This posthumous selection from Bob Schadewald's published and unpublished essays (skillfully edited by Bob's sister, Lois) is an account of several varieties of pseudoscience, including flat earth, perpetual motion, Velikovsky, creationism, and predictions of the end of the world. It succeeds on several levels. First, as an very readable and entertaining account of subjects that usually aren't dealt with in standard science textbooks, and also as a serious examination of philosophical questions relating to our interpretation of the evidence that forms our models of the natural world.
Bob was fascinated by independent thinkers. He followed with great interest the writings of people who refused to accept conventional and accepted science, preferring to invent their own personal world-view, contemptuous of established mainstream science. Bob felt that to fully understand what science is and how it is done, we should also look at the misguided and eccentric ideas of those who don't fully grasp the methods of science, or who reject them. Bob knew many of these people personally. His interviews with Immanuel Velikovsky and flat-earther Charles Johnson are included in this book. Bob treats his subjects with respect, while, clearly revealing why their ideas were flawed and mistaken.
Eccentric scientific ideas, and the folks who promote them, are the focus of this book. Such colorful characters are mostly harmless eccentrics who do no serious harm to science. But Bob also looks at various creationists who freely engaged in "lying for God" in their efforts to deny evolution and replace it with "creation science". They would be as irrelevant to science as the flat earthers, were it not for the fact that their theories are even today persuasive to religious fundamentalists, especially in the USA. Their motivation isn't scientific inquiry. They have a social and political agenda.
What do all of these have in common? The book title says it. These "independent thinkers" build an elaborate world-view of their own, as an alternative to the accepted scientific world-view. Scornful of the "authority" of science, they are fully confident that their own intuitive "common-sense" is sufficient to answer the great questions that the collective scientific enterprise can not. Nor do they doubt that their personal, naive insights, uncorrupted by higher education, can reveal truths that highly trained scientists are too blind to see.
Concluding chapters deal with "The Philosophy of Pseudoscience" and "Science Versus Pseudoscience." Though this book may seem to cover disparate subjects, one comes away with a clearer understanding that they all have much in common. This is an informative and entertaining book of continuing relevance, for fringe ideas of this sort never die, but are perpetually reborn in new clothing.
You won't need a science education to enjoy and learn from this book. But those who do can appreciate it as well.
- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Xlibris (August 27, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1436304342
- ISBN-13: 978-1436304344
- Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Customer Reviews: 1 customer rating
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#4,740,734 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6379 in Christian Apologetics (Books)
- #863 in Creationism
- #19822 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
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