page_title: Pathological science
section_title: Langmuir's examples
hierarchical_section_title: Pathological science / Langmuir's examples
caption_attribution_description: English: "Registration by Photography of the Action Produced by N Rays on a Small Electric Spark"
context_page_description: Pathological science is an area of research where "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions." The term was first used by Irving Langmuir, Nobel Prize–winning chemist, during a 1953 colloquium at the Knolls Research Laboratory. 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."
  Bart Simon lists it among practices pretending to be science: "categories ... such as ... pseudoscience, amateur science, deviant or fraudulent science, bad science, junk science, and popular science ... pathological science, cargo-cult science, and voodoo science." Examples of pathological science include 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.
caption: Fig. 6,7 from Prosper-René Blondlot: "Registration by Photography of the Action Produced by N Rays on a Small Electric Spark". Nancy, 1904.
exif: {}