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"In theory, scientists are open-minded, but in practice.."

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...an oversimplified, self-serving position.
In theory, scientists are open-minded, but in practice
there is a tendency to identify with the official position:
"the conclusion that science has come to"
concerning various things.

One can list the various ideas that science "knows to be
impossible or has shown to be misconceived",
including paranormal phenomena, homeopathic medicine,
and cold fusion.
But, on the other hand, scientists "knew" that Alfred Wegener's
hypothesis of continental drift was scientifically impossible.

The idea was ignored for decades despite strong evidence
in its favour.
And an investigating committee of the French Academy
"knew", on the basis of too simplified a view of orbits in a
gravitational field, that objects could not fall to the earth
from outer space.
It had to find another explanation for reports of falling meteorites,
sometimes still warm to the touch when found.
That explanation was that people had seen a stone being struck by
lightning, mistaking the flash for a falling object.

The outcome of this application of the scientific method to
eyewitness reports
was that meteorites were removed from many museums
on the grounds of their being of no particular scientific interest.

A similar approach, "scientists are right, eyewitnesses are wrong",
leads to reports of paranormal occurrences being dismissed
in the same way.

We find in Park's book the official story regarding
a number of "mistaken beliefs".
What one will not find -- and is hard to find anywhere
if one does not know where to look to bypass censorship --
is the additional information that might lead one to conclude
that the official view does not tell the whole story.

Regarding the paranormal, Park follows others in quoting a lecture
on "pathological science", given by noted chemist Irving Langmuir,
concerned with claimed phenomena that are difficult to reproduce.
In a number of cases this was because the observed effects were
clearly shown to be caused by a flaw and went away
when a properly designed experiment was done.

But Langmuir then went on to make the dangerous generalisation
that if any effect is weak or difficult to reproduce
then the effect is not a real one.
This does not logically follow;
an effect may be weak or difficult to reproduce simply because
it is weak or difficult to reproduce.
It is not easy, for example, to detect neutrinos from the Sun,
and different laboratories tend to get different results in this research.

Langmuir considered that the flaw in the telepathy experiments
was selective reporting, but present methods address this potential
source of error.
Park also criticises the use of random-number generators, saying
"there are no truly random machines".
But parapsychologists today create random numbers
using processes that physicists consider random.
So if this is the explanation for apparently successful experiments
it would imply that the physicists' view of the world
is also suspect,
which would itself be of great interest.

The reader is beginning to get the general picture:
One starts off with an opinion that a belief is wrong
and creates an argument to justify this opinion.
The arguments spread by word of mouth and are never updated with
contrary information that may subsequently arrive,
thus becoming the "correct position" to take.

It is perilous to say anything that indicates doubt about
whether this "correct" position is in fact correct
(though a certain proportion of scientists look more closely
and can see the cracks in the official position).

This effectively prevents any work in the areas concerned
being published in the major journals where they will be seen
by others.

Cold fusion -- the suggestion that hydrogen nuclei can be made to
fuse together and thereby generate considerable energy
at near room temperature, using an electrochemical process
instead of the usual very high temperatures --
was a claim that seemed initially very unlikely to be true,
though not totally ruled out.

After some workers found themselves unable to reproduce the results
initially claimed by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989,
a high degree of scepticism arose in the scientific community,
especially after the publication of an official report declaring
the absence of any evidence that fusion had taken place.

It is interesting to look both at Park's account of the history
of cold fusion
and at that of the protagonists, presented in a video documentary
Cold Fusion: fire from water
(available from www.infinite-energy.com).

Park impresses on the reader the fact that if the process that
generates the heat is really fusion
then one would expect to see fusion products.
He fails to mention here, as the video does, that the small amount of
such products anticipated, given the amount of energy generated,
was eventually observed, and in just the right quantity.

All mention of positive results, such as the experiment where,
by what appears to be a sound method, it was found
that the energy generated was considerably in excess of anything
that could be explained conventionally,

is collapsed into a paragraph where Park notes that
many claims are soon withdrawn because of errors being found
(as also happens in 'ordinary science').

This device legitimises the dismissal of all positive results,
and so also the corollary "cold fusion is no closer to being proven
than it was the day when it was announced".
This is a seriously misleading statement.

There are scientific arguments against cold fusion, but equally
there were arguments against continental drift.

The fact that theories have been proposed to provide a mechanism
seems not to impress Park as much as
the argument made by Douglas Morrison of CERN,
that one should be "suspicious" if one cannot get the same result
in an experiment every time.
Perhaps he would find such a circumstance less suspicious if he were
a material scientist rather than a high-energy physicist.

Let us move on to another blacklisted topic, the "memory of water"
(or high-dilution) experiments of French biologist Jacques Benveniste.

The claim in this case is that if water is disturbed in certain ways
(either by contact with certain molecules or by applying to it
an electromagnetic signal)
there is some after-effect or "memory",
characteristic of the disturbing mechanism, that can be detected
for a considerable time afterwards
(in the case where molecules are used, the solution is diluted
afterwards to such a degree that only water remains).

This suggestion, like many of the others discussed in the book, seems
to arouse irrationally strong reactions from scientists,
perhaps because of its associations with homeopathy,
also a black-listed topic.

But the objections made appear to be based on bad science.
The standard argument is reproduced by Park, who states that
a fluid such as water cannot retain any memory over significant periods
of time
because the random motions of atoms or molecules will rapidly dissipate
any information that might be contained in their arrangement.
The argument is invalid because there could be a more global organisation
not tied to specific local arrangements
and thus undisturbed by local movements of molecules.

Something like this happens with liquid helium in its so-called
superfluid state,
where the background order present in such a state can sustain
vortex-like flow patterns that persist
despite the continual movements of individual atoms.

manus her... ved Cambridge-professor Josephson, her

Granskede bok er utgitt hos Oxford University Press.
Naturlig nok -- kan man vel stole på naboens sunne dømmekraft?