Voodoo Science may not be Voodoo

Schwarzchild writes "Robert Park's book "Voodoo Science" came out last year with the appearance that all science that did not suit him was bad science. Here is a review by Nobel prize winning Physicist Brian Josephson questioning some of the claims made in Park's book."

Comments

Re:Science accepts new things.

[Tau Zero]

That the shifts are not accepted until the opponents are gone is an urban legend unsupported by facts.

It's been ages since I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but I believe that this was an assertion propounded by Thomas Kuhn.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard

movies

[milgram]

Time to see Serpent and the Rainbow again.

Re:And you may prove Josephson's point

[ponxx]

Why would it take massive funding and hundreds of scientists to repeat an experiment that a few people did "by accident"? Also if I remember correctly, there was a HUGE hype surrounding this discovery and scientists all over the world tried to recreate it, the price of Palladium (which I think they used) shot up.

Every scientist would LOVE to prove such a discovery right, and many tried, but no-one could repeat it, not even the original researchers themselves.

Re:faith?

[Actinophrys]

I find it unfortunate that since we just can't prove something, then it doesn't exist... what about faith and hope?

It is indeed a problem, but I think it's a lot more unfortunate when people believe in something just because they hope it's true, or refuse to have faith in anything else.

faith?

[mylinh]

I find it unfortunate that since we just can't prove something, then it doesn't exist... what about faith and hope?

i agree that some things may seem like hogwash, it may be true that some of these "voodoo sciences" can be untrue. but, maybe some concepts can't be proven because they can't be manipulated by our means.

concerning the paranormal, since it is 'weak' and not easily reproduced, that is not to say that it doesn't exist.

then again, perhaps the cases of all alien abductees are in fact just having bad dreams. =)

Re:faith?

[bcrowell]

Christian churches, for example, don't claim to be doing science. The people doing cold fusion, etc., do claim to be doing science, but then they don't follow the rules of science. Science has limits, such as not being able to describe the ultimate reasons for things, but it also has its own strengths, such as depending on experiments and observation rather than more subjective ways of knowing things.

As a concrete example of the harm done by voodoo science, all the money being wasted on research into supposed health threats from nonionizing radiation could have saved thousands of lives if it had been used for health care in Africa.

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Science accepts new things.

[DerekLyons]

Not that I disagree with you (cold fusion is problematical on energy considerations alone), but remember that it took over 50 years for Alfred Wegener's continental drift theory to be accepted -- he published it in 1915, and it was only around 1967 or so that the striped magnetic domains on the seafloor provided the inarguable evidence that he was right.

It took 50 years to find the evidence, once the evidence was found, it was accepted almost immediatly. It took only a few short years for evidence in favor of General Relativity to be found, which was accepted soon after. It's now well established that at least some dinosaurs had a heat regulating mechanism. That theory took less than five years to be accepted. Hubble's new theories were accepted almost instantly, because he had evidence to back them up.

Fifteen years in science is nothing at all. The major paradigm shifts have to await the death of their opponents before they reach true acceptance.

Fifteen years is a *very* long time in science. Paradigm shifts happen when evidence to support them is discovered. The example of Wegener is often cited, but it's way off the curve of time, yet fits exactly the curve of evidence. That the shifts are not accepted until the opponents are gone is an urban legend unsupported by facts.

And you may prove Josephson's point

[mosch]

15 years without a working device.... for a project that requires massive funding to have a possibility. For cold fusion to work, it would require hundreds of scientists to say 'This is an area worth exploring'. Something that doesn't happen despite the alleged "open-mindedness" of scientists. You don't get funding by investigating ideas which are "obviously voodoo". You get funding by proceeding incrementally, down previously explored paths.

Josephson has a point, which you make beautifully. You claim to back scientific reasoning, yet you dismiss cold fusion out of hand because of a 15 year gap. Perhaps you should visit www.fixedearth.com, and learn that copernicus was wrong, too.

I'm not saying that every voodoo science is real, most of them aren't. I'm claiming that there's no way to tell fact from fiction, except to do thorough analysis, using all available information. "obviously untrue" things are proven true all the time, and vice versa.

I'm certain you'll dismiss me out of hand, as you've dismissed Josephson, and that's sad. You miss the point by arguing against the specific points that Josephson mentions. His point is that validating a mentality, in which new ideas are dismissed out of hand, even with preliminary evidence, is dangerous.

An example that's in the news now, light has been completely stopped by Hau, and another independant team. Obviously, this is untrue, yes? After all, I learned in my fancy undergraduate education that the speed of light was a constant. (In case you didn't notice, the flaws in my reasoning are quite purposeful.) Therefore, this technology does not exist. It's voodoo.

--
"Don't trolls get tired?"

Re:And you may prove Josephson's point

[mosch]

I noted, immediately after my speed of light comment that I had made obvious errors, on purpose. I know that c is only constant in a vacuum, and I'm aware of Hau's previous work, and I'm aware that the speed of light is depandant on the refractive index of the material through which it is passing. That was, in fact, my obvious error. After all, have you ever heard the words 'fancy undergraduate education' said without sarcasm?

You're missing the point. Josephson is not arguing that cold fusion is a current reality anymore than I'm arguing that light travels at an absolute constant velocity. That would be moronic.

The point I'm trying to make is that all non-incremental technological development has seemed completely impossible, until it happened. Over history, every major scientific innovation shattered the idea of the obviously correct, or incorrect.

It's dangerous to create a culture, where scientists are afraid to experiment with the obviously incorrect, a culture which exists today, and which the book voo-doo science promotes.

Remember there was a time, not long ago, when the idea of something smaller than an atom was preposterous. The word itself, 'atom', has a root that means 'indivisible'. Then Rutherford came along, and suddenly we had 'elementary particles', which again were the smallest, simplest things in this universe. We understood matter perfectly, we knew all it's properties. There were electrons, protons and neutrons, everything else was horseshit. Then Dirac got this insane idea about anti-particles... insane until Anderson proved him right, by finding the 'positron'. Time went on, and we had leptons, baryons, and mesons. We understood what they were, what kinds of them existed, and that they were the smallest thing in the universe. Then dammit, we were wrong again, those wacky quarks came up.

I know you already know that, but I hope you see my point. Everything we know was once thought rediculous. Scientists have a natural arrogance, for they understand their part of the universe so completely that they couldn't ever be wrong, after all, the research was valid.

It's dangerous to challenge this assumption, because unless you're 100% right, you'll be a laughingstock in the scientific community. That's horrible. That's the problem. That's why we cannot dismiss voodoo science as voodoo by any intuitive means. That's why it's a good idea to try to prove correct, hypotheses which have been proven incorrect, especially in cutting-edge environments.

If we're not willing to occasionally question the facts, we might as well go get a barrel of leeches next time we get sick, because we'll never make any more revolutionary discoveries. We'll only make easy discoveries, and that would be a tragedy.

--
"Don't trolls get tired?"

Re:And you may prove Josephson's point

[bcrowell]

Josephson has a point, which you make beautifully. You claim to back scientific reasoning, yet you dismiss cold fusion out of hand because of a 15 year gap.
I dismiss cold fusion because (a) I read the evidence in Park's book, and (b) I was a grad student working in the same lab where Moshe Gai did the test for neutron emission, so I saw a lot of what was going on first-hand. (I didn't work on the experiment myself.)

After all, I learned in my fancy undergraduate education that the speed of light was a constant.
It obviously wasn't fancy enough, because you don't seem to realize it's only a constant in a vacuum, not in a meterial medium.

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Re:And you may prove Josephson's point

[bcrowell]

At any rate, one of the key problems with cold fusion research is that it seems to turn out that the process of cold fusion (if it even actually happens) only occurs if the palladium rod has a certain kind of composition
Your interpretation is disproven by the fact that Pons and Fleischman are still alive. If cold fusion had actually been happening at any time, they would be dead from the neutrons.
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Re:And you may prove Josephson's point

[Schwarzchild]

Unfortunately, it seems like in the cold fusion debacle that the news of the possible discovery escaped before the scientists themselves were ready for it to happen. Also I think they were afraid that another researcher with whom they were in competition with was about to announce something. At any rate, one of the key problems with cold fusion research is that it seems to turn out that the process of cold fusion (if it even actually happens) only occurs if the palladium rod has a certain kind of composition. There were apparently experiments where they used certain palladium rods that was pretty uniform in their composition (composition possibly being atomic structure/impurities) and when used these specific rods produce the heat that was expected; however, other pieces of palladium that did not come from the same rod but from other rods that probably didn't have the right composition did not cause successful experiments. The problem of making a successful cold fusion experiment seems to be rooted in being able to successfully create palladium rods that have the right composition. This is a materials science problem, I guess.

So, it would appear that Pons and Fleischmann probably accidentally hit upon the right kind of Palladium rods and when others tried the experiment they simply didn't have the right materials.

Re:And you may prove Josephson's point

[Schwarzchild]

Your interpretation is disproven by the fact that Pons and Fleischman are still alive. If cold fusion had actually been happening at any time, they would be dead from the neutrons.

The problem with this statement is that you're claiming to have all-knowing knowledge of physics and chemistry which we don't. According to the "cold fusion" experiments, they amount of neutrons they detected was 10 times less than would be expected if nuclear fusion was occuring...so perhaps that is why they are still alive. If these effects are cold fusion then a theoretical explanation will have to be developed that explains it. Other weird effects such as the Mossbauer effect and high temperature superconductivity were also things which were not thought to be possible though they were more readily accepted. No doubt, the huge media blitz that surrounded the publicity on the initial cold fusion experiments killed any mainstream acceptance of this field.

Read this essay about cold fusion from a non-believer. He gives a very fair portrayal of cold fusion. It's pros and cons and does go on to say that he doesn't believe in it but he does believe that one of the people doing research in this field is doing ethical, careful research that seems to yield promising results. The author of this essay is a physicist and not an electrochemist.

http://www.caltech.edu/~goodstein/fusion.html

Also in the essay the author notes that cold fusion researchers consistently get positive results when they dope the palladium rods with enough deuterium that the ratio of deuterium to palladium is above 0.85.

I am also not a believer in cold fusion. I don't know if it's for real or not but I prefer to keep an open mind especially if they are doing careful experiments and getting positive encouraging results. It is better for them to actually try and see what is there then to ignore it and hope it goes away.

Re:Josephson may prove Park's point

[tesserae]

It's been, what, 15 years since cold fusion was announced? I'm still waiting for the first demonstration of a working device.

Not that I disagree with you (cold fusion is problematical on energy considerations alone), but remember that it took over 50 years for Alfred Wegener's continental drift theory to be accepted -- he published it in 1915, and it was only around 1967 or so that the striped magnetic domains on the seafloor provided the inarguable evidence that he was right.

Fifteen years in science is nothing at all. The major paradigm shifts have to await the death of their opponents before they reach true acceptance.

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Re:The problem is with closed minded scientists!

[krlynch]

Maybe you should reread what he said, and reconsider why the journal might have rejected the article -- in particular, Newland argues that the experiment as performed does not distinguish between a revolutionary possibility, and a list of more mundane possibilities. In other words, the information derived from the experiment (and quite possibly, contained in the rejected article) does not support the purported result. He's clearly NOT saying that he is rejected the result. What he IS saying is that, if the result is interpreted as being due to the revolutionary possibility, then it contradicts previous experiments, so we have to reevaluate all of the collected data to see where the discrepancy comes from -- more work is needed to separate out the mechanism responsible for the results of the experiment. That doesn't sound to me like a scientist rejected ideas that contradict his own...it sounds like good science.

The problem is with closed minded scientists!

[Schwarzchild]

Another case of the establishment trying to put it's collective head in the sand. See this other slashdot linked article. It's about the scientist who discovered a way to turn adult cells into stem cells.

This quote is very telling:

So unlikely does the claim seem to many biologists that she has found it impossible to have it published in leading journals. But now, she says, it has been replicated by one of the world's leading contract research companies, Covance, and a company has been set up to market the idea.

Yes that's right...the journals seem to not want to publish her possibly ground breaking results. If her work is for real, then this is sad. If not, then it's better we find out.

Also see this quote:

One leading scientist familiar with her work, Professor Adrian Newland of the Royal London Hospital Medical School, said that he had repeated her experiments with the same results. "It's fascinating, but there could be other explanations for what is going on," he said. "My own work suggests that it isn't possible to reverse the process of differentiation, but I have repeated her work and got similar results. I think more research needs to be done to eliminate other possible explanations. As it stands, it could be amazing, or it could be inconsequential."

I find it remarkable that another scientist has reproduced her work and gotten similar results and yet he doesn't want to believe his eyes simply because it would invalidate his previous work!

Josephson may prove Park's point

[bcrowell]

I've written a review of this book myself, and I couldn't disagree more strongly with Josephson. One of the most interesting points in Park's book was how voodoo science shows up in places where you'd otherwise assume only good science was practiced, e.g. NASA's group working on antigravity. The history of pseudoscience is littered with cases of top-flight scientists who have gone outside their areas of expertise and started promoting bunk and nonsense. Sadly, Josephson himself seems to be an illustration of this. His home page is devoted to many varieties of bogus, disproven science, such as homeopathy.

The silliness of Josephson's review is most evident in his discussion of cold fusion:

• Cold fusion -- the suggestion that hydrogen nuclei can be made to fuse together and thereby generate considerable energy at near room temperature, using an electrochemical process instead of the usual very high temperatures -- was a claim that seemed initially very unlikely to be true, though not totally ruled out. After some workers found themselves unable to reproduce the results initially claimed by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989, a high degree of scepticism arose in the scientific community, especially after the publication of an official report declaring the absence of any evidence that fusion had taken place.

  It is interesting to look both at Park's account of the history of cold fusion and at that of the protagonists, presented in a video documentary Cold Fusion: fire from water (available from www.infinite-energy.com). Park impresses on the reader the fact that if the process that generates the heat is really fusion then one would expect to see fusion products. He fails to mention here, as the video does, that the small amount of such products anticipated, given the amount of energy generated, was eventually observed, and in just the right quantity. All mention of positive results, such as the experiment where, by what appears to be a sound method, it was found that the energy generated was considerably in excess of anything that could be explained conventionally, is collapsed into a paragraph where Park notes that many claims are soon withdrawn because of errors being found (as also happens in ordinary science).

  This device legitimises the dismissal of all positive results, and so also the corollary "cold fusion is no closer to being proven than it was the day when it was announced". This is a seriously misleading statement.

This entire discussion is full of untrue and misleading statements:

• "He fails to mention here, as the video does, that the small amount of such products anticipated, given the amount of energy generated, was eventually observed, and in just the right quantity." I've read Voodoo Science, but it appears that Josephson has not. All of this is discussed in excruciating detail in the book.
• "This device legitimises the dismissal of all positive results, and so also the corollary 'cold fusion is no closer to being proven than it was the day when it was announced'. This is a seriously misleading statement." Actually what's misleading is Josephson's description. It's been, what, 15 years since cold fusion was announced? I'm still waiting for the first demonstration of a working device.
• What Josephson fails to mention is the most damning evidence of all against cold fusion: if the device had really been producing the levels of energy Pons and Fleischman claimed, they would have been killed by neutrons. Subsequent experiments by Gai et al. showed no neutron emission in excess of (very low) background levels.

It's sad that someone with Josephson's history of accomplishment has chosen to end his career by making a fool of himself. It's even more sad that he may convince many people who have a right to more trustworthy information from a scientist who should know better.

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