The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense
Michael Shermer
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0195157982
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In The Borderlands of Science, Michael Shermer takes us to the place where real science, borderline science--and just plain nonsense--collide. Shermer argues that while science is the best lens through which to view the world, it is often difficult to decipher where valid science leaves off and borderland, or "fuzzy" science begins. To solve this dilemma, he looks at a range of topics that put this boundary line in high relief. For instance, he debunks the many "theories of everything" that try to reduce the complexity of the world to a single principle. He examines the work of Darwin and Freud, explaining why one is among the great scientists in history, while the other has become nothing more than a historical curiosity. And he reveals how scientists themselves can be led astray, as seen in the infamous Piltdown hoax--the set of ancient hominid bones discovered in England that after decades turned out to be an enormous forgery.
From SETI and acupuncture to hypnosis and human cloning, this enlightening book will help readers stay grounded in common sense amid the flurry of supposedly scientific theories that inundate us every day.
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alarms. The following passages from Cosmic Explorers could have been written by a pulp science fiction writer for 19508 B movies instead of a tenured college professor at a major American university (note the scientistic language and cachet of data-speak): Apparently, Buddha and the Galactic Federation are deeply involved in an intense struggle that conveys the sense of a major conflict, perhaps a war. I do not know from the data in this session if the struggle is exactly the same as that
astronomer George Hale dated December 3, 1932, announced that Theories of Everything 57 "In 1916 I went to Washington, D.C. and transmuted silver into gold for the United States government and I have their reports. BUT IT WAS HUSHED up for reasons I cannot explain."18 Of course. Surprisingly, given our name, at Skeptic we also routinely receive such letters, along with essays and articles for publication consideration, some of which I store in a file called "Theories of Everything." These are
interpretation needed for this one. I was befuddled until I discovered that this man is a good friend of Carr's who had, in fact, driven to San Francisco (where the seminar was being held) from his home in Reno earlier that morning. When Carr later asked me to explain the Stonehenge hit I simply said I thought that Carr probably told him the target ahead of time. Surprisingly, and tellingly, he did not abjure my charge. A real test, I explained, would be if no one knew what the target was and
shifts in phenotypic characters, such as "the tripling in size of the human brain over the last two million years." He goes on to note that in only 4,000 years Polynesian peoples migrated from a small population (or populations) living on the eastern end of New Guinea, to islands all over the Pacific, from New Zealand in the south, Hawaii in the north, and Easter Island in the east. "Doing so meant crossing thousands of miles of ocean that could be chillingly cold at night, and in large
would appear to be decidedly higher than the black band, the amount due to the known size of the earth. As the diagrams in FIGURE 26 show, Wallace's experiment clearly "proved that the curvature was very nearly of the amount calculated from the known dimensions of the earth." Not surprising, Hampden refused to even look through the telescope, trusting this to his personal referee, William Carpenter, who claimed that he saw "the three were in a straight line, and that the earth was flat, and he
