Retorts

Science and Pseudo-science

One of the horrors of travelling in North America has always been a plethora of newspapers, magazines and pamphlets describing new sightings of Elvis, cures for cancer and more recently AIDS, perpetual motion machines, free energy, UFOs and other reports of events which have been suppressed by conspiracies orchestrated by some combination of the CIA, the oil companies, the medical establishment or the military. These articles have two things in common, in that the sad and misunderstood personal history of the downtrodden observer/inventor is emphasised and the independently verifiable facts are zero.

An interesting question for sociologists would be why such an apparently large section of the community actually choose to purchase, presumably read and conceivably believe such rubbish. The good thing is that their presence is largely limited to newspapers of ill repute, magazines of no credibility and publishers of no known track record.

New Zealand has now seen all this change. The Auckland Institute of Technology press have recently published a work called Suppressed Inventions and other Discoveries edited by Jonathan Eisen. The book consists of a large number of reprints of articles, many of which are of the type described above with an introduction by the editor.

Rather than discuss this type of publication from a sociological point of view, Eisen chooses to hector us into feeling guilty about not immediately giving our undivided support to devices which convert water into hydrogen and oxygen with little or no energy input. The resulting gases could then be used to propel a vehicle by burning the hydrogen as fuel -- the perfect perpetual motion machine. Are we actually supposed to believe this device was suppressed by the oil companies -- or was it the CIA?

No more credible, in my view, are claims that the US Air Force has hangars full of crashed UFOs complete with live and dead aliens, or that the wicked medical establishment is suppressing lots of fabulous cures for cancer or AIDS. I'm afraid I remain sceptical.

The Auckland Institute of Technology is trying to earn university status for itself, at least in part by developing its academic press. For some strange reason it has decided to put its academic reputation on the line by reprinting a set of extremely doubtful articles from dubious newspapers and magazines as if they were self-evident scientific truth. This is not a contribution to scientific knowledge nor even a useful contribution to the ongoing debates about the role of science in society. I only hope the content of their science diploma and degree programmes are more credible.

G.L. Austin, University of Auckland