Pathological science is the process by which "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions". The term was first used by Irving Langmuir, Nobel Prize-winning chemist, during a 1953 colloquium at the Knolls Research Laboratory. 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".
Bart Simon lists it among practices pretending to be science: "categories pseudoscience, amateur science, deviant or fraudulent science, bad science, junk science, and popular science pathological science, cargo-cult science, and voodoo science ..". Examples of pathological science may include homeopathy, Martian canals, N-rays, polywater, water memory, perpetual motion, and cold fusion. The theories and conclusions behind all of these examples are currently rejected or disregarded by the majority of scientists.
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Famous quotes containing the words pathological and/or science:
“Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)