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

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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