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Voodoo Science: The road from foolishness to fraud by Robert Park, Oxford
University Press, $25, ISBN 0195135156

IT’S a problem all scientists face: people tend to think of science as a
source of answers when in fact it’s a process. “Science is the systematic
enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organising and condensing
that knowledge into testable laws and theories,” says Robert Park in Voodoo
Science.

A professor of physics at the University of Maryland, Parks has written more
than a hundred papers on the structure of crystal surfaces. Unlike many
scientists, no science is too “fringe” for him to examine in detail. In
Voodoo Science, he takes on would-be inventors of perpetual motion
machines, cold fusion and alternative medicine, as well as more obviously
scientific (though still contentious) subjects such as the alleged link between
power lines and cancer and the future of sending people into space.

Of course, many terms float around to describe things that sound like science
but aren’t: such as junk science, pseudoscience and pathological science. Park
has a smart solution: he uses pathological science for situations where
scientists fool themselves, junk science for arguments deliberately intended to
confuse non-scientists with theories of what could be (but isn’t) and
pseudoscience for things that have no evidence to back them up but which are
often honestly believed.

“Voodoo science” is Park’s umbrella term for the whole mess, because it means
he doesn’t have to decide where the “science” crosses the line from self-delusion
to fraud.

Park doesn’t feel he has to equivocate to make people like him. American
ideas of space stations and interplanetary trips, for example: a beloved dream,
perhaps, but impractical for a host of reasons, all of which Park recounts.
Ironically, he notes, John Glenn’s much-heralded return to space sent him only
128 kilometres further from Earth than his first trip 30 years earlier. Equally,
he doesn’t shirk saying when he thinks some of today’s junk science advocates
must have known they were crossing into fraud.

One unexpected champion of real science is Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson,
(the judge who recently found Microsoft guilty of anti-competitive practices).
Confronted with inventor Joseph Newman and his purported perpetual motion
machine, Judge Jackson commissioned an expert report. When the report was
favourable, he was far from convinced and learned enough physics to ignore the
report and order Newman to turn his machine over to the National Bureau of
Standards for testing. This is all of a pattern with Jackson’s unexpected test
of a routine for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

It all comes down to whether you can resist Pascal’s wager, in which the odds
of a particular claim being true may be infinitesimal, but the payback if the
claim is right is enormous. Park can resist it, and so apparently can Judge
Jackson. But millions of people out there will take that bet, longing for a
miracle.