Pathological science
Area of research which persists despite being widely discredited / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pathological science is an area of research where "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions."[1][2] The term was first used by Irving Langmuir, Nobel Prize-winning chemist, during a 1953 colloquium at the Knolls Research Laboratory.[3] 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."[4][5]
In his 2002 book, Undead Science, sociology and anthropology Professor Bart Simon lists it among practices that are falsely perceived or presented to be science, "categories ... such as ... pseudoscience, amateur science, deviant or fraudulent science, bad science, junk science, pathological science, cargo cult science, and voodoo science."[6] Examples of pathological science include the Martian canals, N-rays, polywater, and cold fusion. The theories and conclusions behind all of these examples are currently rejected or disregarded by the majority of scientists.