Critical Review Dissects Voodoo Science by Dr. Eugene Mallove

Critical Review Dissects Voodoo Science
(Originally Published March-April, 2000 In Infinite Energy Magazine Issue
#30)
by Dr. Eugene Mallove

This review is of a pre-publication galley proof sent to Infinite Energy
with a press release on Oxford University Press letterhead mocking cold
fusion.

Historians of science may well look back on this book as a dying ember from
the funeral pyre of late twentieth century establishment physics, which
hurtles toward a supposed "theory of everything," while being blissfully
ignorant of profound cracks in its very foundations. But Robert L. Park, a
physics professor at the University of Maryland, is now riding high. For
some years he has been the darling of editors seeking crisp commentary from
the chief representative of the American Physical Society (APS), a position
he has held since 1982.

Whether railing against manned spaceflight, anti-ballistic missile defense,
alternative health care, ESP research, UFO investigation, or his favorite
whipping topic, cold fusion, you will find Robert Park in top mud-slinging
form on the Op Ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, among
others. His politicized weekly "What's New" internet science column
(www.aps.org/WN) is remarkable in that it is tolerated at all by the APS.
Especially since Park, with insufferable chutzpa, ends each column with a
fake disclaimer: "Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared
by the APS, but they should be." That's pure Park, who hopes that his
audience will come to see the world through the filter of the scientific
certainties that he and many of his arrogant physics colleagues claim to
possess.

Dr. Park has now compiled his wisdom in a short volume, in which he claims
to have discovered a new kind of science? "voodoo science"? the title of his
book. His definition of voodoo science is encapsulated in the subtitle, "The
Road from Foolishness to Fraud." There is a progression from "honest error"
that evolves "from self-delusion to fraud," he says. Further elaborating the
definition: "The line between foolishness and fraud is thin. Because it is
not always easy to tell when that line is crossed, I use the term voodoo
science to cover them all: pathological science, junk science,
pseudoscience, and fraudulent science."

This is how he says he discovered voodoo science. In the course of his PR
work for the APS he "kept bumping up against scientific ideas and claims
that are totally, indisputably, extravagantly wrong." He is that certain,
three adverbs worth, that many of the things he calls voodoo science cannot
be right. More often than not, he draws his conclusions from fundamental
theory that is supposedly sacrosanct. Therein lies the fundamental failure
of Park and so many of his colleagues in the physics establishment. They
have abandoned what little curiosity about scientific experiments that they
may have had at the beginning of their scientific careers: they attack data
from experiments that at first glance appear to be in conflict with theory,
about which they have concluded one of two things:

1) The theory can't possibly need fundamental modification, which might
allow the phenomenon to occur or

2) It is inconceivable that existing theory can be applied to allow the
phenomenon. It takes a special kind of arrogance to conclude affirmatively
on both those points, particularly when both experimental data and theory
for an anomalous phenomenon trend strongly against the doubters, cold fusion
being a prime example.

Park thinks he knows what he and the physics establishment are doing, but he
does not. He writes, ". . .no matter how plausible a theory seems to be,
experiment gets the final word." For Park, theory rules which experiments he
will even look at. Revealing complete ignorance of the bloody battles over
paradigm shifts in science (of the very kind he is obstructing!), Park
claims, "When better information is available, science textbooks are
re-written with hardly a backward glance." Baloney!

In Voodoo, Park dismisses cold fusion at its very first mention, referring
to it as "the discredited 'cold fusion' claim made several years earlier by
Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann." He says that a "dwindling band of
believers" continue to gather each year "at some swank international resort"
in an attempt to "resuscitate" cold fusion. He asks, "Why does this little
band so fervently believe in something the rest of the scientific community
rejected as fantasy years earlier?" He speculates later, "Perhaps many
scientists found in cold fusion relief from boredom."

Park works himself up about cold fusion throughout the book and tells us
what he really thinks of cold fusion: "On June 6, 1989, just seventy-five
days after the Salt Lake City announcement, cold fusion had clearly crossed
the line from foolishness to fraud." He states that Fleischmann and Pons
"exaggerated or fabricated their evidence." (He only speculates whether cold
fusion researcher Dr. James Patterson of Clean Energy Technologies, Inc. may
have "crossed the line from foolishness to fraud.") He complains that no
helium-4 results were forthcoming from Fleischmann and Pons by June 1989,
ergo, cold fusion is a fraud. Since at least 1991, Park has been informed by
fellow APS scientists, such as Dr. Scott Chubb, about helium-4 detection in
cathodes and in the gas streams of cold fusion experiments. These
independent experiments have been published in the U.S. and Japan in
peer-reviewed journals. There is no doubt that Park knows this. Voodoo
contains no mention of this data, an egregious fraud by Park on journalists
and the general public.

Park has not troubled himself to study the very data which he demanded many
years ago as proof of cold fusion, e.g. the helium-4 nuclear ash data, even
after this data made it into the peer-reviewed literature. "You don't have
to worry about the heat if there is no helium," was his statement to me in
the spring of 1991, recorded in my book, Fire from Ice. On June 14, 1989, in
the Chronicle of Higher Education, Park opined, "The most frustrating aspect
of this controversy is that it could have been settled weeks ago. If fusion
occurs at the level that the two scientists claim, then helium, the end
product of fusion, must be present in the used palladium cathodes." Apart
from his gross error of ignoring the helium that might be in the cover gas
coming from surface reactions (such cold fusion helium had been detected in
1991 and later), it is notable that Park has never mentioned any of the
published literature on helium in cold fusion experiments.

On the issue of cold fusion Park has traveled, in his lexicon, from
foolishness to fraud. Though he has not troubled himself with inconvenient
facts, such as experimental evidence of robust character that supports cold
fusion, he states preposterously: "Ten years after the announcement of cold
fusion, results are no more persuasive than those in the first weeks." He
rewrites cold fusion history with ludicrous bloopers designed to entertain:
"How, I wondered, could Pons and Fleischmann have been working on their cold
fusion idea for five years, as they claimed, without going to the library to
find out what was already known about hydrogen in metals?" Electrochemist
Fellow of the Royal Society Martin Fleischmann not knowing a lot about
hydrogen in metals? A bit much to suggest, even for an unethical obfuscator
like Park. Park is the one who should have gone to the library. He would
have discovered that leading cold fusion scientists like Fleischmann and
Bockris wrote the textbooks about hydrogen in metals. Fleischmann's
outstanding research in this area earned him a Fellowship in the Royal
Society, arguably the world's most prestigious scientific society. In other
contexts Park claims allegiance to established theory and the expertise of
leading ities; in this case, he does not even realize who the ities are.

If Park doesn't get his information about cold fusion from technical papers,
the normal approach in science, from where does he get it? Apparently he is
briefed by fact-resistant critic Dr. Douglas Morrison of CERN, who has
attended the international cold fusion conferences where he asks mostly
obtuse questions, proving that he, like Park, has not read the cold fusion
literature. Morrison has "kept an eye on cold fusion for the rest of us," as
Park puts it. The result of all this is to have Morrison, the prime purveyor
of the "pathological science" theory of cold fusion, passing misinformation
to Park, who then jazzes it up with snide remarks suited to the Washington
beltway crowd.

Morrison is the only skeptic to actually publish a paper that attempts to
come to grips with quantitative issues of cold fusion calorimetry and
electrochemistry. Every paragraph in his paper included an elementary
mistake. A few examples: he subtracted the same factor twice. He claimed
that Fleischmann and Pons used "a complicated non-linear regression
analysis" method? which they did not use. He recommended another method
instead? the one, in fact, they did use. He confused power (watts) with
energy (joules). He claimed that hydrogen escaping from a 0.0044 mole
palladium hydride might produce 144 watts of power and 1.1 million joules of
energy, whereas the textbooks say the maximum power from this would be 0.005
watts, and a simple calculation shows that the most energy it could produce
is 650 joules. This is the "expert" Park relies upon for news of cold
fusion!

And Park well knows the propaganda value of turning a serious subject into a
joke. In his account of the early days of cold fusion he observes, "Cold
Fusion was becoming a joke. In Washington that is usually fatal."

After assaulting the main body of cold fusion research, Park singles out for
attack Dr. Randell Mills of BlackLight Power Inc. (see Infinite Energy
coverage, Issue No. 17 pp. 21-35 and Issue No. 29, pp. 40-41). He says that
Mills did not offer "any experimental evidence" for his claims of excess
energy caused by catalytic hydrino formation. Park does not discuss the
multiple channels of experimental and astrophysical data that Mills has
cited to defend his theory. He covers up the serious, positive results that
the NASA Lewis Research Center published in its official report on the Mills
replication. But Park, at his core, argues mainly from theory: "But those
who bet on hydrinos are betting against the most firmly established and
successful laws of physics." Mr. Certain asks rhetorically, "What are the
odds that Randall [sic] Mills is right? To within a very high degree of
accuracy, the odds are zero."

Though I expected Park to bash scientific anomalies, I was unprepared to
discover the depths of his ignorance about spaceflight and its future.
Commenting on his early 1990s testimony before Congress in support of
unmanned space missions, he recalls, "I wanted to explain why the era of
human space exploration had ended twenty-five-years earlier and was unlikely
ever to come back." No future for human presence in space? Is Park for real?
He ends his myopic refrain with inept poetry bearing an absurd message,
"America's astronauts have been left stranded in low-earth orbit, like
passengers waiting beside an abandoned stretch of track for a train that
will never come, bypassed by the advance of science."

Amateur astronaut Park offers an amazing blooper, "If there was gold in low
earth orbit, it would not pay to get it." Astonishing! He apparently does
not understand such elementary concepts as the small propulsion energy cost
of de-orbiting with rockets and aero-braking, when he makes this and other
claims. In the emerging era of commercial space transportation, this Park
faux pas will be remembered as a late twentieth century howler, on par with
statements by astronomer Simon Newcomb earlier in the century that heavier
than air flight was likely to remain impossible.

In Park's crusade against manned spaceflight, he even goes after astronaut
hero John Glenn: "Both Ham [a chimpanzee aboard an early U.S. space flight]
and Glenn would end up in Washington: Glenn in the U.S. Senate, Ham in the
national zoo. Ham died a short time later without ever returning to space."
He attacks "messianic engineer," Robert Zubrin, who has put forth concrete,
well-researched proposals for cost-saving space missions, in his book The
Case for Mars. Park says that Zubrin started "his own cult? the Mars
Society." Park mocks the aspirations that led people like Dr. Robert Goddard
and so many others this century to work toward the manned exploration of
space: "Zubrin had learned his lessons well. The focus is on the dream. His
followers feel their feet crunching into the sands of Mars, while the most
daunting technical challenges are swept aside with simplistic solutions."

On the book jacket Park singles out "magnet therapy" and cold fusion as the
epitome of "foolish and fraudulent scientific claims." In the only
"experiment" that he actually decides to personally conduct to test any of
his opinions, he launches a misguided effort to disprove the alleged
therapeutic effectiveness of magnets in contact with the human body. He
bought some athletic magnets from a local store, then stuck one on a steel
file cabinet. He then inserted sheets of paper under the magnet, finding
that at ten sheets the magnet fell off. He exults, "Credit cards and
pregnant women are safe! The field of these magnets would hardly extend
through the skin, much less penetrate muscles." Park had merely found the
point at which static friction (caused by the magnetic force) is
insufficient to hold the magnet against the force of gravity. On this basis
he concludes that magnetic field would not penetrate into skin! This is
completely wrong, as sophomore physics students at MIT, and presumably at
the University of Maryland, would know. Park gets an F-grade on that one.
"Not that it would make any difference if it did penetrate," he says. Park
always has some theoretical insight about why something "can't be." This PR
agent for the American Physical Society needs a refresher course in Science
101.

Given Park's incompetent assessment of cold fusion and his failures in
elementary scientific methodology, we cannot expect a useful appraisal of
other controversial areas, such as whether or not there are loopholes in or
extensions to classical thermodynamics, whether low-level electromagnetic
fields can affect biological systems, the "memory of water" question, or the
scientific foundations of alternative medicine. Regardless of their
individual merits, Park gives these questions the same brush-off he applies
to cold fusion. It is not that one might never find areas of agreement with
Park. For example, some of the charlatan-like antics of Dennis Lee of Better
World Technologies, which Park chronicles, are appalling and have nothing to
do with the serious scientific investigation of anomalous energy phenomena.
And Park states that "there is now overwhelming scientific evidence that we
ourselves can affect Earth's climate." Some scientists would agree with
that; I don't happen to. I side with those atmospheric scientists who
believe that computer models do not yet come close to an adequate
representation of all the factors that affect climate.

On the other side, Park is rather forgiving about such things as government
spending for tokamak hot fusion, which is widely regarded as a financially
wasteful research boondoggle even by those who have nothing to do with cold
fusion. He says absolutely nothing about the ill-fated Superconducting
Supercollider (SSC), which was begun and then cancelled, before it could
waste even more taxpayer money. We do not hear of the scandalous recent cost
overrun at the ICF weapons simulation laser fusion device, which was led by
a physicist who was not even honest about his academic credentials. To Park,
this waste is apparently "all in the family"? the kind of money that the
white collar welfare, government-funded physics community can be forgiven
for wasting.

It is tempting to speculate that Park may be suffering from a psychological
problem known as projection, or possibly cognitive dissonance. At some
level, this confused man with all his years of schooling must realize that
he is out of his element in evaluating the cold fusion evidence. He doesn't
really know whether the evidence is good or not. Obviously he has not
studied it except superficially, yet he has gone far out on a limb in
attacking it? he can't bring himself to turn back. Among other problems,
admitting he had been very wrong would call into question his many other
judgments, from manned space travel to magnet therapy. He expected that cold
fusion would have gone away years ago, but it hasn't. So he creates the myth
that the cold fusion field consists of "followers who see what they expect
to see." In truth, it is Park who is seeing what he wants to see? lack of
evidence where there is evidence! The following grand assessment by Park of
"voodoo" others pertains most properly to him: "While it never pays to
underestimate the human capacity for self-deception, they must at some point
begin to realize that things are not behaving as they had supposed." It will
be cosmic justice for this profoundly foolish, mean-spirited flack for the
physics establishment when in the light of scientific advance the bigotry
and lies he has turned against others expose him for what he is.


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