This is a remarkable book. Martin Gardner was an outstanding investigator of pseudo-science. His book covers 26 different topics. And, several overarching themes emerge.
The first one is that pseudo-science is not always a trivial topic that provides entertainment for the rest of us. Sometimes, it can be downright dangerous as when pseudo-science in medicine can result in egregiously bad treatments resulting in the patient’s death when the latter could have easily been saved with conventional medicine.
At other times, pseudo-science can be downright catastrophic at the societal and global level. In the US, flawed views on races and anthropology supported a racism that violently exploited a large minority for over a century. In Russia, flawed theories of genetics emasculated the Russian community of geneticists that were relegated to camps in Siberia and elsewhere in the 1930s. Many of them died or disappeared without having been able to contribute to their field (Ch 12. Lysenkoism). Similar flawed anthropological theories lead Hitler to attempt to entirely eliminate the Jewish population in Germany. He nearly succeeded and took the entire World down with him into WWII (Ch 13. Apologists for Hate).
It is astonishing how gutsy or delusional many pseudo-scientists are. Many of them have waged numerous, prolific, and public attacks on the luminaries of their time including Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein. And, these pseudo scientists did not have any of the necessary knowledge in science or mathematics to be worthy participants in scientific debates within the specialized relevant scientific communities at the time. When they are entirely ignored by the scientific bodies, they claim to be isolated and misunderstood geniuses way ahead of their time such as Copernicus and Galileo were. This is a most common pattern of megalomaniac pseudo-scientists.
However, what may be the most surprising is how many of the pseudo-science myths that Gardner investigates are still very much prevalent today. Just to mention a few: Dianetics-Scientology, homeopathy, naturopathy, Bates method (eye exercise to improve eyesight), creationism-Intelligent Design, and organic-farming.
In any case, this is a great read especially when you consider this book was first written in 1952.
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From the Publisher
Check out these exciting books by Martin Gardner from Dover Publications
Martin Gardner was a renowned author who published over 70 books on subjects from science and math to poetry and religion. He also had a lifelong passion for magic tricks and puzzles. Well known for his mathematical games column in Scientific American and his "Trick of the Month" in Physics Teacher magazine, Gardner attracted a loyal following with his intelligence, wit, and imagination.
Martin Gardner: A Remembrance The worldwide mathematical community was saddened by the death of Martin Gardner on May 22, 2010. Martin was 95 years old when he died, and had written 70 or 80 books during his long lifetime as an author. Martin's first Dover books were published in 1956 and 1957: Mathematics, Magic and Mystery, one of the first popular books on the intellectual excitement of mathematics to reach a wide audience, and Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, certainly one of the first popular books to cast a devastatingly skeptical eye on the claims of pseudoscience and the many guises in which the modern world has given rise to it. Both of these pioneering books are still in print with Dover today along with more than a dozen other titles of Martin's books. They run the gamut from his elementary Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing, which has been enjoyed by generations of younger readers since the 1980s, to the more demanding The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings, which Dover published in its final revised form in 2005.
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