Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Explanations of the Incredible
Review: Does the paranormal exist? Is there some basis for ESP, telekinesis, astrology, and the other beliefs to which many so tightly cling? We cannot prove that they are nonsense, but we can show evidence at least that they are highly questionable and that they are used by hoaxers for fame and profit, especially when those hoaxers pretend to be taking a scientific stance. A wonderful lesson that The Amazing Randi and Penn and Teller have taught us is that magicians can make almost anything happen, or _appear_ to happen, and that scientists can get fooled watching these tricks just as well as Las Vegas audiences can. A happy, short, and informative book, _Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience_ (Johns Hopkins University Press), by Nobel prizewinner George Charpak and his colleague in scientific investigation of the paranormal Henri Broch, is a plea for intelligent avoidance of deception. It is translated from the French, but don't worry; the translator, Bart K. Holland, has himself written about the probability errors that people are prone to, and has an interesting preface to tell how he faithfully worked on the translation.

Much of the book is devoted to magic tricks. There is the problem of the magician who can do a good trick, and claim it is no such thing; it is a miracle, the suspension of the laws of physics at his command. The authors want readers to know some of these tricks; if they can show you how keys can be magically bent (like rabbits can be magically produced), it makes no sense to assume that the bending is a miracle. Uri Geller is terrific at key bending, but so is author Henri Broch. And he gives away the secret here; it is a physical process no more supernatural than using a lever, but done in a hidden manner, the way all magicians do things. Geller claims a miracle; Broch claims a trick. Quite simply, if both performers produce bent keys in some covert way, whose claim is more credible? There is a wonderful ESP trick given here, illustrating the principle of surreptitiously conveying information so that it looks as if you have telepathically sent it. You can learn to stop your heart just like the yogis do, or at least you can make it seem so. There is an explanation of how the television show _Mysteries_ played up the paranormal origin of water that kept accumulating in an ancient sarcophagus, when there was a good scientific explanation already published.

The book is packed with many other examples: the satanic face that appeared in the smoke from the World Trade Center, firewalking, divining rods, amazing coincidences, and more. The authors are amused by these follies, they are happy to demonstrate physical explanations for them, but they are also indignant. They are convinced that minds poisoned by pseudoscience are more tractable by those in power. "Thus we are witnessing a mystification of knowledge, which results in a concept of the world in which many things are forever outside the understanding - and the control - of most people." Clear thinking by the public, they remind us, is vital for the action of democracy. Choices must be guided by rational thought, as much as possible. The book wonderfully proselytizes for the power of rational, scientific investigation. "Rationality, too, can lead to error," the authors remind us, "but a lot less often than ignorance and superstition will."

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Explanations of the Incredible
Review: Does the paranormal exist? Is there some basis for ESP, telekinesis, astrology, and the other beliefs to which many so tightly cling? We cannot prove that they are nonsense, but we can show evidence at least that they are highly questionable and that they are used by hoaxers for fame and profit, especially when those hoaxers pretend to be taking a scientific stance. A wonderful lesson that The Amazing Randi and Penn and Teller have taught us is that magicians can make almost anything happen, or _appear_ to happen, and that scientists can get fooled watching these tricks just as well as Las Vegas audiences can. A happy, short, and informative book, _Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience_ (Johns Hopkins University Press), by Nobel prizewinner George Charpak and his colleague in scientific investigation of the paranormal Henri Broch, is a plea for intelligent avoidance of deception. It is translated from the French, but don't worry; the translator, Bart K. Holland, has himself written about the probability errors that people are prone to, and has an interesting preface to tell how he faithfully worked on the translation.

Much of the book is devoted to magic tricks. There is the problem of the magician who can do a good trick, and claim it is no such thing; it is a miracle, the suspension of the laws of physics at his command. The authors want readers to know some of these tricks; if they can show you how keys can be magically bent (like rabbits can be magically produced), it makes no sense to assume that the bending is a miracle. Uri Geller is terrific at key bending, but so is author Henri Broch. And he gives away the secret here; it is a physical process no more supernatural than using a lever, but done in a hidden manner, the way all magicians do things. Geller claims a miracle; Broch claims a trick. Quite simply, if both performers produce bent keys in some covert way, whose claim is more credible? There is a wonderful ESP trick given here, illustrating the principle of surreptitiously conveying information so that it looks as if you have telepathically sent it. You can learn to stop your heart just like the yogis do, or at least you can make it seem so. There is an explanation of how the television show _Mysteries_ played up the paranormal origin of water that kept accumulating in an ancient sarcophagus, when there was a good scientific explanation already published.

The book is packed with many other examples: the satanic face that appeared in the smoke from the World Trade Center, firewalking, divining rods, amazing coincidences, and more. The authors are amused by these follies, they are happy to demonstrate physical explanations for them, but they are also indignant. They are convinced that minds poisoned by pseudoscience are more tractable by those in power. "Thus we are witnessing a mystification of knowledge, which results in a concept of the world in which many things are forever outside the understanding - and the control - of most people." Clear thinking by the public, they remind us, is vital for the action of democracy. Choices must be guided by rational thought, as much as possible. The book wonderfully proselytizes for the power of rational, scientific investigation. "Rationality, too, can lead to error," the authors remind us, "but a lot less often than ignorance and superstition will."

Rating:
Summary: Chaotic!
Review: For perhaps 2 decades, at the University of Nice, Prof. Broch has taught a course analyzing the claims of pseudoscience. He has also published a number of books on the topic; this is the only one ever to be translated into English. It may be the last. I assume this particular specimen was chosen because the co-author is Nobel prizewinning physicist Georges Charpak, but it was difficult for me to detect Charpak's contributions.

The bad news is that the book looks as if it were assembled by Prof. Broch sitting down and pulling material pretty much at random from the presentations in his courses. The text is never lucid and sometimes lapses into outright incoherence; I found portions to be completely unreadable.

I would recommend skipping the prologue altogether. Chapter 1 begins with Astrology and the Forer Effect; most of the discussion makes sense but illustrations and tables often don't. I would, for example, like to see someone make any sense of the table on page 12, particularly in view of the instructions to select "one box at random from each of the four columns numbered 2 to 4." Of course the columns are not numbered, but if you reread the instructions you'll see that could hardly matter! The whole book is like this. The chapter suddenly veers from astrology to a "telephone psychic" mindreading trick. Then suddenly there are very brief discussions of antiquated levitation illusions, sitting on broken glass shards and beds of nails, a 500-year-old version of "skewer through tongue," firewalking, and one of Broch's classroom demonstrations with nitinol wire. Throughout, when books are mentioned, the reference is almost always to a French-language edition, even when the book was first published in English; can you say, "no editing?"

Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of various "paradoxes" of probability, and it is probably the best-written and most lucid portion of the book. The chapter then veers off into "the man in the moon" illusion, the human tendency to see patterns in randomness.

Chapter 3 touches on dowsing, and then comes the now-expected swerve into a disconnected topic, in this case the "mysterious" presence of water in a sarcophagus at Arles-sur-Tech in the Pyrenees. In the aftermath of the fairly non-coherent discussion, about all I came away with was that French TV "documentary" producers and writers are just as uninterested in fact as British and U.S. TV "documentary" producers and writers. Then there's another swerve into the pseudoscience of obtaining water in large quantities by "condensation" from the air. Then there is yet another swerve, into public fears of radioactivity. I suspect this is the only portion of the text Charpak had much input into, but it does not read any more lucidly than the rest of the book. The basic point of the discussion, to the extent I could make any sense of it, is that activists and the public irrationally worry about "artifical" and highly localized sources of radiation while seemingly being totally ignorant of natural sources spread over the entire globe which provide doses 100 or 1,000 times those of the "artifical" sources.

Chapter 4 seems to deal with the penetration of occult beliefs into French academia. But maybe not. As in the other chapters, the focus, if any, is fuzzy at best. Chapter 5 turns on the apparently subtle fact that being tolerant of others' beliefs is good, but being tolerant of obvious factual errors is bad. The book ends with a brief appendix on calculating probabilities.

I am sure that Prof. Broch teaches an excellent course and indeed I wish I could sit in on it. But this particular book is going to find few if any readers in the English-speaking world.