A friend of mine who I’ll refer to as Bob McBob, once told me about an experiment to measure the ozone layer that he was involved in.

Bob was working for a major chemical analytical instruments manufacturer when he came up with a design for an instrument which measures ozone concentration.

A group of scientists in some country with a European time zone bought one of his instruments and secured funding to do a study of the ozone layer. They received funding and flew Bob’s beautiful instrument in a Big bona fide Boeing (I wish it had been a biplane) through some ozone up high in the atmosphere and recorded the measurements made using Bob’s beautiful machine. They then wrote up their results and published them in a major scientific journal. When the article appeared, the head of the experimental team called up Bob to tell him how happy they were with his beautiful instrument and how wonderfully the whole story turned out.

Then Bob asked him, “So, tell me, how did you calibrate it?”

The man replied, “What do you mean, doesn’t your machine work?”

Whereupon Bob replied, “Oh, yes. Nevermind. Please tell me how well it flew in the airplane. What was the weather like up there? Gee, I’m so happy you guys did such a wonderful job. Blah, Blah, Blah.”

Moral of the story:

Sometimes Famous Scientists published in Famous Scientific Journals perform experimental science that is useless.

Every, and I mean every chemical analytical instrument requires calibration. These guys didn’t calibrate their instrument. They each got paid enormous amounts of money, and spent even more money, and it was worse than a waste of time, because it was published as reliable data when instead it should have been discarded as useless.

Linus Pauling created a body of work that stands to this day as outstanding and extremely reliable. Other scientists have not been as careful in their techniques.

What can the public do?

The public can just sit back and be fooled by Famous Scientists published in Famous Scientific Journals.

The public can sit back and pay the taxes that pay for research on Cold Fusion.

This is another topic that has presented no evidence for ever achieving success. And the ideas associated with it are just like the ideas that people have had for eons about creating a perpetual motion machine—they are impossible.

Oh, wait, I think there is another alternative… yes, perhaps people can learn to evaluate experimental evidence. Nah, that’s too difficult. Isn’t it?