Screwball Science

Most Americans had never heard of John Hagelin until he took on Pat Buchanan for the leadership of the Reform Party--and for the $12.6 million in federal matching funds that went with it. The quantum physicist with a perpetual cherubic smile was a striking contrast to the combative Buchanan. In fact, John Hagelin is a striking contrast to most people.

In 1999, Hagelin was in Washington trying to interest the State Department in his plan to end the violence in Kosovo. An elite corps trained in transcendental meditation would meditate in unison, creating a "coherent quantum-mechanical consciousness field" that would radiate tranquility. It was, he explained to reporters at the National Press Club, "a scientifically proven solution."

Hagelin certainly has the credentials to talk about science: a degree in physics summa cum laude from Dartmouth, a Ph.D. from Harvard and a postdoctoral stint at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. And four years ago he managed to get on the presidential ballot in more than 40 states as the candidate of the Natural Law Party.

His current academic gig is chairman of the physics department of the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. Some of his opinions are not exactly mainstream science. That doesn't make them wrong. It's the facts, to say nothing of common sense, that make his claims preposterous.

But Hagelin sounds scientific, and these days that's often enough to be taken seriously. Indeed, bogus science has become a ubiquitous part of our culture, turning up to support patently unbelievable boasts in everything from health food to national defense. When so much that passes for journalism is just cheap entertainment with a pretense of seriousness, the wackiest claims can pass as news. Most government agencies are unable or unwilling to protect or inform the public about phony "scientifically based" claims--especially when they are on the web, which carries its own ironic and spurious aura of authenticity.

Also, real science is on a roll: Hunger has been reduced to a political problem and our life expectancy has dramatically increased. You have OnStar in your car and genetically modified tomatoes in your salad, and your eyeballs have just been reshaped with a laser. OK, so we still don't have a good light beer, but this is only the beginning. The mapping of the human genome, nanoscale technology and climate science hold the promise of even greater improvements in our lives. The public has come to expect miracles from science--and that's the problem. The more science succeeds, the more opportunities there are for crooks and wackos claiming to be scientists--and for John Hagelin to hold forth in front of reporters and policymakers in Washington, as he has over the years.

Hagelin's proof that meditation could soothe the Balkans during the 1999 war (continued on page 223) Science (continued from page 104) was, he maintained, the success of his 1993 National Demonstration Project to Reduce Violent Crime in Washington, D.C. Funded by the Maharishi (for $6 million), the project brought thousands of transcendental meditators from all over the world to Washington that steamy summer. Hagelin predicted their efforts would reduce violent crime in the city by 20 percent. His plan, he said, was grounded in superstring theory, a highly speculative notion that seeks to unify all the forces of nature. One of those forces, according to Hagelin, is a sort of universal consciousness that can be tapped into by transcendental meditation.

It was right out of an old mad-scientist movie--an experiment that went horribly wrong. In a single week during the summer of 1993, while the transcendental-meditation devotees gathered around the city and meditated against violence, 24 people were killed and another 53 were wounded by gunfire or stabbings. Also during this time, six children were shot at a public swimming pool in a single afternoon. Participants in the project, serenely unaware of the bloodier-than-usual carnage around them, continued to meditate, peacefully repeating their mantras.

In evaluating the project, Hagelin cautioned that many factors, such as the unusually hot weather, would have to be taken into account. He promised a full analysis according to strict scientific standards. A year later he was back with "a rigorous time-series analysis" of the TM project that included not only the weather but fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field. Despite the increased rate of crime, the mantra chanting had worked, Hagelin proudly announced. Violent crime, he said, had been reduced by 18 percent. Compared with what? asked reporters. Compared with what it would have been had the TM people not been meditating, Hagelin patiently explained.

Hagelin was back in 1999, confident the violence in Kosovo could be stopped using the same principles. This time he proposed to use a crack corps of 7000 "yogic fliers." Yogic fliers are the most highly trained followers of the Maharishi, having developed, they say, the ability to levitate. He brought a dozen fliers, lean and fit young men, to the National Press Club on April 9. They sat down, cross-legged, eyes closed, on mattresses. Reporters and other witnesses to the demonstration obediently remained silent as the fliers meditated.

After about five minutes, one of them abruptly "levitated." He just sort of popped up a few inches in the air and then thumped back onto the mattress. Then another popped up--then they were all levitating. Thump, thump, thump. It looked like corn popping. You could hear them panting after a few hops as they paused to recover.

And no wonder. Their achievement was not so much transcendental as it was athletic. By clenching and flexing various muscles, especially in their buttocks, the young athletes had been able to propel themselves into the air in a concentrated, mighty levitation. It was like watching a shot-putter in action, except that the fliers gave no sign of their mighty exertion. Meanwhile, it seemed to me the law of gravity was working the way it always does.

Hagelin seemed genuinely perplexed when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ignored his offer to send his fliers to Kosovo.

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I have no quarrel with transcendental meditation. People are free to practice whatever they like and a little meditation can't hurt. What I object to is the implication that TM is somehow validated by modern physics. All the talk about "quantum-mechanical consciousness fields" and "time-series analysis" and "superstring theory" is simply meant to give the appearance of science. Which is not to say Hagelin and his followers are insincere in their beliefs. In fact, they may believe so fervently that they feel it would be misleading to report experiment results that do not reveal the truth they know in their hearts.

Most phony scientific claims, however, have less to do with misguided beliefs than with simple greed--and the gullibility of people who want to believe. You can get ripped off by false scientific claims half a dozen times before you finish breakfast--especially if you believe what they say about magnets. You might, for example, be willing to pay $125 for a pair of Florsheim MagneForce shoes with flexible magnetic insoles to reconnect you with mother earth. Florsheim has made the outlandish claim that the shoes will increase circulation and boost energy. Keep shopping and you'll find magnetic lipstick, magnetic fragrances and even magnetic underwear. The underwear's magnetic field "penetrates the prostate, colon, ovaries, uterus and reproductive organs." For breakfast, be sure to take a herbal supplement with your organic orange juice, and read the amazing "scientific" claims about the stuff. Scan the morning paper to see if that company in New Jersey that says it has found a way to extract energy from ordinary water has come out with its initial public offering. Read the front-page story about the $60 billion missile defense program, paid for with your taxes, that can't tell a warhead from a toy balloon.

And then, of course, there is "oxygenated" water.

In the finals for the 1999 Stanley Cup, the Dallas Stars were hoping to get an edge. Players guzzled "oxygenated water" supplied by a company in Toronto called Oxyl' Eau. According to the company, oxygen dissolved in the water would enter the players' bloodstreams, boosting performance by reducing the lactic acid that builds up in muscles during intense exercise.

The oxygenated water was said to be derived from a new, patent-pending electronic process that increases dissolved oxygen fourfold compared with ordinary water. That would be miraculous. The solubility of oxygen in water can be increased somewhat by sealing the container under pressure, but a fourfold increase would be a stretch, rather like trying to squeeze 400 people into a telephone booth.

For purposes of discussion, however, let us grant Oxyl'Eau this miracle. There is another problem. Oxygen is not absorbed into the bloodstream from the gastrointestinal tract. That's what lungs are for. Nevertheless, let us grant Oxyl'Eau a second miracle and suppose that not only is there four times as much oxygen dissolved in the water as the laws of nature permit, but the oxygen finds its way directly into the bloodstream. How much oxygen are we talking about?

We need to know just two numbers: the solubility of oxygen in water and the oxygen requirements of the players. Well, one liter of tap water contains about eight milligrams of dissolved oxygen. Four times that, which is what the company claims, would be 32 milligrams. A trained athlete playing hard will use something like 130 milligrams of oxygen every second. To get only a one percent boost, therefore, players would have to chug one liter of oxygenated water every 25 seconds. The technical term for that is drowning. Still, several companies keep selling "oxygenated water."

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In 1998, there was a full-page ad in USA Today for Vitamin O, marketed by Rose Creek Health Products. According to the ad, Vitamin O had been developed for use in the space program to ensure that astronauts received enough oxygen. This, it turned out, was news to a NASA spokesperson, who denied any knowledge of the substance.

The ad warned that as a result of deforestation and pollution, oxygen levels in large cities were at dangerously low levels. City air is crummy, but it's not short on oxygen. Taken orally as a supplement, the ad promised, a mere 15 to 20 drops of Vitamin O twice a day would give you increased energy, improved memory, greater resistance to colds and flu, and a host of other benefits. "Vitamin O," the ad said, "contains stabilized oxygen molecules in a liquid solution of sodium chloride and distilled water." That's just ordinary saltwater--and they were selling it for $10 an ounce.

A lot of people, by some estimates 60,000, bought the stuff. Many of them reported they felt better, though not perhaps as robust as the marketers of the saltwater did when they pocketed nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

When ingenuity and gullibility meet, almost anything "scientific" can happen. Some other recent examples include:

• A few years ago, the Quadro Corp. began marketing the Tracker, a device its inventors claimed could locate anything from illicit drugs to lost golf balls.

They cautioned, however, that the golf ball the device found might not be the user's actual missing ball, because the Tracker "is tuned to the average DNA of golf balls." When scientists at the Sandia National Labs tested the product, they determined, as expected, that it couldn't find anything. (You try finding DNA in a golf ball.) In April 1996, a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against the company--but not before it had sold more than a thousand Trackers, at prices ranging from $400 to $8000.

• In the spring of 1995, Robert Walker (R-Pa.), chair of the House Science Committee, introduced the Hydrogen Future Act. Its purpose was to promote hydrogen as a "new energy source," a seemingly worthy goal. In principle at least, hydrogen is the perfect nonpolluting fuel: When it burns, the only exhaust is water.

The problem was getting the hydrogen, a process that involved separating water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. That could be done, but the process required more energy than burning hydrogen fuel would produce. In other words, the "breakthrough," if implemented, would have been a huge step backward.

• In September 1999, USA Today carried a full-page ad promoting a crosscountry tour by Dennis Lee, president of Better World Technologies. He was demonstrating his infinite energy machine and, for a small fee, giving consumers free electricity for life. It was a perpetual motion machine scam easily debunked by simple physics. Before Lee was even halfway through his tour, Good Morning America exposed the huckster, in a rare example of responsible journalism in the field of so-called scientific advances.

So what can be done about something like Vitamin O? Not much. Many fellow scientists tend to think the cure for pseudoscience lies in better science education. Education is a fine idea. But what is it, I keep asking my colleagues, they expect a scientifically literate public to know? We can't expect the public to know how much oxygen can be dissolved in water. Government regulation in the field is virtually nonexistent. In 1994, in a telling episode, after a vigorous lobbying campaign by the food supplement industry, Congress exempted "natural" dietary supplements from the Food and Drug Administration requirements for proof of product safety or efficacy. And what, after all, is more natural than water?

The Federal Trade Commission did step in after I exposed the Vitamin O scam on National Public Radio in late 1998. Rose Creek Health Products was charged with false advertising, and in April 2000, the company had to pay $375,000 in redress.

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One of the most persistent myths of the industrial world is that automobiles could run on ordinary water--if the oil industry did not suppress the technology. Every 10 years or so there is another claim from some entrepreneur about extracting energy from water, updated to conform to current scientific jargon.

For sheer audacity, however, BlackLight Power, a New Jersey company founded by Dr. Randell Mills, may take the prize. Dr. Mills, a Harvard-trained medical doctor, boasts that he has made "the most important discovery of all time, right up there with fire."

Mills claims to have found a way to nudge hydrogen atoms in water into a "state below the ground state," liberating energy in the process. He calls these shrunken hydrogen atoms "hydrinos." Conversion to this new state of hydrogen would not only produce inexhaustible, clean energy, it would open up a whole new field of hydrino chemistry.

Physicists scoffed. Ground state is the experimentally verified lowest energy an electron can have in an atom. A state below the ground state is like south of the South Pole. But when several prominent physicists, including Nobel Prize winners, did their scoffing in public, they received strongly worded letters from BlackLight's lawyers that threatened legal action if the scoffers kept scoffing.

On February 15,2000, a patent was awarded to Mills and BlackLight for the hydrino process. A second patent dealing with the chemistry of hydrinos was slated to be issued two weeks later, and other BlackLight patent applications were set to be processed. BlackLight's founders had already raised $25 million from investors, who stood to reap a bonanza as the company prepared an initial stock offering.

But just two days after the patent was issued, the Patent Office told BlackLight that the second patent application had been withdrawn. A patent official said the patent smacked of "perpetual motion and cold fusion." The reversal happened the moment someone sensible in the office saw the patents.

With its intellectual property in patent limbo, BlackLight filed suit against the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks in federal court. In August 2000, Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled against BlackLight, writing that the Patent Office action was "neither arbitrary nor capricious."

BlackLight Power is still in business, though chances of a lucrative IPO seem diminished. BlackLight may simply become a part of the myth--another discovery about using water as a fuel that was "suppressed."

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Journalism has often been less than rigorous in examining extravagant "scientific" claims. In 1987, for example, Dan Rather broadcast his second story in three years about a backwoods mechanic from Mississippi, Joe Newman, who claimed to have invented a machine that produced more energy than it took to run it. Once again, Rather introduced the report with the suggestion that Newman's discovery was plausible.

In fact, in 1986 Newman had reached Congress with his 500-pound device. It was, he said, an "unlimited source of energy." He made enough friends in Washington that Senator Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) had scheduled a hearing on legislation to compel the Patent and Trademark Office to give Newman a patent. Typically, that office refuses to consider a perpetual motion machine unless the inventor can make it run for a year, under supervision in the Patent and Trademark Office.

On July 30, 1986, Newman appeared before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, where he touted his amazing discovery without serious opposition until Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) spoke. "It's a simple enough problem," the former astronaut said. "You measure the input and you measure the output and you see which is larger. Would Mr. Newman agree to that? If he does, what laboratory would he like to have make the measurements?"

Newman shied away from the challenge and his congressional backers began to shy away from him.

Two years later, Rather had more amazing scientific news. On March 23, 1989, in the top story on the CBS Evening News, he reported news that "might be a tremendous scientific advance." Earlier that day, the University of Utah had held a press conference to announce that two respected chemists, Martin Fleischmann, a member of the Royal Academy, and Stanley Pons, a full professor, had produced deuterium fusion in a flask of heavy water. They called it cold fusion. They had done nothing less than duplicate the source of the sun's energy. Except they hadn't.

Rather was hardly alone in touting the first report. What emerged after all the media hype was not a story of a dazzling scientific breakthrough, but a sad comedy about wishful interpretations of sloppy and incomplete experiments, evolving into altered data and suppression of contradictory evidence. By July 1989, when a Department of Energy panel concluded that additional research into cold fusion was not warranted, most scientists had already returned to more productive lines of research.

Nevertheless, a dwindling band of true believers remain convinced that cold fusion is real. If hucksterism is pseudoscience, this is pathological science, the distortion in which scientists manage to fool themselves.

Not taken seriously by other scientists, the cold-fusion faithful hold their own meetings and have their own magazine with the all-too-predictable title Infinite Energy. Its pages promise an energy revolution just around the corner and bitterly denounce the scientific establishment for conspiring to suppress it.

In 1998, Paul LaViolette, a 52-year-old astronomer, was hired as a patent examiner at the Patent and Trademark Office. LaViolette believes in cold fusion. Actually, he believes in a lot of stuff: He believes the B-2 stealth bomber uses secret antigravity technology, reverse-engineered from a crashed flying saucer. He believes that certain pulsars are actually interstellar communication beacons used by more advanced civilizations.

The Patent and Trademark Office terminated LaViolette in 1999. Convinced that his dismissal had to do with his belief in cold fusion, LaViolette appealed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He argued that belief in cold fusion should be treated as a protected religious belief. In July 2000, the commission upheld his complaint, in effect ruling that cold fusion is a religion. This appeared to confirm what many scientists had suspected all along. Will LaViolette ever get his job back? It's about as likely as a President John Hagelin. Eventually, most screwball science gets exposed for what it really is, and the practitioners are never heard from again. Until the next time.