Voodoo Science

Robert L. Park's book, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud

Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud is a book published in 2000 by physics professor Robert L. Park, critical of research that falls short of adhering to the scientific method. Other authors have used the term "voodoo science", but it remains most closely associated with Park. The book is critical of, among other things, homeopathy, cold fusion and the International Space Station.

Categories

Park uses the term voodoo science as covering four categories which its publisher says evolve from self-delusion to fraud

• pathological science, wherein genuine scientists deceive themselves
• junk science, speculative theorizing which bamboozles rather than enlightens
• pseudoscience proper, work falsely claiming to have a scientific basis, which may be dependent on supernatural explanations
• fraudulent science, exploiting bad science for the purposes of fraud

Park criticizes junk science as the creature of "scientists, many of whom have impressive credentials, who craft arguments deliberately intended to deceive or confuse."

Examples cited

• Perpetual motion, free energy suppression and fringe physics claims
  • Robert Fludd
  • Garabed T. K. Giragossian
  • The Energy Machine of Joseph Newman
  • Better World Technologies (Dennis Lee)
  • Blacklight Power, formerly HydroCatalysis (Randell Mills)
  • Cold fusion (Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann)
  • Patterson Power Cell (James Patterson)
  • Gravitational shielding (Eugene Podkletnov)

• Human spaceflight (in terms of actual importance to science since the rise of robotic spacecraft)
  • International Space Station (for claims of necessity to conduct scientific research)
  • Gerard K. O'Neill, L5 Society and space colonization
  • Robert Zubrin, Mars Society, Biosphere 2 and a manned mission to Mars

• Voodoo science protected by government secrecy
  • Project Mogul and the Roswell UFO incident resulting in a loss of public trust, as well as the later alien autopsy video hoax
  • Edward Teller and Lowell Wood's work on the Strategic Defense Initiative (especially regarding the X-ray laser, but also "Brilliant Pebbles")
  • Great Oil Sniffer Hoax

• Superstitions and pseudoscience
  • Mars effect (astrology) claimed by Michel Gauquelin
  • Parapsychology (e.g. Robert G. Jahn and Dean Radin)

• Placebos and alternative medicine
  • Vitamin O
  • Homeopathy
    • water memory (proposed by Jacques Benveniste)
  • Animal magnetism
  • Magnet therapy
  • Therapeutic touch (debunked by Emily Rosa at age nine)

• Other health claims
  • Maharishi Effect (using Transcendental Meditation to effect a decrease in societal violence; the spike in murders during the 1993 Washington D.C. study is specifically mentioned)
  • Deepak Chopra (who makes claims linking Ayurveda (traditional medicine native to India) with quantum mechanics)
  • Electromagnetic radiation and health (especially related to power lines and cancer risk)
    • "Paul Brodeur and Microwave News in particular, had given the public a seriously distorted view of the scientific facts." (Page 158)

• Contributing factors
  • Mainstream media reporting voodoo science uncritically as infotainment
  • Abolition of the Office of Technology Assessment
  • Establishment of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Park also discusses the Daubert standard for excluding junk science from litigation.

Quotes

• I came to realize that many people choose scientific beliefs the same way they choose to be Methodists, or Democrats, or Chicago Cubs fans. They judge science by how well it agrees with the way they want the world to be. (Pages VIII-IX)
• The integrity of science is anchored in the willingness of scientists to test their ideas and results in direct confrontation with their scientific peers. (Page 16)
• America's astronauts have been left stranded in low-Earth orbit, like passengers waiting beside an abandoned stretch of track for a train that will never come, bypassed by the advance of science. (Page 91)
• Few scientists or inventors set out to commit fraud. In the beginning, most believe they have made a great discovery. But what happens when they finally realize that things are not behaving as they believed? (Page 104)
• [T]he uniquely American myth of the self-educated genius fighting against a pompous, close-minded establishment. (Page 112)
• They are betting against the laws of thermodynamics. No one has ever won that wager. (Page 138)

Warning signs

Drawing on examples used in Voodoo Science, Park outlined seven warning signs that a claim may be pseudoscientific in a 2003 article for The Chronicle of Higher Education:

1. Discoverers make their claims directly to the popular media, rather than to fellow scientists.
2. Discoverers claim that a conspiracy has tried to suppress the discovery.
3. The claimed effect appears so weak that observers can hardly distinguish it from noise. No amount of further work increases the signal.
4. Anecdotal evidence is used to back up the claim.
5. True believers cite ancient traditions in support of the new claim.
6. The discoverer or discoverers work in isolation from the mainstream scientific community.
7. The discovery, if true, would require a change in the understanding of the fundamental laws of nature.

See also

• Antiscience
• Cargo cult science
• Denialism
• Politicization of science
• Scientific misconduct
• Scientific skepticism
• List of cognitive biases

Books

• Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions
• List of books about the politics of science

Examples

• Energy Catalyzer
• Franz Tausend
• Heinz Kurschildgen
• John Ernst Worrell Keely
• Piltdown Man
• Steorn
• List of experimental errors and frauds in physics
• List of topics characterized as pseudoscience

External links

• Dogma Free America podcast interview with Bob Park