Junk Science Alert!

The Chronicle of Higher Education ^ | 1/31/03 | ROBERT L. PARK

[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

[mikegi]

So, Mike, what color is an electron?

I don't know, you tell me. And while you're at it, give me the size and shape of a photon. Pick a wavelength, any wavelength. Scratch that ... if a photon is a point particle it really can't have a wavelength, can it, because that would imply something which varies with distance?

[js1138]

I think he could get investors. Last year someone in my home town was caught selling a modem that would transmit video speed data over a standard phone line. The list of his investors included half of Silicon Valley.

[kidd]

I have fallen into the trap of the media vernacular. I meant human-induced global warming. I have given a score of 5.0/7 for human-induced global warming.

[Sloth]

Grrrr... fixing it right now! :)

[whattajoke]

I enjoyed the layman explanation. Especially the summation!

S: These long-range correlations trouble me. Pass the hemlock.

That sums up my college physics experience (which contained nothing even close to the level of Bell's Inequality) very well!

[PatrickHenry]

Hmmmmm, I seem to remember somebody talking about laboring in isolation in their attic la-BOR-atory, with his mascot, "Plato" the Platy, on an anti-gravity machine.........

How many times do I have to tell you? Anti-gravity in the basement; perpetual motion in the attic. And in the garage (pronounced "guy-RAHGE") I do my FTL work.

[gomaaa]

Jeez, you go and actually try to do WORK for couple hours and all hell breaks loose.

The problem is that the American Academy of Science and most scientific organizations would follow the established 'party-line'.

Contrary to what you seem to think, the scientific community is not the Republican party and does not blindly follow orders from anyone. There is significant resistance to theories which challenge the currently accepted thought, but if these theories are good they will eventually pass muster. That's the way it works. Good science will eventually triumph because it is supported by real evidence.

Although there is still debate about whether this is fusion or not, there have been quite a few, repeatable, experiments which result in more energy coming out of the experiment than was put in.

I would be VERY skeptical about anyone trying to claim cold fusion. It is incredibly hard to get two protons close enough together to fuse, and the only way that's been tried with any success that I know of is incredibly high temperatures. The results you speak of are most likely someone thinking they see something that isn't really there, like those guys in Utah, though it's hard to tell without looking at the articles.

So, Mike, what color is an electron?

Better to ask, what color is quark? Or even what flavor! God I love Quantum Mechanics. Thanks for explaning things to mikegi. I may try my own hand at explaining the EPR paradox soon, but I have to go do productive things now.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Still the same. Most of the increase in CO2 is human. (There is a lot of CH4 from beavers however.)

The real problem is that the politicians are neither trying to understand nor to solve the problem. Mostly the politicians see GW as a useful issue. Koyoto did nothing except impose a tax on the US without lowering global production of CO2.

More efficient economies will help though. Unfortunately the Political GW Proponents are against these efficiencies too.

[Doctor Stochastic]

I know a Nigerian colonel who might be interested.

[PatrickHenry]

Interesting website on detecting pseudoscience: What is pseudoscience?.

[balrog666]

Bump for later.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[Ichneumon]

By that time, only Einstein and a handful of others had a problem with it.

And even Einstein accepted the majority of it and had made his own significant contributions to the field. His main "problem" with it was the philosophical hypothesis that the underlying forces might be truly random (as opposed his personal view that they might be only apparently random but working by "hidden variables" that were deterministic). He also had a problem with the notion of "action at a distance", but to be fair the jury is *still* out on that one.

[Ichneumon]

[2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.]

This specific part is bogus. Almost all new theories face stiff resistance from the old school.

That's apples and oranges. "Resistance" is not "suppression".

Yes, radical new ideas will face initial "show me" skepticism -- which is as it should be.

That's not at all the same thing as the crank's eternal cry that his work is being rejected/ignored because the "establishment" is working as a conspiracy to "suppress the truth" -- as opposed to the more likely explanation that it's being rejected/ignored because it's nonsense and almost everyone can see that but the crank who has too much time/emotion/ego invested in it.

[Physicist]

And while you're at it, give me the size and shape of a photon. Pick a wavelength, any wavelength. Scratch that ... if a photon is a point particle it really can't have a wavelength, can it, because that would imply something which varies with distance?

You're asking ill-formed questions. They don't make physical sense.

Nature, at its core, is quantum mechanical. Electrons behave like electrons; photons behave like photons; quarks behave like quarks. Everything you think you understand--sound waves, water waves, billiard balls, butter--is composed of those quantum objects. Their properties are derived from the properties of the quantum objects that compose them.

Now you demand that quantum objects and properties be described in terms of quotidian objects and properties, but it can't be done. It it philosophically impossible to describe the more fundamental in terms of the less fundamental. It works rather the other way around.

Meanwhile, if you want to understand how a photon can be both pointlike and wavelike, study the Fourier transformation.

[Old Professer]

I'd like to be rich enough so that I could throw soap away after the letters are worn off.

Writing implements dutifully eschewed.

[Old Professer]

If the moon disappeared, the earth should change its orbit about the sun.

[js1138]

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.

Actually, point two should include the fact that junk scientists invariably refuse to reveal the details of their inventions, lest they be stolen -- denying themselves the only opportunity to benefit from their discovery through patent or historical credit. I mean, how could General Motors or even the CIA put the toothpaste back in the tube after it was published on the internet?

[kidd]

In that case I have a huge disagreement with your assessment. Please see the site:
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm

Here is one of many examples of their argument against human-induced global warming:

Moving 11-year average of terrestrial Northern Hemisphere peratures as deviations in ºC from the 1951-1970 mean left axis and darker line (References:Jones, P. D. et. al. (1986) J. Clim. Appl. Meterol. 25, 161-179 and Grovesman, B. S. and Landsberg, H. E. (1979) Geophys. Res. Let. 6, 767-769). Solar magnetic cycle lengths right axis and lighter line (Reference:Baliunas, S. and Soon, W. (1995) Astrophysical Journal 450, 896-901; Christensen, E. and Lassen, K. (1991) Science 254, 698-700). The shorter the magnetic cycle length, the more active, and hence brighter, the sun.

[Old Professer]

The author of the article is dead wrong on (at least) one point. I've read the entire patent in question, and it says quite plainly that the device converts magnetic energy to electricty, with the magnetic energy comning from a permanent magnet, and the permanent magnet becoming de-magnetized (or less magnetized) in the process.

Tesla's patent #396121 details a device for creating electric current by simply heating a magnet attracting an iron core attached to a spring; as the magnetic force lessened from the heat, the spring overcame the attraction and swung the core through a coil producing a measurable current; by the time the pendulant force had reversed, the cooled magnet once again attracted the core until the heat again released it.

The admitted drawback to his scheme was that there is a critical point at which the heat permanently demagnetizes the "magnet."

His designs optimized the action to extend as long as feasible the effect.

Such a device could be employed to make a "bobbing head," I would imagine.