DEBUNKING THEM IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE

Gardner's unique mathematical column is well known to readers of the Scientific American; but he is no less gifted as a writer on science in general. When the book was written, the names of Uri Geller, Erich von Daniken, Jeane Dixon, P. Ehrlich and E.J. Sternglass were unknown, but there was no shortage of charlatans, though there were fewer college professors among them, and except for Lysenko and other totalitarian pseudoscientists, none seem to have been motivated by political ideology.

Another fine book is De Camp's The Ancient Engineers, published in 1960 and now reprinted as a (Ballantine) paperback. A history of engineering up to the Renaissance, it records, among other things, how Hellenic science declined and finally went under in the flood of mysticism, irrationalism and obscurantism in the centuries preceding the fall of Rome.

Neither book is concerned with energy (except for foolishness like "orgone" energy); yet both, in different ways, throw some light on the irrationality of pseudoscience in the past, and help to understand the pseudoscience of the present.