 |
There are currently, 256 guest(s) and 0 member(s) that are online.
You are Anonymous user. You can register for free by clicking here
| |
| |
Pathological Disbelief
Posted on Saturday, October 23, 2004 @ 17:41:42 UTC by vlad
|
|
(Committee for the Meetings of Nobel Laureates in Lindau)
Summary of lecture by Brian D. Josephson, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge (http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10)
This talk mirrors "Pathological Science", a lecture given by Chemistry
Laureate Irving Langmuir (1).
Langmuir discussed cases where scientists, on the basis of invalid processes,
claimed the validity of phenomena that were unreal. My interest is in the
counter-pathology involving cases where phenomena that are almost certainly real
are rejected by the scientific community, for reasons that are just as invalid as those of the cases described
by Langmuir.
Alfred Wegener's continental drift proposal (2)
provides a good example, being simply dismissed by most scientists at the time,
despite the overwhelming evidence in its favour. In such situations
incredulity, expressed strongly by the disbelievers, frequently takes over: no
longer is the question that of the truth or falsity of the claims; instead, the
agenda centres on denunciation of the claims. Ref.
3, containing a number of hostile comments by scientists with no detailed
familiarity with the research on which they cast scorn, illustrates this very
well. In this "denunciation mode", the usual scientific care is
absent; pseudo-arguments often take the place of scientific ones. Irving
Langmuir's lecture referred to above is often exploited in this way, his list of
criteria for "Pathological Science" being applied blindly to dismiss
claims of the existence of specific pheomena without proper examination of the
evidence. We find a similar method of subverting logical analysis in a
weekly column supported by the American Physical Society (4).
Other popular forms of attack are "if X were true we would have to start
over again" (as we of course had to do with Relativity and Quantum Theory,
and so the argument proves nothing), and then there is the dictum
"Extraordinary Claims require Extraordinary Evidence", which has the
marvellous feature of allowing the requirements for acceptable proof to be
stretched indefinitely as more and more support for a contested claim comes in.
Its originator, the late Marcello Truzzi, later decided that his comment was 'a
non sequitur, meaningless and question-begging', and had planned to write a
debunking of his own creation (5).
Ref.
6 takes a light-hearted look at a range of strategies used by critics.
"Cold fusion" appears to be the modern equivalent to continental
drift, starting with the controversial claim, made by Pons and Fleischmann in
1989, to have generated in an electrochemical cell heat considerably in excess
of anything explicable in conventional terms. This provoked hostile
reaction: ignoring the possibility that an aggregate of ions in a condensed
matter matrix may behave differently to a collection of freely moving ones, it
was asserted that nuclear fusion could not be responsible for the claimed excess
heat. Then came 'failure to replicate' by a number of groups, equated with
the non-existence of the phenomenon, ignoring the fact that if different groups
get different results there can be two explanations, one that the people who see
some effects are bad experimenters, and the other that they were in fact better
at creating the precise conditions needed for an effect to be seen.
Usually in such cases time tells which side is right, but here the steadily
mounting evidence that there was a real effect was suppressed through the
publication policies of the major journals. Consequently, these apparently
supportive results are not known to most scientists, who simply take it for
granted that the Pons-Fleischmann claims have been disproved.
In an attempt to promote proper discussion of the issue, I tried in 2002 to
upload a survey by Storms (7)
to, the preprint server arxiv.org, the natural place for facilitating such
discussion, but the moderators frustrated this intent by deleting the review,
declaring it "inappropriate" (chemists, being a more robust species
than physicists, were permitted to see it on their own server chemweb.com).
A breath of fresh air has been introduced into the situation now, with the
recent decision of the US Department of Energy to review the research (8);
if the reviewers simply look at some of the research going on they will almost
inevitably conclude that fusion can take place at ordinary temperatures, with a
yield far in excess of the 'almost undetectable level' referred to in Langmuir's
lecture.
The overall situation seems profoundly unsatisfactory. The system built up
over the years to promote scientific advance has become one that narrow-minded
people can use to block any advance that they deem unacceptable. This
demands urgent review: otherwise, just as astronomy became fixated on the
reasonably accurate, but wrong, Ptolemaic model, science will become fixated in
a respectable, but inaccurate, view of reality.
References:
1. Irving Langmuir, "Pathological Science", http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ken/Langmuir/langmuir.htm
2. "Continental Drift And Plate Tectonics", http://www.zephryus.demon.co.uk/geography/resources/earth/tect.html
3. "Royal Mail's Nobel guru in telepathy row", http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,560604,00.html
4. Robert Park, "What's New" (April 2, 2004), http://www.aps.org/WN/WN04/wn040204.cfm.
5. Marcello Truzzi (1935-2003): an appreciation by Jerome
Clark,
http://www.anomalist.com/milestones/truzzi.html
6. Daniel Drasin, "Zen and the Art of Debunkery", http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/scepticism/drasin.html
7. Edmund Storms, "Cold Fusion: An Objective
Evaluation", http://pw1.netcom.com/~storms2/
(mirrored at http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/papers/storms/review8.html)
8. "DOE Warms to Cold Fusion", http://physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-4/p27.html
(Physics Today, April 2004)
and finally, a link to Hansen's
analysis of the organisation CSICOP
Source:Pathological Disbelief
|
| |
|
Don't have an account yet? You can create one. As a registered user you have some advantages like theme manager, comments configuration and post comments with your name.
| |
Average Score: 5
Votes: 1
| |
|
|
No Comments Allowed for Anonymous, please register |
|
Re: Pathological Disbelief (Score: 1)
by vlad on Saturday, October 23, 2004 @ 17:53:36 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.zpenergy.com | Javthornton writes (free_energy list): "...Admittedly the current state of our knowledge seems to prevent our ever discovering workable devices allowing us to achieve FTL, as it discounts it entirely. However, the fundamental basis of our current knowledge is very shaky, despite its ability to predict some results with outstanding accuracy. At this point, I always mention last year's lecture series (each about an hour, so you need flat rate broadband) by Sir Roger Penrose (a real, genuine physicist, if ever there were one) at people who wish to appreciate this shakiness: "Fashion, Faith and fantasy": http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/
(scroll down to October where the menu lists the 3 Penrose talks)
...
Qualified criticism yes, but no more dogmatic mantras please!
Rgds,
John T.
|
|
|
Re: Pathological Disbelief (Score: 1)
by ElectroDynaCat on Sunday, October 24, 2004 @ 17:35:07 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) | Its ironic that an intellectual community that evolved from dissention against popularly held beliefs can become so resistant to paradigm shift in such a short amount of time.
Yet if we look at what that community has produced in the nature of concepts, we see ideas that themselves still stretch the imagination. Relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, all bend the common notions about the world, yet are a mainstay of modern thought.
Maybe the first stage of any scientific revoltion IS Pathological Disbelief! |
|
|
|
|
