svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
Was looking up a product I hadn't heard of before (from the '60s) and ran into the term "pathological science", so I looked it up, from wikipedia:
Which would have been okay, but then I spotted:
So the conclusion: always good to keep an open mind about crazy ideas... just don't invest in them!
Pathological science is an area of research where "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions."... Langmuir said a pathological science is an area of research that simply will not "go away" — long after it was given up on as "false" by the majority of scientists in the field. He called pathological science "the science of things that aren't so."
Which would have been okay, but then I spotted:
Cold Fusion caught my eye, because its a real thing, there were always elements in the data that couldn't be explained away. Wikipedia even says it real enough:Bart Simon lists it among practices pretending to be science: "categories ... such as ... pseudoscience, amateur science, deviant or fraudulent science, bad science, junk science, and popular science ... pathological science, cargo-cult science, and voodoo science."[6] Examples of pathological science include Martian canals, N-rays, polywater, and cold fusion. The theories and conclusions behind all of these examples are currently rejected or disregarded by the majority of scientists.
Interest in cold fusion was renewed after a review of promising findings from NASA and Google were published in a 2019 issue of Nature.[12] This revival of interest was largely driven by a small community of researchers who continue to investigate it,[6][13][14] often under the alternative designations low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) or condensed matter nuclear science (CMNS).
So the conclusion: always good to keep an open mind about crazy ideas... just don't invest in them!