by Sam Kean
A full beard also argues against his being driven mad, as some have suggested, by another depilatory on the periodic table—the poisoner’s poison, thallium. Crookes discovered thallium at age twenty-six (a finding that almost ensured his election to the Royal Society) and continued to play with it in his lab for a decade. But he apparently never inhaled enough even to lose his whiskers. Besides, would someone ravished by thallium (or selenium) retain such a sharp mind into old age? Crookes actually withdrew from spiritualist circles after 1874, rededicating himself to science, and major discoveries lay ahead. He was the first to suggest the existence of isotopes. He built vital new scientific equipment and confirmed the presence of helium in rocks, its first detection on earth. In 1897, the newly knighted Sir William dove into radioactivity, even discovering (though without realizing it) the element protactinium in 1900.
No, the best explanation for Crookes’s lapse into spiritualism is psychological: ruined by grief for his brother, he succumbed, avant la lettre, to pathological science.
In explaining what pathological science is, it’s best to clear up any misconceptions about that loaded word, “pathological,” and explain up front what pathological science is not. It’s not fraud, since the adherents of a pathological science believe they’re right—if only everyone else could see it. It’s not pseudoscience, like Freudianism and Marxism, fields that poach on the imprimatur of science yet shun the rigors of the scientific method. It’s also not politicized science, like Lysenkoism, where people swear allegiance to a false science because of threats or a skewed ideology. Finally, it’s not general clinical madness or merely deranged belief. It’s a particular madness, a meticulous and scientifically informed delusion. Pathological scientists pick out a marginal and unlikely phenomenon that appeals to them for whatever reason and bring all their scientific acumen to proving its existence. But the game is rigged from the start: their science serves only the deeper emotional need to believe in something. Spiritualism per se isn’t a pathological science, but it became so in Crookes’s hands because of his careful “experiments” and the scientific trimmings he gave the experiments.
And actually, pathological science doesn’t always spring from fringe fields. It also thrives in legitimate but speculative fields, where data and evidence are scarce and hard to interpret. For example, the branch of paleontology concerned with reconstructing dinosaurs and other extinct creatures provides another great case study in pathological science.
At some level, of course, we don’t know squat about extinct creatures: a whole skeleton is a rare find, and soft tissue impressions are vanishingly rare. A joke among people who reconstruct paleofauna is that if elephants had gone extinct way back when, anyone who dug up a mammoth skeleton today would conjure up a giant hamster with tusks, not a woolly pachyderm with a trunk. We’d know just as little about the glories of other animals as well—stripes, waddles, lips, potbellies, belly buttons, snouts, gizzards, four-chambered stomachs, and humps, not to mention their eyebrows, buttocks, toenails, cheeks, tongues, and nipples. Nevertheless, by comparing the grooves and depressions on fossilized bones with modern creatures’ bones, a trained eye can figure out the musculature, enervation, size, gait, dentition, and even mating habits of extinct species. Paleontologists just have to be careful about extrapolating too far.
A pathological science takes advantage of that caution. Basically, its believers use the ambiguity about evidence as evidence—claiming that scientists don’t know everything and therefore there’s room for my pet theory, too. That’s exactly what happened with manganese and the megalodon.*
This story starts in 1873, when the research vessel HMS Challenger set out from England to explore the Pacific Ocean. In a wonderfully low-tech setup, the crew dropped overboard huge buckets tied to ropes three miles long and dredged the ocean floor. In addition to fantastical fish and other critters, they hauled up dozens upon dozens of spherical rocks shaped like fossilized potatoes and also fat, solid, mineralized ice cream cones. These hunks, mostly manganese, appeared all over the seabed in every part of the ocean, meaning there had to be untold billions of them scattered around the world.
That was the first surprise. The second took place when the crew cracked open the cones: the manganese had formed itself around giant shark teeth. The biggest, most pituitarily freakish shark teeth today run about two and a half inches max. The manganese-covered teeth stretched five or more inches—mouth talons capable of shattering bone like an ax. Using the same basic techniques as with dinosaur fossils, paleontologists determined (just from the teeth!) that this Jaws3, dubbed the megalodon, grew to approximately fifty feet, weighed approximately fifty tons, and could swim approximately fifty miles per hour. It could probably close its mouth of 250 teeth with a megaton force, and it fed mostly on primitive whales in shallow, tropical waters. It probably died out as its prey migrated permanently to colder, deeper waters, an environment that didn’t suit its high metabolism and ravenous appetite.
All fine science so far. The pathology started with the manganese.* Shark teeth litter the ocean floor because they’re about the hardest biological substance known, the only part of shark carcasses that survive the crush of the deep ocean (most sharks have cartilaginous skeletons). It’s not clear why manganese, of all the dissolved metals in the ocean, galvanizes shark teeth, but scientists know roughly how quickly it accumulates: between one-half and one and a half millimeters per millennium. From that rate they have determined that the vast majority of recovered teeth date from at least 1.5 million years ago, meaning the megalodons probably died out around then.
But—and here was the gap into which some people rushed—some megalodon teeth had mysteriously thin manganese plaque, about eleven thousand years’ worth. Evolutionarily, that’s an awfully short time. And really, what’s to say scientists won’t soon find one from ten thousand years ago? Or eight thousand years ago? Or later?
You can see where this thinking leads. In the 1960s, a few enthusiasts with Jurassic Park imaginations grew convinced that rogue megalodons still lurk in the oceans. “Megalodon lives!” they cried. And like rumors about Area 51 or the Kennedy assassination, the legend has never quite died. The most common tale is that megalodons have evolved to become deep-sea divers and now spend their days fighting krakens in the black depths. Reminiscent of Crookes’s phantoms, megalodons are supposed to be elusive, which gives people a convenient escape when pressed on why the giant sharks are so scarce nowadays.
There’s probably not a person alive who, deep down, doesn’t hope that megalodons still haunt the seas. Unfortunately, the idea crumbles under scrutiny. Among other things, the teeth with thin layers of manganese were almost certainly torn up from old bedrock beneath the ocean floor (where they accumulated no manganese) and exposed to water only recently. They’re probably much older than eleven thousand years. And although there have been eyewitness accounts of the beasts, they’re all from sailors, notorious storytellers, and the megalodons in their stories vary manically in size and shape. One all-white Moby Dick shark stretched up to three hundred feet long! (Funny, though, no one thought to snap a picture.) Overall, such stories, as with Crookes’s testimony about supernatural beings, depend on subjective interpretations, and without objective evidence, it’s not plausible to conclude that megalodons, even a few of them, slipped through evolution’s snares.
But what really makes the ongoing hunt for megalodons pathological is that doubt from the establishment only deepens people’s convictions. Instead of refuting the manganese findings, they counterattack with heroic tales of rebels, rogues who proved squaresville scientists wrong in the past. They invariably bring up the coelacanth, a primitive deep-sea fish once thought to have gone extinct eighty million years ago, until it turned up in a fish market in South Africa in 1938. According to this logic, because scientists were wrong about the coelacanth, they might be wrong about the megalodon, too. And “might” is all the megalodon lovers need. For their theories about its survival ar
en’t based on a preponderance of evidence, but on an emotional attachment: the hope, the need, for something fantastic to be true.
There’s probably no better example of such emotion than in the next case study—that all-time-great pathological science, that Alamo for true believers, that seductress of futurists, that scientific hydra: cold fusion.
Pons and Fleischmann. Fleischmann and Pons. It was supposed to be the greatest scientific duo since Watson and Crick, perhaps stretching back to Marie and Pierre Curie. Instead, their fame rotted into infamy. Now the names B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann evoke only, however unfairly, thoughts of impostors, swindlers, and cheats.
The experiment that made and unmade Pons and Fleischmann was, so to speak, deceptively simple. The two chemists, headquartered at the University of Utah in 1989, placed a palladium electrode in a chamber of heavy water and turned on a current. Running a current through regular water will shock the H2O and produce hydrogen and oxygen gas. Something similar happened in the heavy water, except the hydrogen in heavy water has an extra neutron. So instead of normal hydrogen gas (H2) with two protons total, Pons and Fleischmann created molecules of hydrogen gas with two protons and two neutrons.
What made the experiment special was the combination of heavy hydrogen with palladium, a whitish metal with one flabbergasting property: it can swallow nine hundred times its own volume of hydrogen gas. That’s roughly equivalent to a 250-pound man swallowing a dozen African bull elephants* and not gaining an inch on his waistline. And as the palladium electrode in the heavy water started to pack in hydrogen, Pons and Fleischmann’s thermometers and other instruments spiked. The water got far warmer than it should have, than it could have, given the meager energy of the incoming current. Pons reported that during one really good spike, his superheated H2O burned a hole in a beaker, the lab bench beneath it, and the concrete floor beneath that.
Or at least they got spikes sometimes. Overall, the experiment was erratic, and the same setup and trial runs didn’t always produce the same results. But rather than nail down what was happening with the palladium, the two men let their fancies convince them they had discovered cold fusion—fusion that didn’t require the incredible temperatures and pressures of stars, but took place at room temperature. Because palladium could cram so much heavy hydrogen inside it, they guessed it somehow fused its protons and neutrons into helium, releasing gobs of energy in the process.
Rather imprudently, Pons and Fleischmann called a press conference to announce their results, basically implying that the world’s energy problems were over, cheaply and without pollution. And somewhat like palladium itself, the media swallowed the grandiose claim. (It soon came out that another Utahan, physicist Steven Jones, had pursued similar fusion experiments. Jones fell into the background, however, since he made more modest claims.) Pons and Fleischmann became instant celebrities, and the momentum of public opinion appeared to sway even scientists. At an American Chemical Society meeting shortly after the announcement, the duo received a standing ovation.
But there’s some important context here. In applauding Fleischmann and Pons, many scientists were probably really thinking about superconductors. Until 1986, superconductors were thought to be flat-out impossible above −400°F. Suddenly, two German researchers—who would win the Nobel Prize in record time, a year later—discovered superconductors that worked above that temperature. Other teams jumped in and within a few months had discovered “high-temperature” yttrium superconductors that worked at −280°F. (The record today stands at −218°F.) The point is that many scientists who’d predicted the impossibility of such superconductors felt like asses. It was the physics equivalent of finding the coelacanth. And like megalodon romantics, cold-fusion lovers in 1989 could point to the recent superconductor craziness and force normally dismissive scientists to suspend judgment. Indeed, cold-fusion fanatics seemed giddy at the chance to overthrow old dogma, a delirium typical of pathological science.
Still, a few skeptics, especially at Cal Tech, seethed. Cold fusion upset these men’s scientific sensibilities, and Pons and Fleischmann’s arrogance upset their modesty. The two had bypassed the normal peer-review process in announcing results, and some considered them charlatans intent on enriching themselves, especially after they appealed directly to President George H. W. Bush for $25 million in immediate research funds. Pons and Fleischmann didn’t help matters by refusing to answer—as if such inquiries were insulting—questions about their palladium apparatus and experimental protocol. They claimed they didn’t want their ideas to be stolen, but it sure looked as if they were hiding something.
Despite withering dismissals from nearly every other scientist on earth, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed they had produced cold fusion at room temperature. Their apparatus consisted of a heavy-water bath with electrodes made of the superabsorbent element palladium. (Special Collections Department, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)
Nevertheless, increasingly doubtful scientists across the world (except in Italy, where yet another cold-fusion claim popped up) learned enough from what the two men said to rig up their own palladium and heavy-hydrogen experiments, and they began pummeling the Utah scientists with null results. A few weeks later, after perhaps the most concerted effort since Galileo to discredit, even disgrace, scientists, hundreds of chemists and physicists held what amounted to an anti–Pons and Fleischmann rally in Baltimore. They showed, embarrassingly, that the duo had overlooked experimental errors and used faulty measuring techniques. One scientist suggested that the two had let the hydrogen gas build up and that their biggest “fusion” spikes were chemical explosions, à la the Hindenburg. (The supposed fusion spike that burned holes in the table and bench happened overnight, when no one was around.) Usually it takes years to root out a scientific error, or at least to resolve a controversial question, but cold fusion was cold and dead within forty days of the initial announcement. One wag who attended the conference summed up the brouhaha in biting, if unrhythmical, verse:
Tens of millions of dollars at stake, Dear Brother
Because some scientists put a thermometer
At one place and not another.
But the psychologically interesting parts of the affair were still to come. The need to believe in clean, cheap energy for the whole world proved tenacious, and people could not still their heartstrings so quickly. At this point, the science mutated into something pathological. As with investigations into the paranormal, only a guru (the medium, or Fleischmann and Pons) had the power to produce the key results, and only under contrived circumstances, never in the open. That didn’t give pause to and in fact only encouraged cold-fusion enthusiasts. For their part, Pons and Fleischmann never backed down, and their followers defended the two (not to mention themselves) as important rebels, the only people who got it. Some critics countered with their own experiments for a while after 1989, but cold fusionists always explained away any damning results, sometimes with more ingenuity than they showed in their original scientific work. So the critics eventually gave up. David Goodstein, a Cal Tech physicist, summed things up in an excellent essay on cold fusion: “Because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here.” It’s hard to imagine a better, more concise description of pathological science.*
The most charitable explanation of what happened to Pons and Fleischmann is this. It seems unlikely they were charlatans who knew that cold fusion was bunkum but wanted a quick score. It wasn’t 1789, where they could have just skedaddled and scammed the rubes in the next town over. They were going to get caught. Maybe they had doubts but were blinded by ambition and wanted to see what it felt like to be brilliant in
the world’s eyes, even for a moment. Probably, though, these two men were just misled by a queer property of palladium. Even today, no one knows how palladium guzzles so much hydrogen. In a slight rehabilitation of Pons and Fleischmann’s work (though not their interpretation of it), some scientists do think that something funny is going on in palladium–heavy water experiments. Strange bubbles appear in the metal, and its atoms rearrange themselves in novel ways. Perhaps even some weak nuclear forces are involved. To their credit, Pons and Fleischmann pioneered this work. It’s just not what they wanted to, or will, go down in science history for.
Not every scientist with a touch of madness ends up drowning in pathological science, of course. Some, like Crookes, escape and go on to do great work. And then there are the rare cases where what seems like pathological science at the outset turns out to be legitimate. Wilhelm Röntgen tried his damnedest to prove himself wrong while pursuing a radical discovery about invisible rays, but couldn’t. And because of his persistence and insistence on the scientific method, this mentally fragile scientist really did rewrite history.
In November 1895, Röntgen was playing around in his laboratory in central Germany with a Crookes tube, an important new tool for studying subatomic phenomena. Named after its inventor, you know who, the Crookes tube consisted of an evacuated glass bulb with two metal plates inside at either end. Running a current between the plates caused a beam to leap across the vacuum, a crackle of light like something from a special effects lab. Scientists now know it’s a beam of electrons, but in 1895 Röntgen and others were trying to figure that out.
A colleague of Röntgen’s had found that when he made a Crookes tube with a small aluminium foil window (reminiscent of the titanium window Per-Ingvar Brånemark later welded onto rabbit bones), the beam would tunnel through the foil into the air. It died pretty quickly—air was like poison to the beam—but it could light up a phosphorescent screen a few inches distant. A little neurotically, Röntgen insisted on repeating all his colleagues’ experiments no matter how minor, so he built this setup himself in 1895, but with some alterations. Instead of leaving his Crookes tube naked, he covered it with black paper, so that the beam would escape only through the foil. And instead of the phosphorescing chemicals his colleague had used, he painted his plates with a luminescent barium compound.