Submitted by Nicholas C. Darnton (inactive) on Thursday, 11/19/2009, at 9:25 PM

These topics vary from good science that doesn't quite fit the canonical description – that is, it is missing some parts of the standard scientific method – to spectacularly bad science.  My descriptions may give you an idea of where, IMHO, a particular topic falls in that spectrum, but you will need to decide for yourself on many of these. 

Astrobiology

Now that extrasolar planets are a dime a dozen, the next step is to search for life on them.  That's what this proposal suggests.  In fact, it will only look for water vapor, carbon dioxide and similar gases; it's pretty honest that it will only be looking for Earth-type life (not all life).  I guess you have to start somewhere, and other astrobiologists are looking at exotic Earth environments to try to guess what range of conditions are compatible with life, but I suspect no one has a clue whether other forms of life will have chemistry similar to ours or not. 

The traditional alien hunters are the people at the SETI institute.  This (slightly dated) article summarizes SETI projects;  the last paragraph on "The significance of null results" is quite level-headed for a field is vulnerable to kooky ideas. 

Astronomy

There are problems with conventional astronomy (most obviously, the need for 96% of the mass-energy of the universe to be in the as-yet unobserved / undetected forms of dark energy and dark matter) but they are minor compared with truly bad astronomy:

  1. Velikovsky explained Biblical events using solar system dynamics.  This passionate screed argues that scientists treated him unfairly.  The entire affair is summarized here; as you can imagine, anyone taking the trouble to put together such a website is more than inclined to give Velikovsky the benefit of the doubt. 
  2. Apparently the world will end in 2012.  In the supposed explanations of this, it's hard to find anything that makes enough sense to even label it wrong.  The one element of truth in the movie is that magnetic pole reversals do occur, and there's evidence that one is in the works right now (where by "right now" I mean within the next few tens of thousands of years).  This has nothing to do with reversing the rotation of the Earth, of course.

Over-unity devices

Joe Newman talks about his impossible motor.

I gathered some examples of violations of conservation of energy in here.