Lets be VERY clear here...sonoluminescence is a real effect, and many serious researchers have done a lot of work on it.... I have seen it in action and I have read the literature on it and I wanted to look at it myself... It is a legitimate topic for study. All I was criticizing was the the way this one group did their study.

sonoluminescence IS NOT crank science, it is a demonstration that a VERY simple experiment can show us things we never really expected or can easily explain... the research in the past few years has done much to clear up the mystery...

My disagreement with you was your statement that 50% of the published papers are crap... That is not true in the hard sciences... Peer review can be pretty brutal... Now there are many cases where people publish results of an experiment and then say "We suggest that the reason the results turned out like this is due to..." and give a possible speculative theory...
This is fine, you get results and you do your best to explain them...the important thing is that you admit that your explanation of why you got those results is your best guess and you encourage others to come up with alternate suggestions... In the papers I have been on I have never said "I got this result and so I have proven that theory X is correct" Very rarely does such definative data ever arise. I have said "our results rule out theory Y" and when I did that I went to great lengths to show my data was "clean".

My research to get a PhD was 6 yrs of proving that my machine could take clean data and a few weeks of taking the actual data...Trust me, the vast majority of researchers are FAR more afraid of making a stupid mistake that they are forced to retract than they are eager for a 5 minute shot of fame...

To just make a blanket statement that half of all research is crap is foolish and feeds into the "down with those egg-heads" movement that is always so popular... Speaking as a researcher, I try my hardest to be intellectually honest... 90% of my ideas I thought would work didnt, and I admitted it... even tho I had REALLY hoped I was right- but that made the other 10% all the more rewarding...

End Of Rant