[A number of 'misspeaks' etc. have been corrected in the following transcript]

What I’m going to talk about today is what I see as a serious problem with the scientific process. Science is normally considered to be the most reliable indicator of truth, and yet on occasion the beliefs generally held by scientists are the opposite of the truth. I’m not talking here about simple ignorance, that’s cases where the relevant facts haven’t been discovered yet, but cases such as telepathy and ‘cold fusion’ where the facts are available but the scientific community simply refuses to accept them as true.

In such cases it is the very processes of science that are the cause of the problem, in particular the various means whereby discoveries are communicated. Communication is the basis of consensus, and while this consensus generally settles upon the truth, the opposite is sometimes the case. Now what do I mean by the truth? Well, I’ll define it as what would be the outcome of a rational analysis of all the facts. So, this might go wrong in two ways, either a subject is not being discussed, or dealt with, rationally, or the consensus is based on a partial view of the evidence.

Two examples from the past of this ‘pathological disbelief’ (I’ve given a lecture on that subject, which you can download from http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/JosephsonBpathologic.pdf) -- two examples are continental drift and Semmelweis’ observation that if doctors washed their hands before examining patients the incidence of childbed fever could be drastically reduced. In the latter case, doctors felt it beneath their dignity to have to wash their hands. A leading obstetrician at the time stated “doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are clean”, so they did not need washing. As a result these antiseptic procedures were not generally taken up, and many patients died unnecessarily.

What is pathological here is principally the fact that while it would not have been very difficult to check Semmelweis’ claim people did not do this. They didn’t do it because they didn’t believe the claim. They did not believe the claim as they didn’t have an appropriate model (this was before the time of Pasteur and his germ theory). This tendency to ignore evidence because one cannot think of a mechanism has its modern echo in the words of Steven Weinberg, who said he would not take the time to examine the evidence for telepathy because he could not imagine a mechanism for it. The case of continental drift is similar. Wegener and others had found very clear evidence that the continents had once been joined, but this was rejected by geologists because no physical mechanism allowing for the movement was known. There is also a psychological aspect -- Wegener was not a geologist and so had low esteem in the eyes of geologists. But in other cases, such as superconductivity, absence of mechanism did not lead to rejection of the phenomenon (it took 40 years before it was understood how superconductivity comes about). In that case there does not seem to have been strong resistance against the discovery, perhaps because verification is straightforward for any laboratory with access to liquid helium. And the phenomenon itself is unambiguous.

Now if we think about this, we see that the following are factors favouring the acceptance of a new claim: first of all if it is easily reproduced and there is an unambiguous outcome it is more likely to get accepted. It helps also to be consistent with and ideally explicable on the basis of current theory. And the reputation of the investigator counts as well.

So let’s look at the cases I’ve discussed so far. In the case of antiseptic treatment and childbed fever, we have a very big and unambiguous effect -- there’s an enormous reduction in mortality if doctors wash their hands. On the other hand if you wanted to confirm this you’d have to put in a certain amount of effort. And again there was no applicable theory -- germ theory wasn’t around at the time. And the investigator didn’t have a particularly high reputation. Again, with continental drift, a certain amount of effort was needed to evaluate the evidence; again no applicable theory and the investigator did not have a particularly high reputation.

Now if we turn to telepathy, the effects can be fairly big (33% versus 25% chance outcome, for one particular kind of experiment). But individual cases can explained away as chance. And you need carefully designed experiments, with many runs, and possibly enhanced by meta-analysis, to get definite outcomes, and again in this case there’s no theoretical explanation -- quantum mechanics is suggestive because it has non-locality, but there’s no specific model for telepathy.

Now telepathy is a little unusual compared with the other things I’ve been talking about in that in fact a sizeable proportion even of scientists believe it is a real effect. But they have to avoid making this view known, as it might have detrimental effects on their reputations if people knew somebody believed telepathy was real. In this context, a couple of years ago I was invited to a conference (on Bohmian mechanics), and things had progressed as far as my being asked how long I wanted to talk for, then suddenly I got a letter ‘disinviting’ me on the basis of my interest in parapsychology. It was asserted later by one of the organisers, rather implausibly, that my presence at the meeting might adversely influence the prospects of any student there. Here’s the letter I received:

“It has come to my attention that one of your principal research interests is the paranormal. I have told (and he named his co-organiser here) that, in my view, it would not be appropriate for someone with such research interests to attend a scientific conference. On this basis, I have urged him to agree to withdrawing the invitation, much to his personal regret. We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused, and wish you a pleasant summer.”

Well, that demonstrates some of the sociology involved, which I shall return to later.

Now what I want to do next is the controversial subject of of cold fusion. It’s now 23 years since the dramatic announcement in 1989 by Pons and Fleischmann that they’d been able to achieve fusion at essentially room temperature using electrolysis. I should say that the fusion we’re talking about is two nuclei fusing together into one, as is the source of power for the sun and the hydrogen bomb. This normally requires rather extreme conditions because of the Coulomb barrier that has to be overcome, but Fleischmann had the idea that you could just electrolyse heavy water and the nuclei being pumped in at the surface of the metal (palladium) would concentrate so much or press together so much that you’d get fusion, and this did in fact seem to work. So, they announced their results, and there was considerable excitement as this might provide a means of fusion energy on a much more practical scale than the high temperature fusion processes, on which enormous amounts of money are being spent. But then it all went wrong -- people announced that they couldn’t replicate it, and so the general belief then was that there was something wrong with the original experiment and there was no fusion process at all. Now it was some years later that I started to realise that that was not the actual situation. It happened because somebody gave me a video to look at [Fire from Water], which described a number of people doing what seemed to be perfectly normal experiments and getting positive results -- in some cases the observed heat being produced in excess of what was being fed into the system, and some people observed nuclear products. So that seemed to be a bit strange.

Well, the best thing to do to investigate a claim is to go along to a lab where the research is being done, and I took the opportunity while I was at a conference in Boston to visit a lab where this work was being done, and this all seemed pretty convincing -- the experimenter concerned was getting more than 30% more heat out of his device than out of a similar resistor and the temperature rise was significant -- I think more than 5 degrees centigrade, so there didn’t seem to be much one could complain about in this experiment. And over the years I’ve visited a few labs where the work was being done. So it seemed that something rather peculiar was indeed happening.

If a lot of people are doing these experiments and they work, how is that the general belief is that this is a kind of delusion? Well, roughly speaking what happened is that some people tried the experiment and failed, while others tried the experiments and were successful. But the people who were unsuccessful considered that this showed there wasn’t a real phenomenon at all, and they spoke rather loudly about it. In the next slide you can see a confrontation between Nathan Lewis and Fleischmann at an American Physical Society meeting -- he is being attacked, and is being described as having done a poor experiment or possibly fraud, and this had a great deal of influence on public opinion. What happened was that editors assumed that this wasn’t a real effect and they wouldn’t take any papers on the subject, and so the outcome was that they were only published in somewhat obscure journals and so very few people knew that people were getting successful results. An example of something that influenced the thinking of the physics community is this book by nuclear physicist John Huizenga with the title ‘cold fusion, the scientific fiasco of the century'.

The situation seems, however, to be gradually changing, it’s something happening behind the scenes -- there are people who know that cold fusion is a real phenomenon and they’re busy getting on with things. One thing that’s happened recently is the death of Martin Fleischmann, and I took advantage of this, had the opportunity to get some things published. One was this obituary that I sent to the Guardian newspaper. The obituaries editor was initially slightly doubtful as what I sent in was not quite obituary material, and he said well, we’re going to be publishing something so why don't you publish a response. Then, I think he started thinking about it and I said to him do you really want to publish an obituary which is saying things that which are untrue like (as many other obituaries said) 'there were great hopes for cold fusion but it was discovered that it was not a real phenomenon'. Well, for whatever reason he changed his mind and said ‘do send us something, here is what our format is', so I followed the format and together we worked on the details and eventually this was published in the newspaper. Well, then another opportunity came along -- the Journal Nature published an obituary by Philip Ball which said the usual things but said them a little more strongly as he presumably thought he could do, now that Fleischmann was not alive. He talked about ‘pathological science’; he talked about people being unable to accept that they were wrong, so I thought ‘here’s my chance': I sent in a letter to Nature Correspondence and this they accepted and published, in the issue which -- the print issue came out today, the day in which I am recording this. So hopefully, these publications will bring to light what had previously been hidden.

So what we have here is really an extraordinary situation -- some phenomenon which seems to be real; the scientific community however thinks it is not real, it is some kind of delusion, and the facts just can’t get out. There are a couple of occasions when they might have got out; in 2004 the US Department of Energy had an investigation, and the investigation was fairly favourable towards the subject -- quite a number of the panel agreed that there seemed to be a real effect as far as excess heat was concerned anyway; perhaps the report was a little lukewarm and anyway little notice was taken of it. Then again, a couple of years ago there was a programme on CBS TV where Robert Duncan, Vice-Chancellor of Research at the University of Missouri, he was brought in as an expert to evaluate the subject. To his surprise he found there seemed to be good evidence for there being a real effect. He stated on the programme how his views had changed once he had come to look at it. Again, it had no effect on the scientific community. So something is seriously wrong -- science is not always a self-correcting process.

To continue my review, I’d like to talk about two situations where we seem to have something similar. The first of these is another controversial subject, the memory of water, which owes its origins to the experiments of Jacques Benvensite, an immunologist, later followed by people like Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier, also Gerald Pollack of the University of Washington has done something similar about the properties of water, the fourth state of water he calls it. Benveniste was using a technique which he used in his own immunology experiments, a way of detecting biological activity using a process he calls basophil degranulation. Someone in his laboratory was interested in homeopathy and said why don’t you use this process to test homeopathic claims? So you take a biologically active material such as an anticoagulant, dilute it very highly in the manner used in homeopathic medicine and see if the diluted solution has biological activity. Benveniste was quite sceptical but he found it seemed to work and got this result published in Nature, but with certain provisos. The editor of Nature insisted that after publication they should carry out their own tests to see if they agreed. This is itself a funny thing to do because what’s normally done if there is some doubt about a paper is that you do your investigations *before* publication as you don’t want a wrong result to appear in the literature. It is said that Maddox wanted do discredit homeopathy and it wouldn’t help discrediting it if the paper never saw the light of day, whereas if you could publish the paper that would provide good publicity.

Incidentally, as part of the refereeing process they insisted that other laboratories try the experiment, and other laboratories found they also got the result that highly diluted solutions were active. So it was a paper involving many laboratories. So Nature had their investigation, by a rather curious crew, magician James Randi, a science writer and so on, people who didn’t have any qualifications really to do the experiment went in and they didn’t get the experiment to work. They didn’t realise that it’s difficult quite often to get biological experiments to work -- things can readily interfere with them (they did actually get the experiment to work a bit, said we’ll do a control, and with the control it doesn’t work, but of course correlation doesn’t prove causality. But anyway there was enough for Maddox to write an article saying that high dilution was a delusion -- since it was an editorial article it didn’t have to be refereed, and a referee might have been pretty critical of it. Anyway, it got in and then it became once again the accepted fact that there was no memory of water effect.

I’m not too clear about the validity of the evidence, my real interest being in how these controversial subjects get discredited. What interests me is the arguments used to show that a memory of water is not possible, in other words that you cannot do something to water to produce a change that lasts for a long time. One these fallacious arguments is one which is quoted as ‘no molecules, no effect’. The idea behind this is that you’ve diluted water so highly that not a single molecule of whatever produced the activity in the first place is left. That is a fallacious argument because it is known that water forms into clusters and these clusters can play the role of molecules, so in other words your biologically active material may cause water molecules to cluster in particular ways, and these clusters may be what’s producing the effect.

If you point this out to people they say ‘things happen very quickly in water. you can measure the rate at which bonds form and dissolve, and that’s very quick, so you can’t get long term effects. That’s another of these fallacious arguments. It fails to take into account the fact that you may have different time scales for different phenomena; in particular the time scale for things at a molecular scale may not be the same as the time scale for bulk properties. This difference in time scale is clearly illustrated by the case of ferromagnetism, where we find that spin relaxation is quite fast -- this is a process occurring at the atomic scale, whereas of course magnetism, the macroscopic effect, can persist for a very long time, years at least.

So these are two arguments that just don’t hold up under examination. What happens in these controversial areas is that any argument will do to discredit something; you don’t look too closely at your own arguments to see if they hold up.

Now I’ll move on to a further controversial area, this is the connection between science and religion, or science and spirituality however you want to call it. This is a matter of the ethics of science, what you have to believe to belong to the club as it were. I can’t think of this as being better stated than in an article by Sean Carroll in Nature on the Templeton Prize. What Carroll says is ‘the act of doing science means that you accept a purely material explanation of the universe -- that no spiritual dimension is required'. This is to me an extraordinary statement -- in science you can’t rule anything out, and as science advances it has to incorporate new phenomena, as suggested by the evidence. For example, dark matter and dark energy. Some phenomenon was found, the acceleration of the retreat of the galaxies, and the best explanation available was something called dark energy which is still rather mysterious.

So, why on earth shouldn’t it happen that some phenomena, which people associate with spirituality, should be best explained in terms of a ‘spiritual dimension’? Of course you can’t just say ‘this is a spiritual dimension’, if you want to be scientific you have to start formulating things more precisely; you might put together a description of what spirituality is that would involve testable hypotheses, like how certain experiences influence people, so it is perfectly conceivable in my opinion that future science might incorporate spiritual aspects as it has incorporated quantum aspects, dark energy and so on.

I should perhaps mention something we’re working on; it’s connected with the role of the observer in quantum mechanics. Some formulations of quantum mechanics involve putting in observation explicitly. We could do with a better explanation of the observer, as it is difficult to put the observer into quantum mechanics. So what various people are trying to do is to put the observer in, and when we do that we should get some extension of quantum mechanics and this might include the spiritual dimension if we get a sufficiently complete theory.

So, to sum up, I’ve talked about a whole set of phenomena or fields of research where consensus science doesn’t accept them. Certain ideas, it seems, have to be protected: you must not believe things like telepathy or you are regarded as a bad scientist, you must not believe water can have a memory. This is not only bad for science as it limits the speed with which science can advance, but it may also be bad for science because scientific developments may lead to things which are good for society, and if we blot out certain phenomena, don’t work on them, then this means these developments will no longer take place. So this pathology is something unfortunate and I think the scientific community must address this and put it house in order. Thank you very much.