cliff wright wrote in
:

Dave Oldridge wrote:
cliff wright wrote in news:4430a096
@clear.net.nz:


Irv Finkleman wrote:

I thought this article might be of interest in that we often see
claims about certain types of antennas which fall into the
category.

From
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i21/21b02001.htm

POINT OF VIEW
The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science
By ROBERT L. PARK

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration 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?

Before 1993, court cases that hinged on the validity of scientific
claims were usually decided simply by which expert witness the jury
found more credible. Expert testimony often consisted of tortured
theoretical speculation with little or no supporting evidence.
Jurors were bamboozled by technical gibberish they could not hope to
follow, delivered by experts whose credentials they could not
evaluate.

In 1993, however, with the Supreme Court's landmark decision in

Daubert

v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. the situation began to change.

The

case involved Bendectin, the only morning-sickness medication ever
approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It had been used by
millions of women, and more than 30 published studies had found no
evidence that it caused birth defects. Yet eight so-called experts

were

willing to testify, in exchange for a fee from the Daubert family,

that

Bendectin might indeed cause birth defects.

In ruling that such testimony was not credible because of lack of
supporting evidence, the court instructed federal judges to serve as
"gatekeepers," screening juries from testimony based on scientific
nonsense. Recognizing that judges are not scientists, the court

invited

judges to experiment with ways to fulfill their gatekeeper
responsibility.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer encouraged trial judges to appoint
independent experts to help them. He noted that courts can turn to
scientific organizations, like the National Academy of Sciences and

the

American Association for the Advancement of Science, to identify
neutral experts who could preview questionable scientific testimony

and

advise a judge on whether a jury should be exposed to it. Judges are
still concerned about meeting their responsibilities under the
Daubert decision, and a group of them asked me how to recognize
questionable scientific claims. What are the warning signs?

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. Moreover, the
announcement dealt largely with the economic potential of the

discovery

and was devoid of the sort of details that might have enabled other
scientists to judge the strength of the claim or to repeat the
experiment. (Ian Wilmut's announcement that he had successfully
cloned a sheep was just as public as Pons and Fleischmann's claim,
but in the case of cloning, abundant scientific details allowed
scientists to judge the work's validity.)

Some scientific claims avoid even the scrutiny of reporters by
appearing in paid commercial advertisements. A health-food company
marketed a dietary supplement called Vitamin O in full-page
newspaper ads. Vitamin O turned out to be ordinary sal****er.

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.

Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the University of
Maryland at College Park and the director of public information for
the

American

Physical Society. He is the author of Voodoo Science: The Road From
Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University Press, 2002).

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 49, Issue 21, Page B20

Some good points there Irv!
7. Is very interesting though. I'm an amateur astronomer as well as a

ham

and I'm frequently amused, or saddened, by some of the extreme
efforts to "save" the "Big Bang" theory.
One recent one had negative mass matter, a cosmic repulsion force
which has never been observed and cold dark invisible matter all
brought in. Of course there are WIMPS MACHOS and a period of
inflation at many

times

the speed of light involved too.
To me that makes the "Big Bang" a very suspect theory!!


It IS very suspect. The trouble is, nobody has an iota of a clue
what to replace it with. And this will probably remain the case
until we have some solid quantum theory of gravity to work with.


And that IS the position of many of the "establishment" cosmologists!
These problems are not just on the science "fringe" unfortunately.
A couple of brave souls recently proposed the simple expedient of
very slighty modifing the inverse square law of gravity at vast
distances. It seems to explain many problems of current theories, but
it was "jumped on" from a great height by scientists who don't ever
seem to have heard of Occam's razor.


Yes...very often the replacement "laws of nature" turn out to
approximate very closely to the ones we had before. After all, a
"law of nature" is really just a VERY persistent (and often
mathematical) observation about nature.


Regards Cliff wright.

BTW I have a bet with several of my old colleagues at Auckland
university that LIGO won't detect any "gravitational waves"
So far it has been about 3 years and I haven't had to pay out.


But we ARE dealing with a phenomenon that is at the limit of
detection here.


Hi Dave.
A very interesting reply. Just recently I tried to get answers
about
the actual mechanism for detecting "Gravity Waves".
I know I'm getting on a bit and retired, but I still get very
supicious of claims based solely on advanced Mathematics which the
"claimers" cannot explain in some terms which would be understandable
to a person with a knowledge of Physics to say, Batchelor degree
level. Just how self checking is some of this work?
Some of the answers re LIGO seemed to imply that all 3 spatial
dimensions are affected by the passage of a "Gravity Wave".
How does one detect that when your whole measuring apparatus is
affected at the same time.
The other thing that has made me a little dubious has been that the
claimed sensitivity of LIGO appears to have been downgraded by 2
orders of magnitude after it was completed in its first form.
Some while ago their site was actually downplaying whether they would
ever detect a signal at all. Hopefully time will tell. In fact it
would be nice to be proved wrong.

I think we are in very good agreement re the "Big Bang" theory.
The book of Genisis is the main source of inspiration for it I reckon!
Problem is so many astronomers who have sought for evidence for an
alternative have had a very hard time from the establishment.
I have actually seen this myself at University level, with students
getting marked down for just questioning the theory.

Of course I'm old enough to remember when "plate tectonics" was a
heresy, and we all know what happened there.

The thing is, we know the universe is expanding. That implies very
strongly that it has a definite, very hot, very dense beginning. The
rest of it is the technical details.




--
Dave Oldridge+
ICQ 1800667