There's One Born Every Minute
- ️Sun Jun 01 20200
By ED REGIS
artin Gardner's 1957 book, ''Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science,'' is the classic put-down of pseudoscience. Nobody
who read it will soon forget its stellar roll call of mid-20th-century cranks and crackpots: flat-earthers, Einstein-disprovers, antigravity researchers and the like. All of it was hilarious precisely because Gardner
reported essentially with a straight face: in most cases, taking these weird claims seriously was ridicule enough. Gardner wrote, for example, that ''Alfred William Lawson, Supreme Head and First Knowlegian
of the University of Lawsonomy, at Des Moines, Iowa, is in his own opinion the greatest scientific genius living today.'' He was, after all, the mastermind of Zig-Zag-and-Swirl, a theory whose exact details
need not detain us here.
Many of the characters introduced by Gardner are, unfortunately, gone today, but new ones have arisen to take their place. Joe Newman, for example. Newman, who according to one of his supporters has made ''probably the most significant discovery in the history of man,'' is the inventor of the ''energy machine,'' an infinite-energy device that Newman claims will allow him to run his Sterling sports car forever on an ordinary flashlight battery. A prototype of the 500-pound contraption, which he and his wife put together in their kitchen, supposedly worked by converting its mass into energy. The machine would literally devour itself, consuming its own copper wires and iron magnets, turning them into energy according to Einstein's equation E = mc2. Since c2 (the speed of light squared) is such a large number, just a little bit of matter would go a long way, and his machine would run until hell froze over, or almost, all the while producing clean, free and bounteous energy for the masses.
As Richard Feynman used to say, ''My Quetzalcoatl!'' The most amazing thing about Joe Newman, however, is not his claim to have invented an inexhaustible energy machine: such boasts litter the annals of crackpottery the way fast-food wrappers line highways. The amazing thing is that in 1986 Newman and his miracle device made it to the halls of Congress, several of whose members, including Senators Thad Cochran and Trent Lott, were contemplating legislation to force the Patent and Trademark Office (which had a policy of not considering perpetual motion machines unless a working model ran for at least a year in their offices) to issue a patent on Newman's ''unlimited source of energy.''
On July 30, 1986, accordingly, Newman testified before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Robert L. Park, the author of ''Voodoo Science,'' was in the audience together with executives from many of America's power companies. (''If the gravy train was about to pull out,'' Park writes, ''these guys weren't going to be left standing on the platform.'')
Newman had smooth sailing during his testimony until Senator John Glenn took over the questioning. Glenn, a former test pilot and astronaut, had a passing acquaintance with the laws of physics and immediately got to the crux of the matter. ''It's a simple enough problem,'' he said. ''You measure the input and you measure the output and you see which is larger. Would Mr. Newman agree to that? If he does, what laboratory would he like to have make the measurements?'' Newman declined this simple test of his machine's effectiveness, after which Congressional support mysteriously withered away and died.
Not the machine itself, however, which soon got a jump start from the ''CBS Evening News.'' On March 11, 1987, a mere eight months after Newman's Senate appearance, Dan Rather introduced a segment on the inventor, showing Newman at the wheel of his energy-machine-propelled car as a voice-over intoned: ''He brought his slow-moving car to a stop after two hours and said it could have gone on and on. Newman compared it to the first flight of the Wright brothers.''
So much for investigative reporting. ''Voodoo Science,'' a worthy successor to Gardner's book, is chock-full of the latest pseudoscientific hoaxes, scams and cases of sheer foolishness. Nothing and nobody are safe from Park's gaze, which ranges across the absurd and the sublime with equal impartiality: in his book Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, the prophets of cold fusion, come off no better than Newman and his energy machine, or Deepak Chopra's discovery in quantum mechanics of an ''alternative to growing old,'' or the claims, first publicized in a series of articles in The New Yorker by Paul Brodeur, that power lines cause cancer, or a recent full-page ad in USA Today for a ''Vitamin O,'' said by Rose Creek Health Products, its manufacturer, to provide a source of supplemental oxygen (in the event that ordinary breathing did not suffice), for just $10 an ounce.
The reader will also learn about l'avion renifleur, or ''sniffer plane,'' which supposedly mapped new oil fields by sensing the newly discovered atomic particles emanating from them. The French government poured some $200 million into the scheme, proposed by a shadowy Belgian count, before finding out that the inventor had deftly concealed geological survey data inside the device so it would appear to be detecting underground oil when in fact it was only reproducing maps of known oil fields as the plane flew over them.
Park suggests that Washington is offering Americans a similar bill of goods in hyping the International Space Station (which he describes as ''seven astronauts crammed into a can as spartan as Alcatraz, at a cost that threatens to bankrupt the space programs of 16 nations'') for its alleged scientific benefits. ''The space station cannot be justified on scientific grounds,'' he writes. ''The science planned for the space station . . . is not so much wrong as simply unimportant.''
A virtue of the book is that Park Ñ a professor of physics at the University of Maryland and director of the Washington office of the American Physical Society Ñ patiently explains why these bogus schemes, medical nostrums and miracle machines could not possibly work as advertised, communicating to the reader a considerable amount of genuine science in the process. Still, no amount of real science will separate true believers from their pet theories, no matter how silly they might appear in the cold light of day.
Case in point: homeopathy. Homeopathy, a medical cult founded by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann in the early 1800's (and currently enjoying a renaissance among ''natural medicine'' fans), is the practice of treating diseases with remedies to be taken by the patient in doses charitably described as extremely dilute. In fact, ''extremely dilute'' does not even begin to convey the true nature of the phenomenon. The homeopathic practitioner creates his healing potions by starting with a minute quantity of the curative agent (some natural herb, mineral or whatever), diluting it in water by one part in 10, shaking the flask and then repeating the process again and again.
''The dilution limit is reached when a single molecule of the medicine remains,'' Park says. ''Beyond that point, there is nothing left to dilute.'' But that does not deter the homeopath. Many of today's over-the-counter homeopathic remedies are supplied by the manufacturer in the dilution ''30X,'' which means that the original solution has been diluted 30 times in succession. ''The final dilution,'' Park writes, ''would be one part medicine to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 parts of water.'' This is like getting all the vitamin C you need by putting a drop of orange juice into the Pacific, stirring thoroughly, then taking a spoonful. To the dyed-in-the-wool homeopath, however, even that dilution is unacceptably concentrated, and dilutions of 200X and even more are not unknown. Homeopathic remedies, in short, are essentially driblets of plain water from which a lone medical molecule has long since vanished for all eternity.
What ''cures'' the patient, then, even in theory? The answer: some sort of ''information'' or mystical ''memory trace'' left by the absent molecule. As the mathematician Richard Courant used to say in his heavy German accent, ''Zis is not nuts. Zis is supernuts.''
Whatever else you may think about pseudoscience, at least it's entertaining. For much more of this high comedy, see the frequently droll and invariably enlightening pages of Robert Park's ''Voodoo Science.''
Ed Regis is the author of ''The Biology of Doom,'' a history of the American germ warfare program.