Junk Science Alert!

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

Contrary to what you seem to think, the scientific community is not the Republican party

EXACTLY RIGHT. *MUCH* of the scientific community is like the DEMOCRATIC party, with an explicit, and implicit, agenda, which tends to foster the theories currently in vogue. If you try to promote an idea which is contrary to the prevailing "world view" of the elder scientists...

you simply WILL NOT GET TENURE and WILL NOT PUBLISH.

this ends up working on scientists as a whole the same way it works on faculty who do not tow the PC line on feminism, race, the environment, you get the picture.

now it so happens that i believe there is a *LOT* of bologna and junk science out there, but I assure you many of the future breakthroughs in science are waiting there in the junkyard for someone to understand and develop them...

According to Singleton at Oxford, distributions of electrons and ions can travel faster than the speed of light when the dielectric material is polarized while individual electrons or ions cannot. He is experimenting with an antenna using a special polarization current distribution where the radiation falls off more slowly than the inverse square law. But perhaps eddy currents are confusing the result. Research continues.

Park's article mentions peer review as a way for judges to assess scientific truth. Articles that have been peer reviewed probably do in general contain better science than those that have not undergone the process.

However, just because an article has passed peer review doesn't mean it is correct or that unpeer-reviewed counter evidence by other scientists is necessarily incorrect (it may simply have not undergone peer review yet). Richard Feynman zeroed in on O-ring failure as a cause of the Challenger disaster -- was this incorrect because it had not been peer reviewed?

Peer review can depend in part on the beliefs and prejudices of the reviewers and how rigorous the policies of the journal in which an article is published. For example, if an article in favor of creation science is sent only to creationists for peer review, it would likely pass. If the same article were sent to evolutionists, it would likely fail. That is an extreme example, but the same sorts of personal passions exist in scientific controversies (creation science isn't science).

Peer-reviewed repeat experiments, alternate experiments, and additional data by other scientists are perhaps better ways of establishing scientific truth than peer review of one article alone.

You're talking about motion INSIDE a dielectric material? The speed of light in any material is slower than the actual speed of light in a vacuum. This has little to do with the speed of light in general and is more of an electromagnetic property of the material. It is possible for objects like electrons to move faster than this speed of light, just as it's possible for airplanes to fly faster than the speed of sound. They even give off radiation in a shock wave just like a sonic boom. It's called Cherenkov radiation.

Still, it sounds like VERY interesting work. Got a link? I guess I could do a Google search, but I'm just too lazy at the moment.

I don't have a link, but it is in the current issue of Physics World. [Yes, there is such a publication, and it's target audience is the general public. Lotsa pictures, not much math.]

Article is titled "Futuristic device defies law." Pg 6.

Peer-reviewed repeat experiments, alternate experiments, and additional data by other scientists are perhaps better ways of establishing scientific truth than peer review of one article alone.

Obviously! Isn't this the way it works?

If someone has a new idea, the burden of proof is on them. If the conclusions are sound, they'll attract support and inspire further research.

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.

A thousand pardons for my juxtaposition, your crankiness.......

Obviously! Isn't this the way it works?

One would hope so. My concern is that judges that are not scientifically trained might opt to accept only things that have undergone the peer review process. I fear that in some cases such a judge might rule out valid data.

If a case involves data that have not undergone peer review and/or are too complex for a non-scientist judge, perhaps the judge should set up a scientific review panel. Such panels do not need to involve the National Academy.

In cases involving competing scientific interpretations, the poor judge and jury sometimes don't know what to believe.

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

Of course, the classic cop out.

Now you demand that quantum objects and properties be described in terms of quotidian objects and properties, but it can't be done.

No, I'm not. I'm asking for the dimensions of your photon. Are you denying the existence of space? Are there time delays involved in interactions? Seeing the typical "ill-formed questions" response makes me want to write a "Indicators that you're involved in a cult".

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

How can you say that something with an FT of 1 (eg. a point) has a specific wavelength, which a photon is supposed to have? Nope, you're going to have to broaden that impulse out in time and decrease the amplitude before anything resembling a dominant wavelength emerges. So, how broad in time is a photon (I can handle multiplying by c all by myself).

How can you say that something with an FT of 1 (eg. a point) has a specific wavelength, which a photon is supposed to have?

Look, if you aren't conversant with the basics of quantum mechanics, why do you feel that you are in a position to critique it? The whole point is that if you are locating the photon to a specific place, it cannot have a specific frequency, and if you measure the photon to a specific frequency, it cannot have a specific location. That is both a theoretical imperative and an irreducible experimental fact. If you specified both the position and frequency of a photon, it would constitute a violation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

If a case involves data that have not undergone peer review and/or are too complex for a non-scientist judge, perhaps the judge should set up a scientific review panel.

Sound advice. One would hope that this already is the practise.

Such panels do not need to involve the National Academy.

I don't live in the States. Why do you think this National Academy need not necessarily be involved? What is their role in the scientific field?

Why do you think this National Academy need not necessarily be involved? What is their role in the scientific field?

In my opinion, the National Academy of Science ought to focus on matters of high scientific interest and public policy, not on scientific disputes in private litigation. I've known a number of people who have served on NAS panels. I jointly wrote and published a scientific paper with one of them and once supervised another. None of their scientific duties for NAS involved resolving court disputes.

The Daubert court case mentioned by the lead article of this thread is important for limiting the use of junk science in the US court room. I applaud it in general. Long before Daubert, however, I saw a scientific arbitration panel formed by members of both sides of a dispute that revolved around scientific issues. The scientists reviewed data from both sides and agreed on a recommendation.

I don't live in the States.

Looks like you are from Ireland, land of some of my ancestors. Tell me, what is the mood of the people there about the Iraq issue? Answer me by Freepmail if you would -- I don't mean to divert this thread from its original subject.

Dr. Park's rules do not seem to allow for authentic dsicoveries of new natural laws. Admitedly, such an event is rare but that is how science progresses. Many scientific breakthroughs have been put forward by those who did not have formal credentials within a given scientific discipline.

About 10 years ago an Australian Doctor discovered the fact that ulcers were caused by a bacterialogical infection and not the overproduction of stomach acid. His work was initially villified and ridculed by Doctors specializing in ulcer treatment. After several years of travail the Doctors results were accepted and ulscers are now almots always treated by using antibiotics rather than older methods.

The aspect of any new authentic scientific discovery should be repeatability. If other scientists can reproduce the same results using the same methods then it is authentic discovery. Solely relying the assessment of experts who have a vested interest in the current theory is a recipe for scientific stagnation.

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