Description:
Do more guns mean less crime? Is AIDS caused by something other than HIV? Does our solar system have two suns? These are three of the "crazy" (some might say crackpot) ideas that physicist Robert Ehrlich explores in Nine Crazy Ideas in Science. But Ehrlich's crusade isn't to overturn established scientific thinking. His mission is to teach and promote the scientific method: techniques used to examine new ideas to see if they explain our world better than current theories do. Ehrlich's oddball and hot-button topics keep the discussion exciting and fun. But he also points out: Many ideas in science seemed crazy at one time but are now reported as being settled ... as in the case of plate tectonics, which grew out of an earlier "crazy" theory of continental drift. Some of the crazy ideas relate to our lives: AIDS, gun control, sun and radiation exposure. Others are further out there, such as the double sun theory and the possibility of time travel. For each, Ehrlich scrutinizes who the idea's proponents are and what their agendas might be. He looks for internal consistency, misapplication of statistics, how open the proponents are with their data and methods, and more. His conclusions are sometimes surprising, even to Ehrlich, who admits that his feelings about gun control changed after completing his research. Another startling finding comes in the chapter that digs into the theory that oil, coal, and gas have abiogenic origins--that they are not created from decayed vegetable matter, but were part of the Earth's original composition. A fringe, unorthodox notion, certainly. Still, substantial evidence supports the theory, and Ehrlich finds that a chemical origin for hydrocarbons better explains the observed facts. Nine Crazy Ideas in Science makes several eccentric scientific theories accessible to general readers and, more important, it teaches methods of evaluating new ideas so we can decide for ourselves whether or not they make sense. --J.B. Peck
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