Bogus science

[mmcirvin]

Charles Murtaugh, in the context of skepticism about wild nanotechnology claims, points to this old but good article by Robert Park about the "warning signs of bogus science". They've served me well when reading media reports. Some of them are the same as Langmuir's famous "characteristic symptoms of pathological science" (mentioned in this longer colloquium). Langmuir was specifically concerned with the sticky borderline case of self-deluded research going on in more or less mainstream science labs. Park's symptoms apply more generally to anything identifying itself publicly as science, including medical quackery, paranormal pseudoscience and blue-sky hypothesizing pitched in popular books.