How to know what to believe and why
Socrates was an epistemic nihilist, a fancy way to describe him claiming (repeatedly) to only know for certain that he knew nothing. This is like me insisting during the years of discussion of Randell Mills, which included him in the online conversation, that I was skeptical about his claims and theory. One day, Randell asked me what it was I was skeptical about. I had no reply. I felt rather stupid to have believed that I could just call myself a skeptic and not be responsible for thinking about concluding something with the information I was processing. Was it all fraud? I took that as a very real possibility for a long time, because fraud is a big part of fringe science. I did not realize that understanding what Mills was theorizing was not fringe science. I thought I could never understand it, just as I was resigned to ever understanding the standard model of quantum mechanics, SQM. What he was doing was attempting to help science recover from having gone over the edge 100 years earlier. I just needed to see that the model of the hydrogen atom with the electron orbital he had conceived was basically coherent and overcame the chief objection accepted in classical physics that an orbiting electron must radiate energy. There are conditions under which it does not radiate. Obviously, the ground state.
Years ago, Mills posted on his website that he was giving a talk at his alma mater, Harvard University, where he had earned an MD. There was a link to the Harvard website, which described this gathering where Dr. Mills would be delivering a talk about what he had been doing with his career. Was that fake? I admit, I did not contact Harvard directly, but I concluded it was real. There is only one www.harvard.edu.
A misconception that I had was that Dr. Mills was a doctor who had an urge to become a scientist and inventor. I was entirely wrong. He went to Harvard Medical School and became a doctor because he wanted to develop technology that doctors need. How better to understand what doctors need than to become a doctor? His first journal published scientific paper was in Nature in 1988 about a technology he invented, which he named MIRAGE (Mossbauer Isotopic Resonant Absorption of Gamma Emissions).
When I met Dr. Jonathan Phillips, an LANL senior scientist, at the ICCF14 meeting in DC, he gave me his email address @lanl.gov, and we had some email exchange in which he sent me his three recently published journal articles describing experiments he conducted which confirmed Mills' empirical claims supporting the reality of hydrino. This is the same guy who appears in a number of videos on YouTube in which he discusses why the hydrino is a viable concept. It is obvious that he holds Dr. Mills in high regard. What Dr. Phillips told me about what happened when he published the papers, how he was treated by his supervisor at U of NM, really shook me. I could not easily doubt his story, once I checked and made sure this guy was who he claimed to be? He was and is a top tier scientist in terms of credentials and publications. How could his chemistry department supervisor demand that he stop the research and cease publishing about it? He justified his demand by saying that the hydrinos might be dangerous, which is bizarre. So, he apparently believed that the hydrino is real, a discovery of such immense significance, I can barely describe. Yet, his concern was what would people say if it was learned that verification of claims of Randell Mills was developed in a lab in his department.
I checked out several of the professors who provided reports posted by Mills for work they did investigating or witnessing experiments. I obtained contact information for them by going through their universities and contacted one. These people are real and sincere, in my opinion. This was not some cabal.
Over my years of looking hard for reasons to see Dr. Mills as a scoundrel, I found nothing. It would have been much better to approach the subject by studying his theory and seeing how it predicts the hydrino and then conducting my own experiments to confirm the hypothesis, like Dr. Phillips did, but I am not a professional physicist, nor did I have access to a professional lab.
I have participated in online discussions of Mills and his work since 1997. There is no shortage of those proclaiming to "know" that he is a fraud and I took those statements seriously because as I learned, there are a lot of frauds and mistaken individuals in the "free energy" arena. My bias was strongly against accepting claims of excess heat, and I know that I insulted Mills on more than one occasion. He is not easily provoked. He behaves like a man who knows that he is right and that detractors cannot hurt him any more than he has unless he lets them. He already has a terrible reputation among mainstream scientists. This kind of stoicism is not found among the frauds that I have witnessed or uncovered.
Mills has a quality of raw intelligence and technical talent that is not disputed. It was so evident that his first published paper was in Nature, which cannot be explained except by realizing that he deeply impressed many people who had contacts with the editors. That magazine has so many high quality authors wanting to publish there constantly. For a man whose record was so small, he must have made a very powerful impression. For what it is worth, my contact with him (mostly indirect) leaves me with a profound appreciation of his intelligence. I have never weighted my impression of his personal attributes very highly because I always believed that he could be mistaken.
One way to approach the question of Mills' personal credibility is his character, as demonstrated by education, excellence and reports from those around him. All of these indicators appear to weigh heavily in favor of his honesty. But, he could be mistaken and honest. Sometimes, a simple mistake can trigger a cascade of mistaken impressions if the expectation of a certain result is high. This can result in a flurry of confirmation reports that are honest, but false. This is why the need for repetition of an experiment by the investigator making the claims is a given, and then when he is satisfied that the results can be reproduced reliably, publication follows and (ideally) replications by independent people begins. The goal of replication is to falsify the claims of the investigator, and doing so will result in prestige for the debunker. Positive replications may not confer much credibility for a variety of reasons, and this has been the case with Mills. There have been negative replication efforts for Mills, such as from Scott Little of Earthtech Labs.
An attempt at replication that results in negative results does not necessarily kill a claim. I personally conducted many experiments that were attempts at replications of cold fusion experiments. There was not much weight placed on my uniformly negative results because I am not a degreed scientist.
Both Jonathan Phillips and Peter Jansson have made strong statements about data produced by themselves that supports Mills. Jansson's Master's degree was based on experiments he performed under the auspices of Rowan University that were a replication of a Mills claim. The staff there had much involvement. In fact, Associate Professor Anthony Marchese of Rowan won a grant from NASA for investigation of a possible propulsion system based on Mills' ideas. He had heard about Mills from Jansson and could personally observe the replication work done by Jansson, which entails a quite simple experiment. The reputation of Rowan and each of the people who witnessed and reported what they saw was at stake, so there had to be some strong scrutiny and error seeking at work. These are indeed extraordinary claims and they are not expected nor accepted easily.
Rowan let Jansson complete his work and granted him his Master's degree. Then Jansson went onto Cambridge University to earn a PhD. He currently is a faculty member at Bucknell University. It can be safely assumed that those responsible for admitting PhD students into Cambridge are qualified and must perform investigation of the candidates. The topic of Jansson's Master's thesis must have triggered a warning that these Cambridge admissions people would scrutinize. This Master's thesis was a strong support for a refutation of a foundational theory of modern physics. The thesis would be a major focus of attention for the Cambridge personnel. Admitting Jansson into the PhD program was a tacit acceptance of the credibility of Mills, in my opinion.
One might expect that discussions on line for a controversial set of ideas would rapidly become a cheer leading exercise, but I have not seen that. Even when critics become abusive, employ stereotypes and fail to respond to requests for support of their statements, they do not get banned. Some do get banned, but it usually takes a real malevolence. Some people take on a mission to save humanity from "impossible ideas" or fraud. These people can be interesting because their intentions are good, but their due diligence is lacking. It is not an easy thing to intelligently criticize Mills.
The Hydrino Study Group was started by Luther Setzer, a NASA engineer. He had many years of great activity and attracted some serious scientists. Some, like Zimmerman, were launching attacks without doing much background work. Debunking attempts were fully accepted, and the importance of criticism was well respected. Mills attended and even sponsored online discussion. Critics cannot claim to have no opportunity to clarify their criticism by direct communications. Few attempted.
The strongest criticisms (most effective) against Mills, in my view, are that he has promised commercially successful devices and failed to deliver, repeatedly, over many years: the mark of the charlatan. However, as I attempt to show here, final judgement must be withheld when the subject is of extremely great importance and mitigating factors weighed carefully. Basic research is very challenging. It is not a simple extension of established knowledge. Commercialization can take many centuries for technologies if we measure the time between when a physical effect was first noticed and when commercial success. The basic ideas involved in the jet engine find roots in ancient times, for instance.
Mills was starting from "a blank sheet of paper" as he puts it. Nobody else had done any work with hydrino, not even the step of applying the non-radiation condition to the ground state of the hydrogen atom, which re-opened up the long sought classical physics modeling approach. He had to go through the establishment of evidences for the hydrino and then determine the extent of conditions under which hydrino can form. As it turns out, this is a very great undertaking. The next step was to begin to work on exploring which of these conditions might yield sufficient reaction rates and be safe for commercial application. He began with electrolytic devices and with the help of Thermacore explored the potential far enough to decide that the power density available was too low to be commercially useful. The quality of the heat was not good. To compete commercially requires being able to make power (electrical or heat) in a way that is cheaper and preferably offers other advantages over currently in use technologies. These qualities are quantified by figures of merit such as power per unit mass or volume, cost, total power available.
The electrolytic approach was not power dense and the maximum heat that could be produced for a practical device was far too low to be at all useful. However, they did demonstrate a highly repeatable means of producing easily measurable excess heat, a goal that few cold fusioneers ever claimed to have met.
Mills abandoned the electrolytic approach to making hydrinos and thought about other phases of matter besides liquid. Solids offer high power density, possibly, but there is a problem with getting the reactant and catalyst delivered into a continuing reaction and products removed. This work culminated in a couple of reactors, one of which was the object of Jansson's work. The other showed promise, but suffered from corrosion. It might conceivably develop into specific applications, but it does not show potential as a very useful replacement for most of society's power needs.
Mills had been thinking in terms of plasma physics for a long time. He started with a low-power density, glow-discharge device, inspired by very successful experimentation that showed some very crucial anomalies. The development of a plasma, one that produced extreme and anomalous UV radiation in an apparatus that had only a very low voltage was impossible to explain with established science. Mills realized that this reaction could be sustained indefinitely and was producing enough heat that if scaled up to a large device, might prove to be a central generating technology, either as a boiler or in a magnetohydrodynamic generator.
The area of philosophy focused on the title subject is epistemology. My
first college course in philosophy was Philosophy of Science, taught by
the dedicated and talented Gary Stahl at U of Colorado in 1975. I
realized after a few weeks that most of my classmates were making real
effort to understand the material, material which felt obvious to me,
which meant that my thinking was already geared toward scientific
inquiry. It gave me terminology and mental framework for approaching
scientific questions that proved to be very valuable in the coming years
of coursework and interests outside the classroom.
Modeling the hydrogen atom with classical physics is the act of unifying quantum mechanics and classical physics. This is a very great achievement, all by itself, if it is correct. This would not be a complete unified theory because there is still the question of relativity, but Mills thoroughly addresses that and I am not going there.
This philosophy course formed a boundary in my thinking between scientific knowledge and the rest of knowledge. The textbook was by Michael Polanyi whose writing style was good for bringing abstract philosophy into a personal context. His work largely is focused on the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge, their interdependence and what the introduction of an imaginary boundary between them has done to influence societal development. Eventually, I learned that a boundary like this extended into politics and social interaction as well.
I am not the one to tell you what to think or how to form your beliefs, despite the title. That person is you. Surrender of this responsibility creates unstable societies as people become predictably influenced and easy fodder for those dedicated to controlling mass psychology. The Science of Coercion (Oxford Books) was written by a professor of Communications Studies, Christopher Simpson, who became curious about the origins of the subject in which he had earned a PhD. First, the oddness of not knowing the origins when so deeply immersed is striking. Every science I have studied contained at least a brief mention of major investigators, theorists and originators. Typically, much focus is either directly on their work or a simplified version of it.
What Simpson discovered was that this subject was in some sense, a fraud. When developing a new science, certain questions are answered. Why does communication between people matter? What is it? How is it seen in larger contexts, such as evolution and political philosophy? What communication is observed in other species, particularly primates? Such subjects are investigated, but what Simpson found for his own field of study was that the questions around which the knowledge formed were about how to control people, to make use of mass psychology. Chapters have titles like Defining Psychological War, Outposts of the Government, and Internationalization and Enforcement of the Paradigm of Domination. As he discovered, this obsession for control first, understanding later (if at all) was because the research on which the subject material was based was gained by observing people under conditions of severe coercion like prisoner of war camps and communities under military siege. It is about the use of propaganda and brain washing. The investigators/originators were members of intelligence agencies of many countries.
This subject was packaged as an academic discipline and introduced onto college campuses with no hint of how the knowledge was gained. As an engineering student, I was required to take two courses in it. I did not mind because I did not need to pay much attention or study for A's.
It was years later that I came across Simpson's book and it took quite a while to absorb, reflecting back on my college courses. I was familiar with such plots from fiction works, but this was far from fiction. The most shocking discovery was that this discipline was primarily aimed at those students who aspired to become journalists. This was so foreign from my expectations of how the media was produced that my skepticism toward it grew in leaps and bounds. Even worse, how could this be considered to be part of a college education? You see, I had not yet learned about Operation Mockingbird or Edward Bernays. I knew about Josef Goebbels and I thought that sort of stuff was restricted to tyrannies like nazism.
Mass psychosis is real. It may be called mass hysteria. It occurs spontaneously, but it can be designed and implemented. Rahm Emanuel is perhaps best known for saying, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." The nature of war and politics is that every resource available that might prove valuable in reaching the goals of control and dominance must be employed. The reason is that if you fail to explore and use every possible tool, your enemy might, and you will be subjugated or no more. This grim feature of the human condition has led to MK-ULTRA, false flag operations and justifications for actions I shudder to imagine, like weaponized mass hysteria. Our beliefs have been and are the target of some very sophisticated operators.
Life in the West is largely a race to acquire. Owning toys and experiencing things that others cannot afford is a high point in our narcissistic society. Possessing and controlling everything and everyone, except one's own self, is the prized goal.
Science is a philosophical pursuit, first and foremost. It is how we can know that we know and what we know. Philosophy is based on self-knowledge, and by implication, self-control. The contrast between the goals of most people in Western society and the goals of science is strong, yet the West relies upon, and has contributed greatly to, the advancement of science. This has resulted in a warped perception of science, generally.
Early in our relationship, I was having lunch with Eugene Mallove and we were focused on upcoming events in the world of cold fusion. The question of what are the biggest problems faced by humanity and how will they be affected by "Infinite Energy" based technologies came up. I told him that the biggest problem we faced was as it always has been, how to treat each other, that is, what are our responsibilities in view of the need to make life so valuable to people that they respected it in each other like they do in themselves? If solving pollution problems and lifting standards of living with extremely cheap, safe and unlimited energy was possible, how would people react? How did we react when the mass produced internal combustion engine and electric motors became ubiquitous? The genii was out of the bottle and persuading people to be responsible with their use of energy proved difficult. Even defining reasonable energy use was hard, so we defaulted to whatever we could afford. Quality of life, in some ways, may have been irretrievably damaged.
As I see it now, the biggest advantage that humans will have with ideal energy sources (very low cost, no environmental impact, no fuel limitations) is that the potential is to abolish one of the oldest and most powerful of monopolies that controls our lives, energy. We could be free from privations considered unavoidable for almost all of our specie's existence. But, like slaves freed from the plantation, how do we prepare for the unavoidable responsibilities that come with the freedoms? What do we do with the power? How do we not lose the power to control ourselves, to slide back under someone's or something's control? The old axiom, knowledge is power, is etched in stone and into minds because it is true. Without real, reverent and relevant knowledge of life, ourselves and our place in it, we will not escape self-imposed doom.
Some thinkers believe that such an energy source would automatically doom us. Dr. Paul Erlich said that cold fusion was “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.” He was not alone in this opinion. He has a point, but who knows what kind of world we will have? How would this knowledge of the future world be acquired? Was he just projecting his pessimism into the future? His predictions were almost all incorrect. People generally do not buy into solutions imposed upon them unless they have some say. People who decide to impose their will arbitrarily for some ostensibly altruistic purpose tend to create great problems, often mass death. Tyrants self-destruct, and they take many people with them.
One of the common problems with acquiring knowledge is overcoming the status quo, i.e. the dominant paradigm that is enforced dogmatically through academia. We must not be too critical of the academy, although it does not receive enough well directed criticism. When some early explanation of some phenomenon gains acceptance, it tends to get etched in stone because it gains currency among intellectuals who pride themselves on what they know more than on how well supported such knowledge may be by actual data. There is career safety in herd mentality. Stanley Milgram demonstrated how viciously the herd will defend their territory. Lethally, quite literally, in defense of the ideals of science that they can easily misunderstand or interpret in self-serving ways.
Thomas Kuhn alerted society to the illusions of how science operates because it is influenced by social effects. It is his very successful book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that continues as a popular reference when discussing paradigms because he introduced that word into popular usage. What school children are led to believe is that scientists operate in some atmosphere where objective reality is their focus of attention. In fact, what keeps a scientist active within his society is grant money, and acquiring a steady stream of that is a main focus. Another major focus is peer acceptance. The source of most research funds is the federal government and the people who decide who gets close to the feeding trough are typically informed by a small number of sources. Magazines like Nature and Science (flagship journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) are two main sources. Consequently, a scientist is very mindful that career advancement is much enhanced by getting accepted for publication in such journals.
The trouble with truth and reality is that our ideas about them tend to be unexamined. "The way we hold the world doesn't have to be true in order for it to be fantastically useful" (21 minutes into video). This was true of Ptolmaic cosmology. Great bodies of "knowledge" were built on arbitrary pattern formation, and the fact of the arbitrariness was a state secret, meaning that casting doubt upon it was a capital offense. This is true of the standard model of quantum mechanics. The reverence surrounding the Schrodinger Equation makes the suggestion that reality of the search for the arbitrary pattern formation a heresy.
Schrodinger knew that he had not derived his equation from established and accepted theory, although it was done in a way that it appeared to be an application of the wave equation. Thus, the existing need for unification of classical and quantum. It was as much of a guess as Rydberg's, and it became even more highly prized. Rydberg, however, never pretended that his formula was derived from anything or meant anything. It was a pattern recognition.
The living/dead cat was presented as reductio ad absurdum in correspondence with Einstein to make the point that the trajectory of theoretical development along the lines anchored in the Schrodinger Equation was likely to be a great deal of wasted effort. It is telling that this anecdotal bit of ridicule has become a cornerstone of common conceptualization of quantum physics.
"One of the principle objects of theoretical research in any department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity." - Josiah Willard Gibbs
The Gibbs quote evokes Occam's Razor as well as laws concerning stability and energy distribution in a system. It is not simply the arbitrariness of human explanations of things that settles upon the parsimonious explanation. Nature has a way of making sense that appears to be coherent with the way that our minds can comprehend when not encumbered with political and social priorities.At the risk of belaboring the point, Schrodinger could see that the equation he was heralded for producing was not bearing fruit in any satisfactory way. It was misleading a great deal of human effort, as he expresses quite clearly. He was making a logical argument that if we keep theorizing as Born and Dirac and now countless others have done, the effort is doomed. He was telling us that we really need to go back to the drawing board. Dirac eventually agreed. Of course, Einstein and Sommerfeld found little of value in the Schrodinger Equation after a little exploration. So, why would it have become the foundation of 95 years of physical theory? Because nothing better was found. If you have studied Kuhn, this should seem familiar and serve as an indication of where we may be on the cycle of moving between periods of normal and revolutionary science.
But, why did Schrodinger's Equation fly at all, given the need to immediately rewrite it 3 times, then totally change the meaning of it from position to probability, and then add patch after patch after patch in order to supposedly make it empirically verified? Let's not even get into mutually contradictory interpretations and arbitrary basis sets that are all accepted as valid. In a strong enough wind, even fat turkeys will fly. The excitement of having "solved" atomic theory, which placed theorists into the exalted positions of omniscient priests, was and is embraced wholeheartedly. They control who gets published, where the research money flows and most importantly, what gets taught in schools. Such power is not surrendered easily, so an understanding of why Mills is so rejected without apparent consideration must include this.
"In addition (to other inconsistencies making the Dirac equation invalid), consider the simplest atom, hydrogen, no physical mechanism for the existence of discrete radiative energy levels or the stability of the n = 1 state exists--only circular reasoning between empirical data and a postulated wave equation with an infinite number of solutions that was parameterized to match the Rydberg lines." - GUTCP
There needs to be a bottleneck for controlling who gets considered for funding because there are many more interesting objects of exploration than money available to pay for the work of investigating. Unfortunately, this does not mean that only the best ideas get funded, obviously. Because the people dispensing money cannot possibly be expert in all areas in which they are approving funds, there is a tendency to get stuck in a situation where making "safe" decisions is all too common. A safe decision is one where the person making it will not come under severe criticism, against which defense is nearly impossible. So, supporting research that tends to reinforce accepted ideas (paradigm) is the most likely criteria for selection. A lot of excellent work has been produced by this, but work which might be disruptive to the paradigm is not career enhancing for the bureaucrats or the scientists.
There are other factors that limit the progress of science. Science must be a conservative enterprise because it forms foundational knowledge upon which cultures are built. Stable cultures make for healthy societies. If a society becomes too unstable, the advantages and riches accrued by centuries of civilization can be lost in a short period of turmoil. We need a bedrock of accepted knowledge. But, a society can stagnate and die, too, from prizing stability too highly.
The well known case of Galileo and the Catholic Church clashing over the threat he posed to their need to be the focus of faith regarding planetary motion should not be a reason to hate religion. Regulating how change surges through society is a heavy responsibility and the skills required for doing it well are not so obvious. This is not a call for suppression of knowledge or abolishing religion. Knowledge is power and freedom from oppression, but learning to deal with newly acquired knowledge is a challenge frequently underestimated, a challenge that has wrecked many idealistic movements toward enlightenment. Consider that the great discovery of nuclear reactions, first demonstrated in 1934 by Enrico Fermi, has left humanity perched on the threshold of self-annihilation.
Kuhn defined two kinds of science: normal and revolutionary. He explains why both types form and why they conflict. Normal science is formed so that people can understand and probe it. It is an accumulation of ideas and investigations that accrue around seminal works, such as Newton's Principia or Lavosier's Chemistry. Revolutionary science springs from the accumulation of anomalies that are not explained very well by the normal science's paradigm. Normal and revolutionary science complement each other. People living in times of normal scientific inquiry dream of sparking a revolution in thinking or great discovery and revolutionary scientists during revolutionary times are striving to find some normalcy that can make their theorizing acceptable, or discovery believable, to the community.
Very important discoveries have gone unacknowledged by the authorities that had great historical consequence, some quite dire. Brett Holverstott recounts a sad example from 19th century medicine. In his biography of Dr. Randell Mills, Holverstott describes a Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, an obstetrician who was deeply concerned about the frequent deaths of young mothers who had come to hospitals to deliver their babies. The diagnosis was childbed fever and the cause was unknown because the nature of infection was not understood. It was killing large portions of these mothers and the resulting tragedies were a dreadful consequence for the obstetrician to face. Semmelweis was in charge of wards of beds for these women. He conducted three clinical trials where he would force workers in some wards to wash with a strong disinfectant, while the others went on as normal. The results were easily and soon observed. Childbed fever was almost eliminated in the wards using antisepsis. The joy of this discovery was not shared by his peers. For reasons that are elaborated in various accounts of this history, Semmelweis was ignored and his discovery was ignored, which may seem hard to believe. There must have been many people who observed the results of his trials. Indeed, one doctor became convinced and was so distraught by the realization that he had been killing his patients that he committed suicide.
How could such a wonderful discovery go on being ignored by the medical community? I will not attempt to elaborate here. Semmelweis made his discovery, published data and even wrote a book (still in print) during the 1820s. The implementation of medical practices based on these discoveries did not take place in the US until the beginning of the 20th century. Think of the number of people who died unnecessarily of iatrogenic infections or wounds that were not treated during that period of ignorance.
This is why it is an utmost ethical imperative to seize upon truth when it is presented. What does that mean, when truth is presented? Experience is the basis of knowledge and thus the basis of empirical science. Constructing a meaning for the experience is a separate task than preparing for and executing the experience, i.e. the experiment.
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill
We are trained in school how to experiment, but to get through class, students often figure out what the results are supposed to be and just keep repeating a procedure until it comes up right, or just lie to achieve a symbolic success, a good grade. Experimentation is difficult because if you got the wrong result, you likely will not know it and there are generally vastly many more ways to do something wrong than to do it right, especially if you're not quite sure how to do it right. So, when somebody declares that they have made a great discovery and verified it by experiment, this may seem like a conclusion, a fait accompli, but scientists know that the work of finding the errors is then just beginning, and that work to falsify claims might not begin at all. The claims may take on a life of their own. A lot of results are published and are not repeatable, yet the peer-review system is supposed to assure a certain likelihood that if it makes it into the journal that it was acceptably good work.
The peer-review system is grossly flawed. We cannot rely on an experimental result being correct unless it was conducted openly, with raw data accessible, and enough replication of suitable quality conducted by credible people, with no conflicts of interest. Use of apparatus that was provided by the original claimant can be grounds for rejecting the replication claims. A lot depends on the experiment in question. The detonation of the first atomic bomb did not require replication to arrive at a reliable and sustained conclusion. Evidence from early experiments can be dispositive, but usually, the data can be interpreted to mean different things.
So, were there good reasons for rejecting Semmelweis? In my understanding, no. The results were hard to misinterpret, so if it was error or fraud, simple replication should have exposed that. Yet, others were not inclined to test the hypothesis for themselves. People like to avoid disruption. If you confirmed Semmelweis and announced that his conclusions were correct, you would probably make a lot of enemies and face an uphill battle. If you failed to confirm Semmelweis, you gained nothing. Nobody's mind would change. Where was your incentive?
Pathological science was a term coined by a great scientist, Irving Langmuir. He listed a number of examples of past episodes where people sincerely made scientific claims which were eventually determined to be false, but for a while, had the appearance of truth. Langmuir summarized a number of characteristics that these examples of pathological science tended to exhibit. These characteristics have become a working definition of pathological science.
When I was an 8th grade student in 1970, I took a course called Introduction to Physical Science. The teacher was Mrs. Karen McGill, fresh from some college campus. It was perhaps the best course of my life, both for enjoyment and content. I was thrilled with every class because all we did was conduct experiments and write reports. I was marked as a teacher's pet, but I survived.
I dropped out of college after 3 semesters with a straight A average in an engineering/pre-med major, not seeing it as the right path. After a couple of years, I went to visit my old philosophy professor, Dr. Stahl and I explained the frustration I was having finding the will to work for a living. He said the obvious, which somehow had escaped me. I could only see that work must be nothing but misery. What he said was that the person who can work at what he loves never works. I needed to follow my desires. What did I desire? To understand why the world is the way it is.
My pursuit is still what it was from that day forward.
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