrecy in an attic laboratory and ends up making a revolutionary breakthrough is a staple of Hollywood's science-fiction films, but it is hard to find examples in real life. Scientific breakthroughs nowadays are almost always syntheses of the work of many scientists.
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation. A new law of nature, invoked to explain some extraordinary result, must not conflict with what is already known. If we must change existing laws of nature or propose new laws to account for an observation, it is almost certainly wrong.
I began this list of warning signs to help federal judges detect scientific nonsense. But as I finished the list, I realized that in our increasingly technological society, spotting voodoo science is a skill that every citizen should develop.
Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park and the director of public information for the American Physical Society. He is the author of Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University Press, 2002).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 21, Page B20
Totally off topic, but I suspect schizophrenia is a rather simple disorder structurally -- an inability to turn off what would otherwise be a normal dream state. Perhaps at heart it is a sleep disorder.
True, but there is a lot of evidence that people can be taught to live with bad feelings, and that as their lives improve, the bad feelings diminish. this is the school of therapy that says change the behavior first and the feelings will follow.
It is the only effective treatment for phobias, and it works really well.
In order to talk about it's shape, you would have to localize it, compress it to a single point. That's not allowed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.
You don't even need to compress it to a point. Just an equation of the overall shape would be fine.
I used to work in a lab with a femtosecond pulse laser system. A pulse of about 25 femtoseconds (1fs = 10^-13 seconds) is spread out over a distance of less than a millimeter.
Cool stuff. What was the application? I've read quite a bit about photoconducting antennas and their applications. Even done a few simulations of it using my TLM program.
I think you're describing a photon scattering off an electron here, though I'm not quite certain. The problem is, you're asking for a classical response to a question that ONLY Quantum Mechanics will answer. For one thing, it is IMPOSSIBLE for a photon to scatter off an electron without having the elctron respond.
Classical em handles scattering fine until you get to extremely short wavelengths. Also, I guess my original scattering post was unclear. It would have been more clear to say an "initially stationary electron". Of course, the electron is free to move in response to the incident wave. My whole point was to show that an incident wave accelerates a point electron in such a way that the scattered wave cancels the incident wave at exactly the classical electron radius. It's weird that this radius can be calculated in several (seemingly) unrelated ways.
If they are indistinguishable, why did you describe one as a "free electron" and the other as a "bound electron"???
Let me repeat. Why would a stationary electron reflect e.m. waves?
Good grief. I said "a unit step em wave hits a stationary point electron". Stationary, as in not moving, v(t=0) = 0. The whole point of that paragraph was to describe how the electron accelerates in response to the incident wave and how the resulting reflected/scattered wave behaved.
The important question for society is, if some individuals cannot -- due to objectively verifiable brain disorders -- control their behavior, can we allow them freedom, even if they have not yet committed a serious crime? Right now the courts are mixed on this, as they should be, because there is no objective way of predicting threats. But it is a problem.
Oh, jeez. I have identical twin brothers. One lives in Ireland. One lives in England.
Look, guy, I was hoping to be able to explain something to you. You're pretending to be stupid as a rock, or you're not pretending; either way, it's not going to work, so let's give it up, OK?
Ok. One last thing, I would like an answer to my "great philosopher" question. I'm curious.
The way to describe a light pulse is an equation for the Electric field that solves the wave equation. This can have an incredible variety of forms, all depending on the situation. The most familiar form would be a combination of sin & cos waves, like E=Asin(kx-wt)+Bcos(kx-wt). Alternatively you could use complex exponentials. It gets more complicated when you bring the polarization of the pulse into it, since the numbers A & B can be complex. This isn't generally thought of as an individual photon, though, but a bunch of innumerable photons. (Not really innumerable, but a LOT.) I'm not sure this really answers your question, though.
Classical em handles scattering fine until you get to extremely short wavelengths. Also, I guess my original scattering post was unclear. It would have been more clear to say an "initially stationary electron". Of course, the electron is free to move in response to the incident wave. My whole point was to show that an incident wave accelerates a point electron in such a way that the scattered wave cancels the incident wave at exactly the classical electron radius. It's weird that this radius can be calculated in several (seemingly) unrelated ways.
Ah-ha! You're referring to Thomson scattering. Now I think we're on the same page. This is pretty cool. It's been a while since I've looked at this stuff, so this was a good review for me.
http://hep01.s.chiba-u.ac.jp/lecture/radiation/node1.html
I also found it in Classical Electrodynamis by Jackson(p.694), and I think he does a slightly better job of it.
So the incident wave accelerates the electron, which then emits radiation, as you suggest. The resulting scattering cross section (the "size" of the particle which the incoming wave "sees" and therefor scatters off of) is SigmaT at the bottom of the link I gave. It just so happens to include the classical elctron radius as a factor in the result. As you pointed out, this is also obtained by calculating what volume you would need to cram an electron's charge into to get a potential energy the same as an electron's rest mass. This is really wierd, seeing as how electrons don't really have radii according to QM. There's a nice discussion of this on:
http://www.rsystem.org/rs/satz/elecur.htm
The electron radius gives the correct scale and units for the Thomson cross section, but isn't the exact value. It is useful, but not an actual physical thing. Another way to show that this couldn't be real is to think that if the electron were a small, spinning sphere of this radius, (we can measure it's 'spin') the parts of the electron on the outer rim of the sphere (the equator if you will) would have to be moving faster than the speed of light. Thus neither the radius of the electron, nor it's spin are classical concepts and can only be understood quanutm mechanically.
Cool stuff. What was the application? I've read quite a bit about photoconducting antennas and their applications. Even done a few simulations of it using my TLM program.
Fs lasers have very interesting interactions with matter. They're so fast that they can be used as a strobe light of sorts to measure ultrafast phenomena like the motions of electrons in solids or in atoms & molecules. It can also be used to study the processes of chemical reactions the same way, as they unfold! Lots of cool applications. I'm just more interested in smashing atoms into each other at rediculous speeds.
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