Last week I wrote of junk science that was based on experiment and purported observations. This includes everything from cold fusion to alien abduction to remote viewing to telepathy. However, there is an equally large body of junk science based on pure theory.

History is packed with examples. Sometimes they were the accepted wisdom of the times: the earth is flat; the earth is a sphere but the sun goes around it; comets herald disaster; rotten meat spontaneously generates maggots; women have fewer ribs than men; malaria is caused by bad air (the word means just that); bleeding is a sound medical treatment.

These theories did not survive, not because they were ridiculous, although today we may think so. They faded and died because experimental evidence proved they were wrong.

An ugly experiment can destroy a beautiful theory, but another major obstacle faces anyone promoting a junk science idea. Normal science, conventional science, is a vast and highly interconnected body of knowledge. In throwing away a piece of it, you will often be forced to throw away a thousand other aspects, all supported by strong experimental evidence.

I will limit myself to two very different examples. The first one remains highly controversial. Many people, following Biblical authority, reject the idea of evolution. Using the genealogy of the Bible, they prefer to believe that the world, and indeed the whole universe, is only about six thousand years old. But what can you do about the evidence provided by geology, with rocks apparently many millions of years old, through which are scattered the fossil remains of extinct animals and plants?

Well, you can explain the mystery if you assume that the world was indeed created a few thousand years ago, but with an intact fossil record already in place in the geological strata. Before you dismiss this as too absurd for words, let me point out that just such a theory was offered in the 1850's by the naturalist, Philip Gosse. He wrote a book, "Omphalos," that sets out his ideas. His son, Edmund Gosse, wrote in a beautiful book, "Father and Son," a passage that is at the same time comic and sad: "Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipations of success... My father lived in a fever of suspense, waiting for the tremendous issue... But, alas! atheists and Christians alike looked at it, and laughed, and threw it away."

Then, as now, rational persons would not accept the idea that God hid fossils in the rocks to test the faith of geologists. However, the person who does not accept evolution and who believes in a universe only a few thousand years old finds himself at odds with far more than just geology. He must reject geomorphology and continental drift, evidence of the periodic switching of north and south magnetic poles, everything in biology from the genetic code to elaborate host/parasite relationships, and everything in physics that underpins the dating of substances via radioactive decay. This is the short list. Almost all of modern science must be thrown out in order to admit an Earth only a few thousand years old and to reject evolution.

It is not surprising that the ideas of evolution and natural selection lead to junk science theories and cause such an outcry. In addition to running contrary to Biblical authority, they raise the dreadful prospect that Man and Monkey might not be so far apart after all. In a famous debate, Thomas Huxley told Bishop Samuel Wilberforce that he would rather be descended from an ape than from a man who lectured on scientific subjects about which he knew nothing. But many people sided with Bishop Wilberforce, and saw Charles Darwin as the Anti-Christ.

Far more difficult to explain is the rejection by many people of another great thought-revolution of the past couple of centuries: the theory of relativity.

The objections here are not religious. They are based on the argument that relativity runs counter to "common sense." Relativity states that time and distance are not absolute but relative quantities, depending on the observer. Of course, "common sense" was derived at speeds very small compared with the speed of light. The effects of relativity are negligible unless objects are moving at a substantial fraction of light speed. Arguments that relativity must be wrong because we don't notice it in everyday life are rather like arguments offered by a snail, that wind resistance due to movement cannot possibly occur because the snail itself never experiences any such thing.

I had personal experience with the rejection of relativity. A friend of mine produced his own version of the laws of motion and theory of gravity. He asked me to read his work. I should have known better, but I agreed to do it. He had labored over his theory for years, and written it out by hand on many hundreds of sheets of yellow legal-size paper.

What I found, after I had finished reading and cursing, was perhaps predictable. In order to establish his ideas, Dave had been obliged to throw overboard not just relativity, but almost every established physical principle involving space, time, and motion. I would say, for example, "But if this is true, then angular momentum isn't conserved." And he would reply, "That's right. I don't accept the conservation of angular momentum. Instead, I use..." He had found that, just as in the case of evolution, science forms an interlocking structure and you can't throw one piece away without profoundly changing many others.

Of course, one could make the argument that Einstein did just that. He established a whole new philosophical framework for physics. But Einstein's work would not have lasted had it predicted results contrary to observations. Reject Einstein without offering some other theory capable of experimental verification, and you are denying reality. Nuclear reactors depend on relativity; so do cyclotrons and other high-energy particle accelerators, which would not work if relativity were wrong.

The same is true, unfortunately, of nuclear weapons. And here, finally, I have a chance to say a word or two in favor of junk science. If you do accept one of the junk science theories I have described in the past couple of weeks, and build a device based on it, the world will be in no danger of destruction. There isn't a chance in a million that the machine will work.

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