At first sight this book, with the OUP's paperback version showing a shadowy figure apparently making some sort of magical gestures with his arms, might look like another book written against the young-earth anti-evolution movement. But in fact its targets are rather different and in some ways more important. Robert Park, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Maryland and former Executive Director of the American Physical Society, and a fairly well-known sceptic, has the cudgels out for widely accepted golden cows such as homeopathy, free energy machines, the blaming of power lines for sickness, and (dare whisper it) the old Strategic Defence Initiative ("Star Wars") and even the US manned space programme.
Park's style is not abrasive but is critical, tempered by flashes of humour. The free energy machines receive something of a caning as these are simply a variant of that age-old canard, the perpetual motion machine, whose non-feasibility this reviewer learnt about in GCE O-Level Physics at secondary school. However, the proclaimed successes of cold fusion from the 80s also get dumped into this category, and it has to be said for those of us who hope that one day fusion may be feasible that the evidence presented here by Park on these early attempts is pretty damning. As for homeopathy and similar alternative therapies, Park digs up the rather mystical and quasi-scientific explanations given by its practitioners, including a fairly famous health guru in the US. One of the later chapters in the book at least offers some hope: the US courts finally decided to implement valid scientific principles in establishing right and wrong in tort cases, thus preventing a massive avalanche of lawyers descending upon the power utilities with claims of power lines causing sickness and death, no scientific evidence having been positively adduced to prove this. One can only hope that courts elsewhere adopt such rigour.
What exactly is voodoo science, and why does it flourish? Park describes three components of voodoo science: pathological science, whereby genuine scientists fool themselves, perhaps through hope or wishful thinking; junk science, usually arguments based on "it could be so" rather than "it can be proven so" which deceive, among others, jurists and lawmakers; and pseudoscience, beliefs dressed in the language of science but without any underlying proof, such as extraterrestrial visitation, quantum theory as a way of healing, and wearing magnets in shoes to draw energy from the earth. Part of the problem also is cultural: scientists like to talk about the high frontier of science, people "want to believe", and furthermore there is a populist feeling in favour of the underdog (such as a backwoods inventor of a free energy machine) against the Establishment.
John Glenn, the US senator and former astronaut, occurs twice in these pages in interesting roles. In the first, described as a "genuine American hero" (which he certainly is) by Park, the senator sits on a committee examing Joseph Newman's free energy machine and with two simple questions severely damages the inventor's credibility. In the second he is finally selected to go on a mission with the space shuttle, but as Park points out, on this mission he travelled scarcely any further into space than he had done roughly nearly four decades previously as the sole occupant of a Mercury space capsule. This to Park is one of the illustrations of the currently very limited usefulness of manned space flight. It seems that there are some respectable sacred cows in science as well as the crank fringe.
See also the Wikipedia article on Robert L Park.
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