Vodoo Science
Robert L Park
Oxford University Press
£18.99
ISBN 0 19 850745 3
Rating: ****
This is not an evidence based study of pins, dolls, and the living dead, but rather an entertaining study of some of the great fake science episodes of our time, from Roswell to cold fusion, power lines to perpetual motion. The author is, by day, a professor of physics. By night he is the American Physical Society's chief inquisitor, hunting out the scientific discoveries where orthodox scientific method is, to say the least, thin on the ground. He has filled this role for several years and it is this that gives the book its edge over your average science history book on “Great Fakes.” Park has attended the press conferences, seen the demonstrations, and in many cases talked to the proponents or inventors of the phenom enon. He charts their rise and fall, or in some cases, rise and disappearance, only to rise again, often with exactly the same claims a couple of years later.
Park is a scientist through and through.
The book is not at all dry but it is devoid of any salacious speculation or gossip. He serves up the evidence and views it under the microscope of modern scientific theory. He concludes that there is no evidence for any of these things and leaves you to decide why the claims were made in the first place. The only time that there is a touch of human emotion is in his obvious anger and disgust with the American media. It is the media he blames for magnifying out of all proportion the relevance and likelihood of these claims.
Unfortunately, these human interest stories play to two great chunks of the American psyche—namely, the little man making good and, when the scientific community fails to support the claim, well then it must be a (government) cover up. With their “talking heads”—six second sound bites by apparent experts in the field supporting the latest discovery, Park quite obviously feels that science could do without such reportage.
Park believes that false science falls into several different types, which he names as pathological, junk, and pseudo. Of these pathological seems both the most innocent and the most sinister. Here the proponents have fooled themselves and at least at the beginning truly believe what they have found. But somewhere along the line there is a departure from scientific dogma, self interest becomes paramount, and there is a slide from foolishness to fraud.
Ben Mills, preregistration house officer in anaesthetics, Greenock
Email: benmills@ecosse.net
studentBMJ 2001;09:305-356 September ISSN 0966-6494
