Customer Reviews

Debunked!: ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Does the paranormal exist? Is there some basis for ESP, telekinesis, astrology, and the other beliefs to which many so tightly cling? We cannot prove that they are nonsense, but we can show evidence at least that they are highly questionable and that they are used by hoaxers for fame and profit, especially when those hoaxers pretend to be taking a scientific stance. A wonderful lesson that The Amazing Randi and Penn and Teller have taught us is that magicians can make almost anything happen, or _appear_ to happen, and that scientists can get fooled watching these tricks just as well as Las Vegas audiences can. A happy, short, and informative book, _Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience_ (Johns Hopkins University Press), by Nobel prizewinner George Charpak and his colleague in scientific investigation of the paranormal Henri Broch, is a plea for intelligent avoidance of deception. It is translated from the French, but don't worry; the translator, Bart K. Holland, has himself written about the probability errors that people are prone to, and has an interesting preface to tell how he faithfully worked on the translation.

Much of the book is devoted to magic tricks. There is the problem of the magician who can do a good trick, and claim it is no such thing; it is a miracle, the suspension of the laws of physics at his command. The authors want readers to know some of these tricks; if they can show you how keys can be magically bent (like rabbits can be magically produced), it makes no sense to assume that the bending is a miracle. Uri Geller is terrific at key bending, but so is author Henri Broch. And he gives away the secret here; it is a physical process no more supernatural than using a lever, but done in a hidden manner, the way all magicians do things. Geller claims a miracle; Broch claims a trick. Quite simply, if both performers produce bent keys in some covert way, whose claim is more credible? There is a wonderful ESP trick given here, illustrating the principle of surreptitiously conveying information so that it looks as if you have telepathically sent it. You can learn to stop your heart just like the yogis do, or at least you can make it seem so. There is an explanation of how the television show _Mysteries_ played up the paranormal origin of water that kept accumulating in an ancient sarcophagus, when there was a good scientific explanation already published.

The book is packed with many other examples: the satanic face that appeared in the smoke from the World Trade Center, firewalking, divining rods, amazing coincidences, and more. The authors are amused by these follies, they are happy to demonstrate physical explanations for them, but they are also indignant. They are convinced that minds poisoned by pseudoscience are more tractable by those in power. "Thus we are witnessing a mystification of knowledge, which results in a concept of the world in which many things are forever outside the understanding - and the control - of most people." Clear thinking by the public, they remind us, is vital for the action of democracy. Choices must be guided by rational thought, as much as possible. The book wonderfully proselytizes for the power of rational, scientific investigation. "Rationality, too, can lead to error," the authors remind us, "but a lot less often than ignorance and superstition will."

For perhaps 2 decades, at the University of Nice, Prof. Broch has taught a course analyzing the claims of pseudoscience. He has also published a number of books on the topic; this is the only one ever to be translated into English. It may be the last. I assume this particular specimen was chosen because the co-author is Nobel prizewinning physicist Georges Charpak, but it was difficult for me to detect Charpak's contributions.

The bad news is that the book looks as if it were assembled by Prof. Broch sitting down and pulling material pretty much at random from the presentations in his courses. The text is never lucid and sometimes lapses into outright incoherence; I found portions to be completely unreadable.

I would recommend skipping the prologue altogether. Chapter 1 begins with Astrology and the Forer Effect; most of the discussion makes sense but illustrations and tables often don't. I would, for example, like to see someone make any sense of the table on page 12, particularly in view of the instructions to select "one box at random from each of the four columns numbered 2 to 4." Of course the columns are not numbered, but if you reread the instructions you'll see that could hardly matter! The whole book is like this. The chapter suddenly veers from astrology to a "telephone psychic" mindreading trick. Then suddenly there are very brief discussions of antiquated levitation illusions, sitting on broken glass shards and beds of nails, a 500-year-old version of "skewer through tongue," firewalking, and one of Broch's classroom demonstrations with nitinol wire. Throughout, when books are mentioned, the reference is almost always to a French-language edition, even when the book was first published in English; can you say, "no editing?"

Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of various "paradoxes" of probability, and it is probably the best-written and most lucid portion of the book. The chapter then veers off into "the man in the moon" illusion, the human tendency to see patterns in randomness.

Chapter 3 touches on dowsing, and then comes the now-expected swerve into a disconnected topic, in this case the "mysterious" presence of water in a sarcophagus at Arles-sur-Tech in the Pyrenees. In the aftermath of the fairly non-coherent discussion, about all I came away with was that French TV "documentary" producers and writers are just as uninterested in fact as British and U.S. TV "documentary" producers and writers. Then there's another swerve into the pseudoscience of obtaining water in large quantities by "condensation" from the air. Then there is yet another swerve, into public fears of radioactivity. I suspect this is the only portion of the text Charpak had much input into, but it does not read any more lucidly than the rest of the book. The basic point of the discussion, to the extent I could make any sense of it, is that activists and the public irrationally worry about "artifical" and highly localized sources of radiation while seemingly being totally ignorant of natural sources spread over the entire globe which provide doses 100 or 1,000 times those of the "artifical" sources.

Chapter 4 seems to deal with the penetration of occult beliefs into French academia. But maybe not. As in the other chapters, the focus, if any, is fuzzy at best. Chapter 5 turns on the apparently subtle fact that being tolerant of others' beliefs is good, but being tolerant of obvious factual errors is bad. The book ends with a brief appendix on calculating probabilities.

I am sure that Prof. Broch teaches an excellent course and indeed I wish I could sit in on it. But this particular book is going to find few if any readers in the English-speaking world.

Nobel prizewinners can be excused for being self-satisfied, but that doesn't help the style or substance of this book.

Some parts are undeniably thought-provoking. On astrology, let's start with the fact that the earth makes one complete circuit of the sun in one year: right? Wrong. Oh. At that point I had to go back a few pages and start again. We choose the length of the year so that seasons don't drift round the calendar. Useful reference points are the equinoxes, when the earth's axis is perpendicular to the plane in which it rotates the sun. But that axis also swivels very slowly, so this year's equinox doesn't occur at exactly the same point on the orbit as did last year's. That means that the constellations _do_ gradually drift through the calendar. So their pattern at the birth of someone in, say, August in classical times is different to that of someone born in August this year. The authors do admit, however, that a minority of astrologers take this into account. And the feasible idea that season of birth could be associated with character traits is not addressed.

Other sections explain, in a tiresomely arch style, how to play pseudo-paranormal tricks on your friends. And others show, at some length, that apparently extraordinary events - - eg light bulbs blowing at the command of a TV psychic - - are really to be expected when you take into account the number of people involved. One of the better chapters is a case study of a French stone sarcophagus which seems to spontaneously fill with water. The most interesting aspect is perhaps not the explanation itself, but subsequent TV programs' persistent denial that one has been found.

The text would've benefited from better editing and translation. For example, when describing Conan Doyle's interest in the paranormal, it's a waste of time including the well-worn joke about Sherlock Holmes camping. And sentences like 'It was so good!' don't work in English.

The dominant mode of argument is the rhetorical question, eg 'How can such stupid things influence anyone of even average education?', after a quote from L Ron Hubbard. The fact is that they _do_ influence such people, but the authors lack either the imagination or inclination to try to find out why.

'Multinationals' are blamed for promoting the occult as a new kind of mass opiate, but none are named: the only specific example in this section is public TV. The authors don't seem to have noticed that business spends billions on orthodox scientific R&D, while 'New Age' ideas are spread by enthusiastic amateurs operating by grass roots networks, fly posting, and cramped stores in low rent neighbourhoods. If the authors are really as concerned as they profess about democracy, they should try to answer their own questions as to why so many curious people don't find answers in science.

Georges Charpak, the 1992 Nobel Prize winner in physics, and Henri Broch, winner of the Distinguished Skeptic Award from The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), have together written a book about the art of being a skeptic.

It's not the first book in the genre, but it's a quite pleasant read, even though it's not by far the best book ever written about the specific topic. Objectively and thoroughly (and once in a while quite funny), the authors discuss different topics and phenomena that for the Believers are truly paranormal, but the skeptic are nothing but lies, illusions, fakes, or simply very normal matters that through a messed up media are given the impression to be more remarkably than they really are.

They willingly admit that they, despite their great knowledge and long experience, do not have all the answers. But, they are indeed hardcore skeptics; and rationally explain things such as astrology, telepathy, spoon bending, levitation, et cetera.

Which is all nice and dandy, but, something is still wrong with the book. Once in a while it's just plain boring with endless mathematical formulas and calculations, and certain topics are thoroughly described while others are more or less only mentioned briefly. The largest problem is, however, how the authors completely forget one factor: namely the human.

Many people relying on, for instance, astrology, live perfectly happy lives doing so. But the authors appear to be completely ignorant to that. Instead, they mercilessly ridicule every single one who believe in matters that established science cannot or will not rationally explain, and at the end of the book they start talking about terrible nightmare scenarios which are certain to happen if more and more people start believing in irrational and unscientific ideas. The end of the world is near (the authors seem to think), unless mankind starts acting like devoted skeptics, and the only religion worth believing is Science.

This more or less fanatical propaganda for critical thinking and the excellence of science destroys what could instead have been a great book.

Georges Charpak, the 1992 Nobel Prize winner in physics, and Henri Broch, winner of the Distinguished Skeptic Award from The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), have together written a book about the art of being a skeptic.

It's not the first book in the genre, but it's a quite pleasant read, even though it's not by far the best book ever written about the specific topic. Objectively and thoroughly (and once in a while quite funny), the authors discuss different topics and phenomena that for the Believers are truly paranormal, but the skeptic are nothing but lies, illusions, fakes, or simply very normal matters that through a messed up media are given the impression to be more remarkably than they really are.

They willingly admit that they, despite their great knowledge and long experience, do not have all the answers. But, they are indeed hardcore skeptics; and rationally explain things such as astrology, telepathy, spoon bending, levitation, et cetera.

Which is all nice and dandy, but, something is still wrong with the book. Once in a while it's just plain boring with endless mathematical formulas and calculations, and certain topics are thoroughly described while others are more or less only mentioned briefly. The largest problem is, however, how the authors completely forget one factor: namely the human.

Many people relying on, for instance, astrology, live perfectly happy lives doing so. But the authors appear to be completely ignorant to that. Instead, they mercilessly ridicule every single one who believe in matters that established science cannot or will not rationally explain, and at the end of the book they start talking about terrible nightmare scenarios which are certain to happen if more and more people start believing in irrational and unscientific ideas. The end of the world is near (the authors seem to think), unless mankind starts acting like devoted skeptics, and the only religion worth believing is Science.

This more or less fanatical propaganda for critical thinking and the excellence of science destroys what could instead have been a great book.

It's a good account of scientific explanation of those physical properties of matter that look paranormal to layman. Unexpected behaviors from a human, animal or even metal creates awe and false beliefs in paranormal activities. Nature is full of such phenomenon and I believe 99% of it is still hidden. I liked reading this book from scientific and a common man's point of view. At some points it may seem a little bit random but that is because it's hard to organize scientific explanation of paranormal for average layman. It's concise and yet adequately comprehensive fullfiling its purpose.