Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness To Fraud by Robert L. ParkMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Finally, a popular science book that was interesting, informative, and well-written. As someone who enjoys science, but doesn't have much of a scientific education, I found the explanations in this book perfectly easy to understand. I especially appreciated the discussions on physics and why certain pseudo-scientific ideas can't be right unless all of understood physics are wrong. I thought the sections on homeopathic "medicine" and EMF radiation were especially effectively written.
The one thing that stood out as kind of odd to me is the chapter on space and space exploration. It doesn't seem to fit into the flow of the rest of the book, and reads like it was jammed in as an afterthought. It's a good chapter, explaining why the billions of dollars that have been spent on various space programs have not returned enough scientific results to be worth it. However, a better fit with the topic of the book, in my opinion, would have been an examination of something like the moon hoax theories and why they're wrong. I hadn't thought about the lack of results from the money spent on manned missions to space, so I appreciated that, but the chapter lacked coherence with the rest of the book.
Overall, a great popular science book, especially for people interested in physics and crank and pseudo-scientists involved with "cold fusion" and perpetual motion machines.
Because I read the paper edition of this book, I am including my highlights here:
I came to realize that many people choose scientific beliefs the same way they choose to be Methodists, or Democrats, or Chicago Cubs fans. They judge science by how well it agrees with the way they want the world to be. p. ix
"The most common of all follies," wrote H.L. Mencken, "is to believe passionately in the palpably untrue." p. 31
People will work every bit as hard to fool themselves as they will to fool others - which makes it very difficult to tell just where the line between foolishness and rad is located. p. 31
It is not so much knowledge of science that the public needs as a scientific worldview - an understanding that we live in an orderly universe, governed by physical laws that cannot be circumvented. p. 40
Simplistic arguments and homespun humor are more effective in such a debate than citing the laws of thermodynamics. Debate has a way of seeming to elevate a controversy into an argument between scientific equals. It is an arena made for voodoo science. p. 42-3
[Re: homeopathic "medicine"] To be precise, at a dilution of 30X you would have to drink 7,574 gallons of the solution to expect to get just one molecule of the medicine. p. 53
Few scientists or inventors set out to commit fraud. In the beginning, most believe they have made a great discovery. But what happens when they finally realize that things are not behaving as they believed? p. 104
It is ingrained in the American character to believe that a simple, virtuous man can accomplish things that are beyond the reach of closed-minded, so-called experts. p. 108
...it never pays to underestimate the human capacity for self-deception.... p. 122
The officials at the utility companies who were responsible for venture capital investments ... mistrusted the authority of science. That's not the same as mistrusting scientists. You should mistrust scientists; all sorts of outrageous claims are made by people who represent themselves as scientists. p. 135
Whether electromagnetic radiation is ionizing is independent of the intensity, or number, of photons; it depends only on the energy of the individual photons.
Breaking a chemical bond with a photon is like throwing stones at something on the other side of a river. If you can't throw that far, it won't matter how many stones you throw. p. 147
It is a general rule in epidemiology that if a better measure of a suspected agent results in a lower risk, there is almost certainly an unidentified "confounding factor." p. 156
That depends, of course, on what you mean by "possible". Richard Wilson, a Harvard physicist who had researched the problem, illustrated "possible" this way: Suppose someone tells you a dog is running down the center of Fifth Avenue. You might think it unusual, but it's certainly possible, and you would have no reason to doubt the story. If the claim is that it's a lion running down Fifth Avenue, it's still possible, but you would probably want some sort of supporting evidence - perhaps a report of a lion escaping from the Bronx Zoo. But if someone tells you a stegosaurus is running down Fifth Avenue, you would assume that he's mistaken. In some sense it might be "possible" the he's seen a stegosaurus, but it's far more likely that he saw a fog and thought it was a stegosaurus. Indeed, most reasonable people would agree that the possibility that there could really be a stegosaurus running down Fifth Avenue is too small to even bother checking out. p. 160-161
In the long run, however, episodes like Roswell leave the government almost powerless to reassure its citizens in the face of far-fetched conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific hogwash. p. 181
Galaxies collided, stars exploded, worlds were obliterated. Humans were powerless before such forces. But terror mingled with wonder. Wonder that fragile, self-replicating specks of matter, trapped on a tiny planet for a few dozen orbits about an undistinguished star among countless other stars in one of billions of galaxies, have managed to figure all this out. That is perhaps the strangest thing about the universe. Strange and very wonderful. p. 213
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