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The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science

zorn

zorn

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Bob Park, a physicist and the public education director of APS, has a good article on some telltale signs to help distinguish between real science and phony nonsense passing itself off as science (which is all too common.) What he says gets the zorn seal of approval, for whatever exactly that's worth.

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The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i21/21b02001.htm

NASA 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?

...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...
  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.
 
There was a story which recently received a fair amount of media attention about an amateur physicist who allegedly had a "groundbreaking" theory of time. I don't have a link, but it was pretty widely distributed throughout the American media. A lot of the stories went completely overboard; comparing him to Einstein and what-not. Anyways, as discussion began surfacing, the general consensus among the physics cognizenti was that his paper was essentially content-less and more a philosophical diatribe than a serious physics paper. But that's beside the point..

People, and Americans in particular, seem to have a somewhat cynical view of the scientific profession nowadays. One of the manifestations of this, I think, is that "pop-science" seems to draw more press and more accolades from non-scientists than traditional academic offerings. Hence the need for a scientifically minded person like zorn to create this thread.

I'd like to hear other's opinions about the role of academic science in today's society and how it's perceived overall...
 
Shit Zorn, I guess that is why patents cost so much to hold on to!

Slight OT,
My dad invented a device that allowed traditional small aircraft to be able to fly on ordinary petrol instead of Avgas. Since Avgas is about 30% more expensive than petrol and that aircraft go through a lot of fuel it was a great little tool. Particulary since it only costs about $50 US to buy. Anyway, my dad never got approval from the Aviation Authority in this country despite continuous lobbying. He couldn't patent it because of the cost p/a on owning the right is too expensive for a person who only made it in his spare time. So he found someone who was interested in the US and they got approved by the US aviation authority without any modification. It went into production and was success. Of course, once it was approved in the US the Australia Aviation Authority accepted it. Sometimes I swear that Australia, like many other countries screw themselves up by being pedantic and grossly underenterprising.
 
RL.... Hmmm, I do hear a lot that part of the reason for the USA's economic lead over the EU, Aus, etc, especially in high-tech, is that the US places a much higher value on entrepreunership and makes it a lot easier. What's p/a?

compact said:
There was a story which recently received a fair amount of media attention about an amateur physicist who allegedly had a "groundbreaking" theory of time. I don't have a link, but it was pretty widely distributed throughout the American media. A lot of the stories went completely overboard; comparing him to Einstein and what-not. Anyways, as discussion began surfacing, the general consensus among the physics cognizenti was that his paper was essentially content-less and more a philosophical diatribe than a serious physics paper. But that's beside the point..
Click to expand...
On that tangent, do you know where I can find a copy of that paper? (Peter Lynds was the guy's name IIRC.) What I read in the media sounded dubious, but he got praise from Wheeler which is rather high praise indeed. I couldn't find the paper on arXiv or on the Web of Science, though, which was aggravating since I wanted to take a look at it.
 
Good post...

in most bogus science publications i see the ancient folklore aspect in some shape or form... there should be a new religion called Faith In Folklore
 
Headlines are driven to create an emotional response. That's why the most breathtaking study will get the front page, even in science. It then requires further reading to be told that the discovery is more of a theory and the findings/data are still under scrutiny and will be very difficult to prove.

Cuddles :\
 
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