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| Irving Langmuir |
In 1953, Irving Langmuir (Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry in 1932) gave a lecture on pathological science, a name he applied to the results of the investigations of perfectly honest scientists, enthusiastic about their work... but who are completely deluded. This is Lagmuir’s definition of pathological science, which Milton Rothman in 1990 called wishful science and John Horgan in 1996 called ironic science:
These are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where
people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human
beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective
effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions.
Langmuir signalled five cases of pathological science:
