Physics 3333 / CFB 3333 Homework 4


Now that you have been hypersensitized to pseudoscience, you should be able to see it everywhere you look.

Find, annotate, and turn in one really good example of pseudoscience in the print media: newspaper or magazine articles or advertisements, photocopies of journal articles or sections of books not mentioned on the web site. Include enough information for someone else to locate your example (a proper citation including name of publication, issue, page, date, etc.). Explain in a paragraph why this is an example of pseudoscience; of what fallacies are the authors or people described guilty?

Do not use "supermarket tabloids" such as the National Enquirer, the Weekly World News, the Globe, and so on, which have pseudoscience on every single page of every single issue! They are notorious for creative writing (fiction) and BS.


Here is an example (of course, yours will be on paper):

Associated Press, Monday 10 February 2003.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The Prime Minister of South Korea thinks that the failure to find any evidence of North Korea's nuclear weapons is proof that the North has no such weapons. What if the North's weapons are simply well concealed? After this article was published, the North admitted that it had been working on nuclear weapons.

2006 Update

The lack of evidence is particularly interesting, because it seems that North Korea DID test a nuclear device on about 9 September 2006.