About a year ago Eric Krieg and I had toyed with writing the definitive book on free energy.  Well, Robert Park, physics professor and past president of the American Physical Society, has done a good part of our work for us by writing "Voodoo Science."  This must rate as this year's most eagerly awaited skeptical book.  Although the free energy hucksters are mercilessly skewered in this book, Park goes beyond them to explore what happens to innovators, be they back-yard inventors or credentialled scientists, when they discover that their pet concept is just not working out.  Many admit failure, often being applauded by their peers for their integrity.  However, Park has written his book about those who take the wrong turn and "descend from foolishness into fraud."
Voodoo science is Park's term which encompasses the range from honestly believed but dubious science, through outright pseudoscience to deliberate fraud.  He uses cold fusion as a case study of an idea which its originators continued to promote long after it had been scientifically discredited.  Pons and Fleischmann had the opportunity to retract their claims and to move on with their professional careers scarred but intact.  They muffed it.
Homeopathy and the promotion of quack medicines get their own chapter.  The promoters of "Vitamin O" allege that you can increase your oxygen intake if you consume their expensive salt water.  Park's comment, "An attempt to extract the oxygen you need from water is called 'drowning.'"  He also reveals that therapeutic magnets are so constructed that their magnetic field doesn't even penetrate the material they are wrapped in much less have any effect on your body.
Park devotes a chapter to the idea that microwaves and the fields from power lines cause cancer and concludes that it is totally fallacious.  A 25 year, 25 billion dollar, scare turned out to have been based on bad statistics and the determination of a few individuals to keep themselves in lucrative positions and in the public eye.  More trustworthy research has demonstrated the falsity of the scare-mongers' position.
A subsidiary theme of "Voodoo Science" is the extent to which the media spread misinformation.  They broadcast what they think is human-interest entertainment but it appears to the viewers as solid information.  Much of Joe Newman's early fame arose from a 1984 CBS program in which he played the home-spun hero who had confounded the scientific experts.  A follow-up program in 1987 repeated the same story without a hint that Newman's claims had meantime been shown to be nonsense.
One point in the saga of Joe Newman's Energy Machine which had always puzzled me was how in 1984 a special master appointed by the patent office had found in favor of an excess energy output.  Park reveals that at the Congressional hearing into Newman's claims in 1989 it emerged that the special master had formerly been one of Newman's patent attorneys.  As Park says, Congress may not know much about the conservation of energy but they can recognize a conflict of interest from miles away.
Park's views on Dennis Lee are as scathing as his remarks about Newman.  Park got onto Lee's case later than did PhACT, and his book must have gone to press before Lee's disastrous 1999 US tour, but he covers many highlights from Lee's demonstrations.  I particularly liked the tale of the Fisher engine which failed, allegedly, because the room temperature rose above the critical point of the liquid carbon dioxide driving it.  Fisher claimed that if the engine had been started earlier it would have kept the room cool.  Well that would be a Second Law violation and as Park points out, echoing Eric Krieg, Lee has broken a lot of laws but he hasn't broken the laws of thermodynamics.
Another of Park's minor themes is Pascal's wager, the argument that, if the potential gain is great enough, then any investment is justified.  Power companies are sinking research money into Randall Mills' company, BlackLight Power, anticipating that a new power industry just might grow from his theory that hydrogen atoms can be induced to fall into a state below the ground state.  There is no physical evidence for this oxymoronic concept.  Missing from Pascal's wager is any distinction between the long-shot which might just pay off and an outcome whose probability is zero.
As popularizers of science generally must, Park oversimplifies.  He misquotes the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, at least as they were first formulated.  The First Law is not a general statement that energy is conserved, it relates only to the conversion of mechanical energy into heat energy.  The Second Law does not say that "friction is inevitable."  It states that no machine can generate mechanical energy from heat energy simply by making something colder.  If anything it is the First Law which implies that friction, the conversion of useful mechanical energy into less useful heat energy, is inevitable.  And if I see that folksy parody of the two laws, "You can't win and you can't even break even," in print once more I think I'll scream.
In his chapter on space exploration, Park comes down solidly on the side of those who believe that space should be explored by robot probes while we sit comfortably at home.  He claims that the space station is scientifically worthless.  This is a view with which I would concur, with one proviso, it can serve as a dress rehearsal for a manned mission to Mars.  This is a mission which Park discounts as too dangerous for the possible scientific return, citing the radiation danger posed by solar storms.  Exploration has always been a dangerous pursuit and yet it has always paid off in the long run.  How many mariners died in Atlantic storms before America was a going concern?  A largely self-sustaining colony on Mars could be established in much less time than the three centuries it took the US to reach the same point.
Another sample of Park's own voodoo science is to cite the cost of putting mass into Earth orbit to demonstrate that even if there were gold in orbit it wouldn't pay to fetch it.  This argument has two flaws.  It assumes that access to orbit will continue to require Shuttle launches.  Interstate commerce wouldn't be practical either if everything had to be trucked in the trunk of a Ferrari.  Too, the energy required to de-orbit a payload is a fraction of that required to boost it into orbit in the first place.  A ton of gold could be returned to Earth with the same small retro-rockets as brought back the Mercury capsules.  Far from seeking gold, future prospectors may be making their fortunes by supplying Earth's steel mills with nickel-iron asteroids.  Men in space have already showed their value as fixers of damaged spacecraft and as makers of immediate decisions on the Moon.  The last thing the human race must do is to sit on the Earth until we rot, or are killed off.
However these are minor flaws in a tremendously worth-while book.  If you haven't already, I recommend that you invest $25 in Park's incisive analysis of life on the fringes of science.

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The following is a response:
from mikec@snip.net

Although Park's book attacks many easy targets, his comments about the
Fleischmann-Pons effect reflect his persistent refusal to look further than his
prejudices. Park has persisted in his slander of Fleischmann & Pons
even when given peer reviewed papers supporting their position, and has walked
out of technical sessions of major scientific societies where respected
researchers have presented papers on the Fleischmann-Pons effect.

The facts are that the existence of nuclear reactions in association with metal
lattices, which release heat far in excess of any chemical reaction, and produce
commensurate He4 and Tritium, has been demonstrated in well-controlled
experiments by McKubre at SRI International, Arata in Japan, and many other
laboratories. These reactions
occur without the release of high energy gamma and neutron radiation, but are
frequently accompanied by transmutations of target materials. The covering name
for this new family of reactions is Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) or
Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions (CANR). There hare now hundreds of papers
from many countries illuminating this new vista.

The best analysis of the CF scene is Charles Baudette's book Excess Heat,
distributed by Infinite Energy Magazine. Baudette reads like a lawyer's brief,
showing in painstaking detail minor mistakes made by
Fleischmann and Pons, but more importantly major lapses of scientific protocol
and ethics by members of the high energy physics community. F&P's mistakes were
ones of timing and not emphasizing how difficult the experiment is to perform,
and a less-than-elegant measurement of neutron radiation. They did not claim
"fusion", only an 'unknown nuclear reaction'. It was the physics community the
seized on the term 'fusion' and assuming that plasma DD reactions were all that
are possible, insisted that the expected signatures be present in the F-P
effect. Measurement of the heat signature requires good calorimetry, an art
foreign to plasma physics. Measurements showing excess heat were arbitrarily
rejected.

Scientifically, the confirmation of the Fleischmann-Pons effect is a closed
book. The exploration of LENR-CANR will occupy generations.