Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction: Where Real Science Ends…and Pseudoscience Begins
by Charles M. Wynn and Arthur W. Wiggins
Joseph Henry Press, £12.95, ISBN 030907309X

Wynn and Wiggins are American university professors, of chemistry and physics respectively, who aim to provide accessible, user-friendly guidelines that will help laypeople tell science from pseudoscience.
They explain in considerable detail how scientific method works, contrasting its (somewhat idealised) principles with the ways of the dark side: subjective measurements, appeals to emotion, unfalsifiable hypotheses, and the rest. Five of their nine chapters comprise a whirlwind tour of “the five biggest ideas of pseudoscience”, identified as UFOs/abductions, body/soul detachability, astrology, creationism, and psi. A further grab-bag of oddments follows: Bigfoot, Nessie, SHC, crystals … Skeptic readers will recognise the examples.
Though worthy and well-meaning, our professors are unlikely to win the hearts of many irrationalists. The authors make useful points, but compressing so much into 214 pages (plus index) tends to reduce solid refutations to assertions, which in the eyes of untutored readers may resemble those arguments from authority and dogma that we deplore in pseudoscientists.
Some tactical issues are worth noting. Announcing before detailed examination that the “five biggest ideas” will prove to be “riddled with flaws” may be appropriate for a scientific paper, but to laymen it smacks of prejudice. Newton’s law of gravitation would be falsified if an apple moved upward from the tree, the authors claim, having presumably never seen a branch buffeted by strong wind and losing an apple on the upswing. And it seems off-target to attack “scientific creationism” with hoary arguments about the logistics of Noah’s Ark, since modern creationists are smart enough to avoid Ark claims in favour of pot-shots at the fossil record.
Readable and likeable, but less persuasive than it might have been.

The Private Life of the Brain
by Susan Greenfield
Penguin, £5.99, ISBN 0140264914

Susan Greenfield is the neuroscientist from Oxford who is already very well known as the presenter of the BBC series Brainstory. This book takes us on a further journey trying to understand the elusive workings of the human brain.
Starting from a summary of what is known of the workings of a normal adult brain, she takes us to the brain of a child, a junkie, a nightmare and a depression to come to general conclusions and hypotheses of what makes us tick, what is a mind, what is consciousness. Is mind, reason or “self” to be explained as the extent of the active neural network? What can disturb the normal functioning of a brain? Any normal person needs a balance between feelings, emotions and mind or reason.
Why do alcohol and many drugs as well as dangerous activities give pleasure, in many different ways but with a similar underlying mechanism? What do calm pleasure and excited pleasure have in common? Why does it take only seconds to feel the action of nicotine while the effect of Prozac takes weeks? How far are we pre-programmed to have instincts? Are schizophrenic and depressed brains two opposites on the spectrum of too much and not enough consciousness, meaning cortical control of emotions? Are fear and pleasure as close as twins and is the difference between them just a little bit more of dopamine? Why are pain and depression also twins? Are fear and pain mutually exclusive? Is schizophrenia comparable to dreaming? What happens in the brain when laughing, when meditating?
Can all this be explained by a tilting of the balance between the “mind” and feelings? Will the discovery of new peptides bring more insight? The answers she proposes to those questions range from well-established facts to daringly hypothetical. Brilliantly written, thought provoking but not easy to read. Warmly recommended.

Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry
by Frank Close
Oxford University Press, £8.99, ISBN 019866267X

Lucifer’s Legacy is as much a history of particle physics as it is a description of symmetry and asymmetry in the universe. The book has its origins in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris when the author, Frank Close, noticed the otherwise perfect symmetry of the parks was broken by a headless statue of a devil, the Lucifer of the title. From here, Close sets off on a metaphorical journey in search of a unified, perfectly symmetrical physical universe.
It is a slightly contrived starting point but he rapidly leaves it behind and launches into one of the most enjoyable romps through the history of sub-atomic physics I’ve read. He pulls together some of the best stories: the Curies’ purification of radioactive elements; Henri Becquerel’s work on X-rays and JJ Thomson’s discovery of the electron, and he tells them well. He has an easy way with metaphor and I found myself understanding again concepts that I already thought I knew. My only quibble was with the biological aspects of asymmetry. Close is not a biologist and sometimes that showed. For example, at one point he describes DNA bases as amino acids (they’re not) and says that amino acids link together via their side chains (they don’t). But I suspect that only a picky ex-biochemist like me will be bothered by these very minor errors.
The second half of the book gets to grips with the concept of symmetry in physics and in particular the unification of the four forces of gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear. Once again, Close’s easy writing style and eye for metaphor makes these difficult concepts accessible and I came away with a clear vision of how and why modern physics is trying so hard to create a Grand Unified Theory of Everything.
I read this book on the train and was regularly disappointed when my short daily journeys ended. However, public reading also led to one of my more unusual commuting experiences. Many people took a second glance at the title but one woman stared in horror as she realised what I was reading. She had a Bible open on her lap and spent the rest of the journey peering at me as if she expected me to grow horns.
The book offers very little in the way of answers, which I found a relief both because science is more about questions than answers and also because those answers are simply not available. I would recommend this to anyone who has even a passing interest in why modern particle physics has evolved to its current state. It’s also a good book to offer to anyone who wants a clear summary of some of the most important discoveries in physics; most of them are there.
My final thought comes from the second paragraph of the book in which Close declares that he is not going to write a “seamy [sic] pot boiler”. Even though Lucifer’s Legacy is a good read I have to report that this is not a Jackie Collins bonkbuster. But what’s been bothering me for days is this; Close is a physicist so surely he realises that if a pot boils it steams?

Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches
by Malcolm Gaskill
4th Estate, £15.99, ISBN 1841150192

In March 1944, Scottish working-class spiritualist Helen Duncan was tried at the Old Bailey and sentenced to nine months imprisonment under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Duncan had given séances at which she had supposedly divulged secret military information, endangering Britain’s war effort. Malcolm Glaskill, a Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge, has made a detailed study of the woman in this strange case.
Duncan’s trial became a cause célèbre. The charge seemed absurd. In the middle of the 20th century, how could the British Establishment make itself ridiculous by charging someone with witchcraft? Duncan’s supporters felt there was a good hope that she would win her case. But Duncan’s defence counsel, spiritualist Charles Loseby, scored a spectacular own goal. He called 45 witnesses to give accounts of Duncan’s séances, in the hope of proving that she was a genuine medium. As Gaskill comments, “far from being overwhelmed, the jury were bored rigid.” Perhaps they were also appalled by the number of credulous people who had handed money over to Duncan in exchange for “supernatural” revelations. Duncan was found guilty. As she was led to the cells, she collapsed, screaming “Oh God! Is there a God? I never done it.”
This was the culmination of a strange career that Glaskill examines in intriguing detail. Living in an Edinburgh slum with a disabled husband, Duncan’s health was ruined as a result of bearing eight children, only six of whom survived childhood. Charging for séances enabled her to keep herself and her family alive. At her séances, spirits supposedly rapped out messages in Morse code, and materialised out of ectoplasm which looked suspiciously like white muslin. Glaskill’s admirably non-judgemental account of her life and career makes fascinating reading.

Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Transformed Mankind
by Henry Hobhouse
Papermac, £12, ISBN 0333736281

Not a new book, having been first published in 1985 before reappearing in paperback with an increase from five plants to six. Perhaps the world changed a little more in the intervening years. So what is it about quinine, sugar, tea, cotton, the potato and coca, that is so world-changing?
I expected a popular botanical science book with perhaps a bit of geography and economics thrown in for good measure. In fact it’s a quite remarkable work with perhaps the strongest emphasis being on the broader sociological impact of these plants from their earliest discovery to modern times. The linking factor in nearly all cases is slavery, serfdom or its equivalent in this country at the time of the Industrial Revolution, which the author assesses as worse.
The links with outright slavery are perhaps most obvious for sugar and cotton but there are some strange mixtures of good and evil, for example in the use of coca leaves among Peruvian silver miners working at 14,000 feet in the Andes in the 17th Century. A handout of leaves every 45 minutes by the mine owners kept altitude sickness at bay and provided a boost of energy which meant the miners needed about 25 percent less food, a considerable cost saving. And of course it kept them content. Good or evil?
Hobhouse manages to quantify economic parameters which one doesn’t normally consider; the number of slave lives per ton of silver produced for example. But it’s not just a depressing book about human oppression. The economic achievements of the early trade, particularly in sugar, tea and cotton come through vividly, not to mention the human benefits flowing from the use of quinine. But even in the early days of quinine the exploiters and charlatans were active with adulteration and selling “the wrong kind of quinine”. And of course “the church” had its finger in the control and exploitation of most of these plants.

The ParaScience Pack
by Uri Geller and Ron van der Meer
Van der Meer Publishing, £29.99, ISBN 1902413520

It’s not every book that comes complete with its own dowsing rods. Not to mention a scrying disk, a crystal supplied by a “crystal healer” and various bits of esoteric paraphernalia for testing your psychic powers. It includes instructions on how to see your own aura, and quizzes you can do to find out whether you’re psychic and whether you’ve ever been abducted by aliens without knowing it. I worked my way through the various exercises and questionnaires and discovered that I’m not psychic, and have never been abducted. No surprises there.
Though maybe I didn’t give some of it an even chance – I must admit that my flooded back garden in a rainstorm is not the ideal place or time to give dowsing a fair trial.
Joking apart, this book offers a bizarre and fascinating introduction to what Geller calls parascience and others might call pseudoscience. Clearly (if rather credulously) written, the book sets out the basic concepts behind faith healing, auras, spiritualism, reincarnation, graphology, firewalking, palmistry, astrology, levitation, out-of-body experiences and a host of other supernatural subjects. Hardened skeptic though I am, I have to admire the depth of research that has gone into the book, and the clear and concise way in which the subject matter is presented.
And the book is beautiful. Ron Van der Meer specialises in what are known as “pop-up books” but this is a totally inadequate description. His wonderful three-dimensional paper sculptures leap out of the page and amaze the reader with their beauty and complexity. Regardless of context, they are astounding and stunningly effective. Shame I can’t say the same about the dowsing rods.

The Queen’s Conjuror: the science and magic of Doctor Dee
by Benjamin Woolley
HarperCollins, £15.99, ISBN 0002571390

This fascinating book begins with a gripping introduction in which 64 years after Dee’s death a secret compartment in a chest was discovered containing strange books and mysterious papers. Their provenance and value was not recognised and some were used “for the lining of pie tins”. It was not until 1672 that Ashmole, the antiquarian whose collection formed the basis for the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, received what he had spent years searching for, the remnant of Dee’s diaries.
Born in London in the reign of Henry VIII (Protestants were the good guys), Dee survived Edward VI, Mary (Catholics were the good guys and Protestants were burned at the stake with church approval), Elizabeth I (Protestants again), apparently by changing hats at the appropriate moments. Fortunately he was a voluminous diarist, and the papers that survived, translated from Latin, Greek, and alchemical symbology, give us a rather complete picture of this curious man as scholar, mathematician, magician, spy, political adviser, calendar revisionist, astronomer, astrologer, navigator, in the days when “astrologer, mathematician and conjuror were accounted the same things”. We also learn of his lifelong dependence on “skryers” (spirit mediums), several of whom he harboured along with their families in his own household. These men duped not only him but also many of the nobility and intelligentsia of the time with their purported conversations with spirits and angels. Perhaps the most notorious of these was Edward Kelly who has 48 entries in the index and was so competent at his job that at one time he persuaded his host that the angels wanted Dee to engage in a little wife-swapping with him.
Copious notes (35 pages), an 11-page bibliography, a four-page chronology, and a 14-page index complete the book and make it a scholarly reference as well as an extraordinary insight into the intrigues, scams, and scandals of the age.

Children of the Matrix: How an Interdimentional Race Has Controlled the Planet for Thousands of Years – and Still Does
by David Icke
Bridge of Love Publications, £15, ISBN 0953881016

The Holy Grail for conspiracy theorists, as for theoretical physicists, is the construction of a TOE – a Theory of Everything – and David Icke is getting ever closer to the goal. This, his latest book (subtitle: How an interdimensional race has controlled the world for thousands of years – and still does), covers innumerable previous conspiracy stories – some familiar (Atlantis, the Templars, water fluoridation, the “murder” of Princess Diana) and some less so (Jayne Mansfield a High Priestess of Satan, Hitler a Rothschild) and shows how all of these are the work of the aliens and human-alien hybrids who walk among us and control every aspect of our lives.
Now, a TOE which invokes virtually undetectable entities with virtually unlimited paranormal powers might be regarded as a bit of a cheat in some quarters – but it certainly allows everything from the Holy Roman Empire to the labels on oil cans to be part of a single story. This is a considerable advance on even the most comprehensive previous efforts. Therefore, when I say that this book is complete baloney, I mean that as a compliment. By comparison, similar books are very incomplete baloney, indeed.
Having said that, I found the book very hard going. Reading it from start to finish makes its overall lack of structure (apart from a broad “ancient to modern” chronology) apparent and dipping into it makes your head hurt. The gory accounts of ritual child-murders (“thousands, world-wide on main sacrifice days”), the endless “eye-witness” stories of George Bush, Edward Heath, the Queen Mother (choose a celebrity) “shapeshifting” into reptilian form have a curiously deadening effect which is the opposite of the “wake-up call” which Icke presumably intends. Unsurprisingly, most of the references are to wacko web-sites and publications but – if the “mainstream” media are under reptilian control…