Читать книгу Bad Science - Ben Goldacre - Страница 8

I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me—I would go so far as to say that it’s my favourite leisure activity—and repeatedly I meet individuals who are eager to share their views on science despite the fact that they have never done an experiment. They have never tested an idea for themselves, using their own hands; or seen the results of that test, using their own eyes; and they have never thought carefully about what those results mean for the idea they are testing, using their own brain. To these people ‘science’ is a monolith, a mystery, and an authority, rather than a method.

Dismantling our early, more outrageous pseudoscientific claims is an excellent way to learn the basics of science, partly because science is largely about disproving theories, but also because the lack of scientific knowledge among miracle-cure artistes, marketers and journalists gives us some very simple ideas to test. Their knowledge of science is rudimentary, so as well as making basic errors of reasoning, they also rely on notions like magnetism, oxygen, water, ‘energy’ and toxins: ideas from GCSE-level science, and all very much within the realm of kitchen chemistry.