Great Science, Fabulous Science, And Voodoo Science: An Introduction To The Use And Misuse Of Data

Science is often portrayed as following a very clearly defined set of procedures: start with a hypothesis, do an experiment and, based on the results, reject the hypothesis or adopt it as a working assumption. The actual process, however, is rarely so straightforward. In addition, the stories as usually told or recorded may differ from what really happened. This text will present some famous, some lesser known, and some infamous experiments, mainly in the physical sciences but also in several other fields, selected to illustrate intellectual tours de force, cases of error, cases of fraud, and the murky boundaries between them. These case studies compare how we imagine (perhaps naively) that conclusions are drawn from data with what is actually done in practice. Along the way, issues such as the discarding of 'faulty data', theoretical bias, and probabilistic tools for hypothesis acceptance and rejection will be discussed. The book also discuss how scientific ideas are evaluated by the media, in the courtroom, and in government.