A strange event happened to me on the way to town: half way through the journey I spotted a van with the word “Lux” on it; I cleverly thought of “Lux aeternus”; minutes later I spotted a poster on a shop window with these same (only these same) words. What are the chances of this happening? Is it coincidence? Or is somebody up there trying to tell me something? Reading while simultaneously listening to the radio frequently results in me finding a clash of the two same words, written and spoken. Is this coincidence? Can it be explained scientifically or are any conclusions I make based on these observations just pseudoscience?
William Williams (now there is a coincidence, I’m a William too) has taken a difficult area of study and made a remarkable encyclopedia out of it; it is also immensely entertaining. He approaches the subject “from the point of view of a scientist”. His aim: to generate skepticism. His introductory chapter comparing science with pseudoscience is exemplary. I immediately compared it with Lewis Wolpert’s “non‐science” (Wolpert, 1992): index‐wise, Williams does not recognise “non‐science” and Wolpert does not recognise “pseudoscience”. (Not a coincidence, Williams does not cite Wolpert either.) So very quickly I am getting confused.
Forget the definitions. I get onto the A‐Z; much more appealing. Well, you have heard them all before, but I will remind you: oozing ectoplasm, spontaneous combustion (remember Krook, Bleak House?), superorganisms (no coincidence, the spelling is correct), raining frogs, weeping statues of the Virgin Mary, alien abductions and the Flat Earth Society (“Earth is flat and has five sides”). More? Soviet Science, Louis Pasteur, Charles Darwin, Conan Doyle and Freud. Like Wolpert, Williams also has space to criticize Karl Popper. And William Harvey and Thomas Kuhn.
Richard Dawkins has maintained that while we should keep an open mind about knowledge, it should not be so open that our brains fall out. Even the best of scientists get it wrong: Lord Kelvin’s views are actually nearer to the Flat Earth Society’s than they are to Darwin. (He misjudged the age of the Earth.) While this is indeed an immensely entertaining book (you can read it cover to cover), I personally have simply got better things to do with my time; for those into pseudoscience, nonscience or simply just nonsense, this is the book for you: Jerome Clark (1993) gives you (and me, it seems) some advice on how to live with anomalies. Despite Kelvin’s shortcomings, I will stick with his solid reductionist scientific methodology: “If ye cannae make a model oot yer observation, ye dinnae un’erstan’ it”. Postscript: my electronic typewriter failed at this point.
