Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic - Hardcover

Gardner, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573920967 ISBN 13: 9781573920964

Publisher: Prometheus, 1996

Synopsis

At a time when popular knowledge of basic science has sunk to a new low and books promoting angels, parapsychology, and bizarre forms of medicine and healing outnumber skeptical books by more than a thousand to one, Americans need a voice of sanity.Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic introduces readers to mind-wrenching probability paradoxes, recent attacks on the Big Bang Theory, and Marianne Williamson's success promoting The Course of Miracles, which is said to have been channeled by Jesus. Other columns address E-prime, a language that omits all forms of the verb "to be"; Norman Vincent Peale's beliefs in the paranormal; repressed memory therapy; science blunders by famous writers; the influence of Transcendental Meditation on the career of Doug Henning; a critique of "Klingon" and other artificial languages; and much more.

About this title

About the Author

Martin Gardner (1914 - 2010), the creator of Scientific American’s "Mathematical Games" column, which he wrote for more than twenty-five years, was the author of almost one hundred books, including The Annotated Night Before Christmas, The Annotated Snark, Martin Gardner’s Favorite Poetic Parodies, From the Wandering Jew to William F. Buckley Jr., and Science: Good, Bad and Bogus. For many years he was also a contributing editor to the Skeptical Inquirer.

From the Back Cover

Never before has American education in science sunk so low, or the flood of books about bogus science risen so high. Books discrediting the paranormal are outnumbered by those promoting astrology, angels, parapsychology, bizarre forms of medicine and healing, the prophecies of Nostradamus, the secrets of the Great Pyramid, attacks on evolution, and scores of similar follies. Martin Gardner is among those science writers who believe that this tide of irrationality needs to be stemmed by informed writing. For years Gardner has authored the "Notes of a Fringe Watcher" column for Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic: More Notes of a Fringe Watcher is a collection of Gardner's columns, to which are added thirty recent reviews of books that deal with science, philosophy, theology, and the paranormal.

Reviews

In an adventurous roundup of his Skeptical Inquirer columns as well as book reviews in various magazines and newspapers, Gardner takes a sharp hatchet to faith healers, theists, Norman Vincent Peale's "'feel good' Christianity," Deepak Chopra's claims for Ayurvedic medicine, beliefs in lost sunken continents and in the curative power of ordinary water and magician Doug Henning's immersion in Transcendental Meditation. In his opinionated, outspoken collection, Gardner maintains that an epidemic of "false memory syndrome" is scarring misdirected patients as well as the family members they mistakenly accuse of having sexually molested them in childhood. He charges Joseph Campbell, scholar of myth, with racism, anti-Semitism and narrow-mindedness. He dismisses the New Age bestseller A Course in Miracles (said to have been dictated by Jesus) as a crude rehash of 19th-century spiritualist ideas. Gardner applies his skeptical critical intelligence to Margaret Mead's portrayal of Samoa as a stress-free, sexually liberated Eden; and to E-Prime, a language invented by semanticist Alfred Korzybski that eliminated all forms of the verb "to be."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573920967
• ISBN 13: 9781573920964
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 260