Crackpot science, sometimes called pseudoscience or "Cargo Cult" science, has a long and colorful history, and there's a lot of it out there. I'm not even going to get started on the tachyon crystals, modern day Mesmerizers, homeopathic healers, e-meter moguls, and the like. And I'm not going to step in and get my shoes dirty by wading around in the hoax of evangelical scientism -- the belief that doing good science is equivalent to divining The Truth. I'll just highlight a few of the more or less notorious products of nuts in white lab coats here.
A perpetual favorite invention of the crack scientist is the Perpetual Motion Machine. The search for a free lunch energy-wise led more recently to Pons and Fleischmann announcing (prematurely) the discovery of cheap and easy cold fusion.
A special digression is in order here for crackpot city planning. I'm thinking here of the brilliant hack of the early 1800s perpetrated by a fellow named Lozier, who managed to convince a sizable crowd of New Yorkers that Manhattan was in imminent danger of tipping over under the weight of sprawling construction. After a few days, Lozier came up with the plan of cutting the island loose, towing it out into the Atlantic, turning it around and reattaching it to the mainland. He enlisted (I'm not kidding, folks) hundreds of people in this wacky scheme.
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A foot-powered breast enlarger from the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices |
I deal with the various pseudoscientific defenses of religious mythology on my Great God Hoax page.
On the medical front, snake-oil salesmen have been a colorful part of the American landscape since the beginning. Check out the weight-reduction eyeglasses and the foot-pumped breast enlarger at The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. Or read about the colorful Quacks of Old London.
Speaking of questionable devices, there are law enforcement agencies in the U.S.A. who spent $8,000 for a plastic box with an antenna that was advertised as having frankly miraculous abilities of crime detection. I wonder how many search warrants were issued based on the findings of the Quadro QRS 250G.
A nice parody of pseudoscientific doomsaying is the ongoing tongue-in-cheek campaign to ban dihydrogen monoxide. Perhaps tongue-in-cheek, perhaps not, is the lonely and difficult road tread by Flat Earth types.
Also worth mentioning here is Alan Sokal's Social Text hoax, where the physics professor wrote a paper on how modern physics and postmodern philosophy now agree that nothing exists. Perhaps he was right about that, but he didn't actually believe any of it, he just was trying to throw together a bunch of pomo gibberish with lots of footnotes to see if they'd publish it.
You may also find material of interest on our Cryptozoology, Archaeological Forgery and Scams & Frauds pages.