Warning Signs
Drawing on examples used in Voodoo Science, Park outlined seven warning signs that a claim may be pseudoscientific in a 2003 article for The Chronicle of Higher Education:
- Discoverers make their claims directly to the popular media, rather than to fellow scientists.
- Discoverers claim that a conspiracy has tried to suppress the discovery.
- The claimed effect appears so weak that observers can hardly distinguish it from noise. No amount of further work increases the signal.
- Anecdotal evidence is used to back up the claim.
- True believers cite ancient traditions in support of the new claim.
- The discoverer or discoverers work in isolation from the mainstream scientific community.
- The discovery, if true, would require a change in the understanding of the fundamental laws of nature.
Read more about this topic: Voodoo Science
Famous quotes containing the words warning and/or signs:
“No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)