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:
“A pathological business, writing, don’t you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!”
—Hans Magnus Enzensberger (b. 1929)
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)