Joe Schwarcz: Love is blind in science, too

Chemistry professor Joe Schwarcz

Back in 1953, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir coined the expression "pathological science" to describe a process in which a scientist seems to follow the scientific method but unconsciously strays in favour of wishful thinking. Pathological science is distinct from fraud; it is, essentially, faulty science promoted by people who are somehow blind to the evidence against their pet ideas. The most frequent use of the term over the last couple of decades has been in connection with "cold fusion," a phenomenon first hypothesized in 1989 by electrochemists Drs. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.

Read more at the Montreal Gazette.