Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Sagan Carl & Druyan Ann

Author:Sagan, Carl & Druyan, Ann [Sagan, Carl & Druyan, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Philosophy, History, Psychology
ISBN: 9780307801043
Goodreads: 11516715
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1995-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

At the borders of science—and sometimes as a carry-over from prescientific thinking—lurks a range of ideas that are appealing, or at least modestly mind-boggling, but that have not been conscientiously worked over with a baloney detection kit, at least by their advocates: the notion, say, that the Earth’s surface is on the inside, not the outside, of a sphere; or claims that you can levitate yourself by meditating and that ballet dancers and basketball players routinely get up so high by levitating; or the proposition that I have something called a soul, made not of matter or energy, but of something else for which there is no other evidence, and which after my death might return to animate a cow or a worm.

Typical offerings of pseudoscience and superstition—this is merely a representative, not a comprehensive list—are astrology; the Bermuda Triangle; “Big Foot” and the Loch Ness monster; ghosts; the “evil eye”; multicolored halolike “auras” said to surround the heads of everyone (with colors personalized); extrasensory perception (ESP), such as telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, and “remote viewing” of distant places; the belief that 13 is an “unlucky” number (because of which many no-nonsense office buildings and hotels in America pass directly from the 12th to the 14th floors—why take chances?); bleeding statues; the conviction that carrying the severed foot of a rabbit around with you brings good luck; divining rods, dowsing, and water witching; “facilitated communication” in autism; the belief that razor blades stay sharper when kept inside small cardboard pyramids, and other tenets of “pyramidology”; phone calls (none of them collect) from the dead; the prophecies of Nostradamus; the alleged discovery that untrained flatworms can learn a task by eating the ground-up remains of other, better educated flatworms; the notion that more crimes are committed when the Moon is full; palmistry; numerology; polygraphy; comets, tea leaves, and “monstrous” births as harbingers of future events (plus the divinations fashionable in earlier epochs, accomplished by viewing entrails, smoke, the shapes of flames, shadows, and excrement; listening to gurgling stomachs; and even, for a brief period, examining tables of logarithms); “photography” of past events, such as the crucifixion of Jesus; a Russian elephant that speaks fluently; “sensitives” who, when carelessly blindfolded, read books with their fingertips; Edgar Cayce (who predicted that in the 1960s the “lost” continent of Atlantis would “rise”) and other “prophets,” sleeping and awake; diet quackery; out-of-body (e.g., near-death) experiences interpreted as real events in the external world; faith-healer fraud; Ouija boards; the emotional lives of geraniums, uncovered by intrepid use of a “lie detector”; water remembering what molecules used to be dissolved in it; telling character from facial features or bumps on the head; the “hundredth monkey” confusion and other claims that whatever a small fraction of us wants to be true really is true; human beings spontaneously bursting into flame and being burned to a crisp; 3-cycle bio-rhythms; perpetual motion machines, promising unlimited supplies of energy (but all of which, for one reason or another, are withheld from close

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