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Pseudophysics is a pseudoscientific practice using the language of physics or discussing issues related to or pertinent to physics to promote ideas which are either incoherent or contradictory to known physics (experimental phenomenology).

According to physicists, skeptics, and science writers, pseudophysics tends to be promoted by so-called "cranks", whose ideas lack peer review, lack falsifiable predictions, and/or blatantly contradict scientific facts and experimental results. Mathematical physicist John C. Baez famously invented a crackpot index to give an idea of what sort of claims and rhetoric were commonplace among pseudophysics proposals he had come across.

Amir Aczel goes so far as to include speculative popularizations of physics, such as David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity and Lawrence Krauss's A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, in the pseudophysics category. He says in part, "But it is definitely wrong — misleading and dishonest — to preach to an unsuspecting public, mostly uninitiated in science, mere hypotheses as if they were confirmed facts."

See also

• Hypothetico-deductive method
• Statistical hypothesis testing
• Theoretical physics
• Mathematical physics
• Experimental physics
• List of pseudoscientific theories

External links

• Paine, Michael, "Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit". Operation Clambake. 1998.
• Shermer, M "Baloney Detection - How to draw boundaries between science and pseudoscience, Part I ", Scientific American 285 (5): 36-36 NOV 2001
• Shermer, M "Baloney Detection - How to draw boundaries between science and pseudoscience, Part II", Scientific American 285 (6): 34-34 DEC 2001