[gomaaa]

The prevalence of junk science today is truly disturbing. Judges are not the only ones who can benefit from knowing these warning signs. Circulate this among friends and family!

[RoughDobermann]

Yep, I agree. After all, "everything that could ever be invented has already been invented..."

[facedown]

Good rules of thumb.

[RightWhale]

The Patent and Trademark Office recently issued Patent 6,362,718 for a physically impossible motionless electromagnetic generator

There could be a few dozen claims in the original application and the patent granted to only one of the claims. For example, the PTO might grant a design patent for the shape of a magnet without granting a patent for a ZPE machine in its entirety.

[husky ed]

Judges are not the only ones who can benefit from knowing these warning signs.

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media
"I did not have sex with that woman"

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work
"It's a Right Wing Conspiracy"

3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
"Stained blue dress"

4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
"It was just about sex"

5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries
"Everybody cheats"

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation
"It's the hardest he's ever worked in his life, and it's for the children!"

7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.
Define what "is" is.

[Frank_Discussion]

While I do tend to hate junk science myself, you have to consider the source. Dr. Park is not exactly impartial about things outside of scientific establishment. He also is hard-wired against human space travel, and wastes no opportunity to bash NASA for it's fixation upon it. It seems this article is meant to merely bolster his "NASA is just nutty" premise in a general way. Character assasination, if you will.

The field of electrogravitics (his first example in the article) is subject to the whims of peer review and scientific community peer pressure. In the 40's and 50's a fellow by the name of T.Townsend Brown had government backing for such research, and the results of his work still stand as valid. I've seen his stuff denegrated a goodly bit, though, and researchers who try to realistically follow up on his work often find themselves unpublished and alone. Such is the capricious nature of scientific circles.

Park's rules are useful, when it is assumed that they'll be applied scientifically. Often, however, they are abused.

[mikegi]

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. I agree with the part about companies buying up patents to suppress inventions like "water-powered" cars, etc.

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.

Well, this would rule out all breakthrough physical theories. For example, quantum mechanics certainly required new laws and significant changes to existing laws.

Of course, I'm a junk scientist! I believe that QM is the worst physics theories in history. Ask a QM proponent about the size and shape of a "photon". Ask them to describe how a photon and electron physically interact. For a theory that's purportedly so accurate that it can describe nature to 12 places, these should be easy questions to answer. Instead, all you'll get a sophisticated version of "sh-t happens".

If you want a hard and fast rule to determine whether a new theory is junk science or not, see if that theory requires or predicts instantaneous-action-at-a-distance (IAAAD). If it does, then the theory is completely junk science. QM predicts IAAAD and people are actually claiming to see it in action in recent experiments. Junk!

[Diogenesis]

Park is often inaccurate, interested only in selling his book
and Clintonism and antiscience, rather than science.

Perhaps it is from the tree that hit him.

[VOA]

bump...back for later reading...

[Xenalyte]

Verrry interesting!

[chilepepper]

If one follows this recipe, then GALILEO's idea of a heliocentric solar system would not be accepted.

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

Most revolutionary breakthroughs in science must cut through this inertia, a difficult and grueling undertaking...

[kidd]

Let's try this on Global Warming:

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media - yes, frequently

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work - yes, often "big oil" is blamed

3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection - yes, we've been told it'll be 30 years before we can determine if the oceans are rising or not, plus other examples

4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal - yes, "sure was a hot day yesterday...must be global warming"

5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries - no.

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation - no.

7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation - yes

Global warming gets 5 out of 7. Sounds like junk science to me.

[Elric@Melnibone]

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

He needs a better example...although it got lost in all the initial furor about the Pons/Fleishmann experiment, there has been quite a bit of further work on this subject in the past decade or so (or so I read in a variety of magazines).

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.

Might be a chemical reaction of some kind, might be something else. But, clearly, something is happening.

[aruanan]

and would violate the most fundamental laws of nature.

As opposed to the least fundamental laws? Of course, the scientists of his day said the same of Edison when he claimed he would build a generator that was more than 90% efficient. They claimed that an efficiency greater than 50% was a violation of the laws of nature.

[Sloth]

This thread inspired me to reproduce a perpetual motion machine I invented when I was in 6th grade:

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Think I can get some investors? :)

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[rustbucket]

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.

[Ben Ficklin]

The authors second example in the first paragraph would be Black Light Power and there some heavy hitters there, both technical and managerial.

[martianagent]

You left out a few warning signs which any such list should include:

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• The theory or project requires tens of billions of dollars and the payoff is decades out or the project spans decades without noticable change (e.g. hot fusion, the space shuttle etc.). Anything meeting that criteria is a jobs program and not science.
• The US government simply declares the project to be a success ( the WOD etc.)
• The theory is supported by international groups but not the American people, or appears to be being used to circumvent democratic principles or involves a claim of such importance that democratic principles require being bypassed ( global warming, Kyoto treaty, snail darters etc. )
• The theory cannot be produced via experiment and/or requires hundreds of millions of years ( evolution etc. )
• Too many scientists treat the theory as a cause rather than a theory and/or evince paranoid behavior in confronting opponents of the theory (evolution again).