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PATHOLOGICAL DISBELIEF
["Pathological Disbelief" was the title of a lecture by 1973 Nobel Prize winner Brian D. Josephson, who teaches physics at the University of Cambridge, delivered at the 2004 Lindau meeting of Nobel Laureates. It describes a problem for science but also one for journalism which has over the past few decades moved from ubiquitous skepticism to ubiquitous condemnation of skepticism, most popularly expressed in labeling the skeptic a "conspiracy theorist."
Josephson, incidentally, cites the treatment of cold fusion as an example. Some readers may recall that the Review is one of a tiny number of publications that has treated research into cold fusion as newsworthy - not because this research will necessarily pan out but because the suppression of this research by both science and journalism violated the objective principles of both trades.]
BRIAN D. JOSEPHSON - This talk mirrors "Pathological Science", a lecture given by Chemistry Laureate Irving Langmuir. Langmuir discussed cases where scientists, on the basis of invalid processes, claimed the validity of phenomena that were unreal. My interest is in the counter-pathology involving cases where phenomena that are almost certainly real are rejected by the scientific community, for reasons that are just as invalid as those of the cases described by Langmuir. . .
The overall situation seems profoundly unsatisfactory. The system built up over the years to promote scientific advance has become one that narrow-minded people can use to block any advance that they deem unacceptable. This demands urgent review: otherwise, just as astronomy became fixated on the reasonably accurate, but wrong, Ptolemaic model, science will become fixated in a respectable, but inaccurate, view of reality.