Pseudoscience

While I was teaching Introductory Chemistry years ago, the World News reported that the pretty actress Gwyneth Paltrow had shown up at a New York film premiere with odd circular hickeys on her shoulders and back.  It turned out that these were due to her use of an acupuncture technique known as “cupping” in which glass jars are warmed (with a candle, I

Have you ever heard of "Red Mercury"? If so, it was probably in a spy novel or movie, not a chemistry textbook. Not everyone has been writing it off as fiction, however.

When addressing those who deny the conclusions of standard science, scientists tend to respond with whatever argument most succinctly shows the fringe view to be incorrect.  For example, most chemists confronted with the claim of a homeopath that a substance diluted in water by a factor of 10^³⁰ would not bother to inquire further,

Universities should be and are expected to be sources of truthful and unbiased information about controversial subjects, especially in the sciences.  Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

"Trick or Treatment" is a critical (very critical) examination of several varieties of alternative medicine. I was surprised to see Simon Singh as lead coauthor of a book about health because I know him as author of a book about math, "Fermat's Enigma", that I recommended in December of 1999. I thought it was the best science/math book of that year.

I am a fan of Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" column in The Guardian.

David Goodstein has enjoyed a long and productive career at the California Institute of Technology as a professor of physics and as Vice Provost. He brings to this small book on scientific ethics the perspective of an administrator of scientific research, a viewpoint that I have not seen expressed in any other place.

One part (but only one part) of the decline in science in the US is the growing minority of citizens who semiautomatically adopt positions antagonistic to those of the scientific consensus, regardless of the issue. The "scientific community" is not a monolith, and skepticism and dissent are essential to the process of science.

Jan Hendrik Schön published some of the most exciting and ground-breaking physics of the past decade. He published it in the most prestigious specialty journals such as Physical Review Letters, Nature and Science. He won several important prizes and was being nominated for more of them when a problem came to light.