I’m grateful for your work and the availability of your site. Though I think tha…

I’m grateful for your work and the availability of your site. Though I think that your ignorant condemnation of the work of other professionals about whose work you know absolutely nothing is contemptuous. Once again the arrogance of the established order and refusal to open-minded investigation. I would not have this opinion if you had used the careful, open-minded, systematic investigation that you espouse before you let your ego expose your ignorance. Carolyne Myss, with a verifiable accuracy rate of 93% percent, should not be called a quack. I wonder if, in your answers on this site, you could attain that rate of accuracy. I sincerely doubt it. In fact, with your over-blown ego, you could really benefit from her work. So stick to the information about lightning and CDs and stay away from that which you obviously are quite ignorant! — Unsigned

This comment, which responds to a previous posting on this site, points out one of the most important differences between physical science and pseudo-science: the fact that pseudo-science isn’t troubled by its lack of self-consistency.

Physical science, particularly physics itself, is completely self-consistent. By that I mean that the same set of physical rules applies to every possible situation in the universe and that this set of rules never leads to paradoxical results. Despite its complicated behavior, the universe is orderly and predictable. It’s precisely this order and predictability that is the basis for the whole field of physics.

In contrast, pseudo-science is eclectic—it draws from physics and magic as it sees fit. It uses the laws of physics when it finds those laws useful and it ignores the laws of physics when they conflict with its interests. But the laws of physics only make sense if they apply universally—if there were even one situation in which a law of physics didn’t apply, physics would lose its self-consistency and predictive power. That’s just what happens with pseudo-science when it begins to ignore the laws of physics on occasion. Moreover, the new rules that pseudo-science introduces to replace the ones it ignores make the trouble even worse. Overall, pseudo-science is inconsistent and can’t be counted on to predict anything.

Pseudo-science might argue that the laws of physics are correct as far as they go, but that they’re incomplete. No doubt the laws of physics are incomplete; physicists have frequently discovered improvements to the laws of physics that have allowed them to make even more accurate predictions of the universe’s behavior. But in the years since the discoveries of relativity and quantum physics, the pace of such discoveries has slowed and what remains to be understood is at a very deep and subtle level. It’s extraordinarily unlikely that the laws of physics as they’re currently understood are wrong at a level that would allow a person to bend a spoon with their thoughts alone or predict the order of a deck of cards without assistance. Just because I haven’t dropped a particular book doesn’t prevent me from predicting that it will fall when I let go of it. I understand the laws that govern its motion and I know that having it fly upward would violate those laws. Similarly, I don’t have to watch someone try to bend a spoon with their thoughts to know that it can’t be done legitimately. Again, I understand the laws that govern the spoon’s condition and I know that having it bend without an identifiable force acting on it would violate those laws. I also don’t have to watch someone try to predict cards to know that it, too, can’t be done legitimately. Without a clear physical mechanism for transporting information from the cards to the person, a mechanism that must involve forces or exchanges of particles, there is no way for the person to predict the cards.

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