Nonsense
From time to time the subject matter at my website will pass within
spitting distance of the vast confederacy of individuals practicing
pseudoscience. I'll refer to them as the PseudoScience Community or
PSC, it's members as PSCers.
The biggest drawback to pseudoscience is this: In knowing something
that is true we are given
real choices,
and conversely in believing something that is false we are deprived of real
choices. Hence pseudoscience restricts our freedom by arguing for
false propositions.
That's rather abstract, so to cast it more concretely: Why should a
person seek medical help for diabetes if they believe that doctors are
evil or incompetent? Why spend 20 billion dollars on cancer research
when one is convinced the money
would be better spent studying the false proposition that power lines
cause childhood leukemia?
There are people out there--parasites--who promote the nonsense that is
pseudoscience. This rather begs the question: Why would they do
such a thing? The most direct explanation is quite simple: PSCers
assert false propositions to make money. While this explanation covers
a lot of PSC phenomena, there is a second
motive at work as well: Sometimes PSCers are simply promoting a
fear-and-ignorance-based agenda, as in the so-called Intelligent Design movement. Whatever
their intent, the abuses of pseudoscience generally take advantage of
our capacity for trust. (Dante had an interesting fate in mind for such
people.)
Usually the respectable members of the science community ignore the
PSC. This is for good reason: To a scientist, the PSC is
extremely boring (as well as annoying). The problem is
that this is exactly what successful PSCers want because they are
left alone to make their money or promote their agenda, generally by
taking advantage of poorly educated people. For more background see the
Pseudoscience sections at the Bibliography
and Links pages.
Here are some pseudoscience topics that can be sources of endless
confusion, amusement, and essays in social science.
Alchemy:
News flash: The transmutation of elements--for example changing
Hydrogen into Helium or Carbon into Silicon--is possible! Transmutation
can proceed only at very high temperatures, millions of degrees,
because of the energy required to overcome the mutual Coulomb repulsion
of atomic nuclei (which are all positively charged). The most common
transmutation occurs inside stars and is therefore called stellar
nucleosynthesis. The PSC
asserts that other types of transmutation are also possible, for
example chemical transmutation or transmutation via 'cold
fusion'. These assertions have never been substantiated and they are
therefore (to date) false. The author is fond of using the word
'alchemy' as shorthand for stellar nucleosynthesis because of the
poetic closure it provides on earlier attempts by certain human beings
(notably Isaac Newton) to transform base metals into gold.
Intelligent
Design: A faith-based
attempt to pass off as science an unscientific
alternative to the fact and theory of evolution. Intelligent Design is
not a theory (since it fails the tests that define a theory) and is
consequently completely spurious to science. In particular it provides
no testable ideas. Intelligent Design is arguably interesting as a
social phenomenon, a recent development in the long history of the
relationship between religious and scientific schools of thought.
Glossary
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