Pathological science

Pathological science is an area of research where "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions.

After a time, American physicist Robert W. Wood decided to visit Blondlot's lab, which had moved on to the physical characterization of N-rays.

Wood then asked to see the experiments being run as usual, which took place in a room required to be very dark so the target was barely visible.

Blondlot repeated his most recent experiments and got the same results—despite the fact that Wood had reached over and covertly sabotaged the N-ray apparatus by removing the prism.

In 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced the discovery of a simple and cheap procedure to obtain room-temperature nuclear fusion.

Although there were many instances where successful results were reported, they lacked consistency and hence cold fusion came to be considered to be an example of pathological science.

Jacques Benveniste was a French immunologist who in 1988 published a paper in the prestigious scientific journal Nature describing the action of very high dilutions of anti-IgE antibody on the degranulation of human basophils, findings which seemed to support the concept of homeopathy.