Wed Jun 04, 2008 8:38 pm by The Chief
I must come out of the corner on the side of science here. I'm really sorry if this offends you. Consider them religious if you must, but the works of Layfette Ronald Hubbard are not scientific. They are in terms of the scientific community pillars of pseudoscience. Ignoring that Mr Hubbard was a horrible horrible man, I'll explain what I mean.
Pseudoscience is the technique of taking common phenomena and imparting extravagant and unrealistic explanations to it with little or no rhyme or reason to those explanations. Say for example you see a plane flying. The actual explanation is due to the interaction of objects with certain angled surfaces moving at speed through air generating a force underneath the wing. I'll demonstrate this with a very simplified example involving one hypothesis.
Imagine though if someone said "it's a property of the metal. The metal when treated with this liquid becomes lighter than air at high speed."
You could then apply that to all metals. So you could have flying cars or wheelbarrows or anything. Now imagine if you tried to do that to a car and it didn't happen. What do you blame? A pseudoscience will come up for all kinds of explanations then. "You didn't do it right." "Ah, but recent research has shown that only this special brand of liquid will do it (availible from the Aerial Empowerment Organisation for a mere $59,999!!!)." If it then by some reason does work (say someone equips the car with jets on gimbals that can be directed at the ground) then that is down to the Tech. It is a no lose situation. A sufficiently complex set of rules write off every failure of the tech as some fault of the operator, and the rare successes show it work, despite other factors being involved in that success.
In this case not the fact that the car has bloody jets on it and can generate some lift thanks to massive quantities of air being forced against the ground. It's the liquid sprinked on the bonnet. The fact that the car can hover is questioned, since it clearly isn't moving at high speed. So from there, a theory that the liquid is somehow able to function given a constant current of air passing it is ratified. HAIL THIS NEW DISCOVERY! We've been doing it wrong for years, and thus do we continue the cycle.
Yet the more time is wasted on this mystical flying liquid, the more complex the rules become. You have to set fire to it as you apply it from only an angle of 32.53 degrees. Anything else will cause a flunk (meaning a failure to fly). Then they find out you need an exact temperature of 853.25 degrees celsius with a humidity of 19.4%. Fortunately the local AEO has such properties availible (the full Aerial Application Rundown availible for a cheap $49,995!). So then you do it, but then they decide that only certain types of people can apply this liquid because it reacts with your DNA and your DNA causes it to fail sometimes. Therefore there's a course which lets you get treated but it's HARD and it sends you through a Wall of Fire as your entire genetic structure changes to suit your flying car. You suffer no visible changes but it's $131,000. By transferring the blame to you, rather than the techniques they tell you work, you blame yourself. It's your fault the car can't fly.
Eventually the realisation that you've been conned hits you. You break off from the Aerial Empowerment Org and you're several hundred thousand dollars out of pocket.
Pseudoscience is the art of taking a hypothesis, never proving it, and expanding upon it until it reaches the point of critical mass where you can explain every single possible failure of the original theory through further theories. Like our flying car, there are some situations where the Hubbard Dianetics will function. However it has little to do with the Tech, or magic liquid, and more to do with the fact that circumstances were right.
Pseudoscience requires that someone not question the original premise. If someone said to me "treat your car with this and it'll fly" I'd ask them to explain how. If they just mumbled "it does" and I did so and it didn't, I would be very unlikely to accept any of their explanations why it did not. What's more if the premise defied what I already knew as to be physically true (that uplift is a simple derivation from newton's laws of motion) and did not function, I would logically conclude their idea is wrong.
