The Scientist, the Madman, the Thief and their Lightbulb
by Keith Tutt
Simon & Schuster, £7.00, ISBN 0743449762

This fascinating book covers a good selection, though admittedly not all, of the recent scientists and would-be scientists who have hoped to succeed in the search for free energy. In fact, it was first published as The Search for Free Energy in 2001, but the spin doctors must have felt that the title didn’t have enough jazz.
Tesla gets a chapter and is the only one who has actually contributed really useful products to life as we know it. Most exciting to me was the news that cold-fusion lives, that over 600 papers report independent tests which duplicate the initial Pons-Fleischmann effect, and that the hot-fusion crowd are attempting to suppress the truth. Did you know that?
There are ten interesting appendices, a good glossary and a proper index and list of references. Dr Hal Puthoff, whom most of us will remember as having been taken in big time by Uri Geller, is quoted as an authority several times. Other than that I have no major criticism.
We are not told anything about the author, which is a pity, as he writes well and presents good cases for the pros and cons of the field, but he should look up the meaning of the word ‘prolific’. Remind me to subscribe to New Energy News and Infinite Energy magazines and buy some Blacklight Power stock!

Flat Earth? Round Earth?
by Theresa Martin
Prometheus Books, $12, ISBN 1573929883

Two schoolboys argue about the shape of the world. The teacher says it’s a sphere, but Stan says it is round but flat as a pancake. “Look out the window, see for yourself ” is his argument.
Nathan sets out to prove to him the teacher is right and the earth truly is a sphere. He uses all the standard observations, round the globe travel, ship sinking below the horizon, time zonation, different shadow lengths, and the shape of the earth’s shadow on the lunar eclipse. Stan rejects them all. It is a book for children “ages 7 and up.” Arguments and proofs are appropriately simple, so youngsters can follow. The author’s intention is to teach a sceptical attitude, and introduce an understanding of evidence and proof.
Stan’s objections seem invented for the moment. Tales of global travel are made up, different shadow length are explained by a nearby sun, ships sinking are optical illusions, there may be local curvature of the Kansas plain, and a disk shaped earth will throw a circular shadow. The author’s point is that any proof can be denied by ad hoc explanations, but scientific knowledge comes from many directions and several lines of evidence. It is the balance of facts which prove the earth a sphere. The book drives home a single valuable lesson of scientific reasoning, and I think children may like it. They will, however, ask why Stan so stubbornly insists the world is flat? No reason is given. The earth curves only about 8 inches in a mile (about 8 cm in a km), which is not a bad approximation to flat. The only reason I can think of as to why Stan cannot be convinced, but remains stubbornly wedded to a flat earth, is because the Bible says so. The author does not tell us.

The Sense of Being Stared at: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind
by Rupert Sheldrake
Hutchinson, £17.99, ISBN 0091794633

This is a book about human and animal experience. It is about animals who know an earthquake is imminent, about dogs who know their owner is coming home, about creatures that know a predator is close, about people who obtain sudden knowledge about a partner’s distant accident. And people who sense they are being stared at.
It is not about the paranormal. These experiences are extra-sensory only for those who think in terms of only five senses: for Sheldrake there are six or seven at least, and there is no need to cross over into the supernatural to find them. The obstacle to research into human experience of any kind is, of course, its subjective character. There is no hard evidence for science to get its teeth into. Sheldrake offers us a sampling from his huge casefiles, and his stories are certainly impressive. But are they anything more than coincidence or delusion? Can we really build a science on anthropologists’ anecdotes about African witch-doctors, or hunters’ experience with their quarry, or animals’ restiveness before an earthquake? Even if they are backed by folklore and tradition spanning the globe and going back centuries?
Sheldrake says yes, we can. Some of these experiences – such as the sense of being stared at – are susceptible to experiment. Some 14,000 trials have been conducted, giving odds against chance of the order of 1020. And a theoretical infrastructure can be constructed, as Sheldrake demonstrates with his suggestion of the extended mind.
These effects promise breakthrough insights into the interactions between people, between animals, and between people and animals. This is a fascinating and thought-provoking book.

Eureka!: The Birth of Science
by Andrew Gregory
Icon Books UK, £6.99, ISBN 1840463740

Books on philosophy are often encyclopeadic and hard to digest, interesting but boring; those on philosophy of science or on logic even more so. Fortunately, this book suffers none of these faults.
Gregory takes us on a tour from the early beginnings, when the world was explained by myths, to the first people who dared to question those myths and laid the foundations for what today is called science.
Myths were rejected and replaced by hypotheses and theories that had to be verifiable. Choosing the best myth is a matter of taste, but then how to decide which is the best hypothesis when several are offered? Gregory describes how the tools to make that difference were developed: logic, and the notions of proof. How may we differentiate them from false proof, false logic and sophism? What made the ancient Greeks unique? Other civilizations, the Babylonians and the Egyptians, also had highly developed technologies but no science. The chapter on Euclid and geometry clearly illustrates the differences between science and technology. All this is exposed in an agreeable narrative style. Why did the Greeks develop science while other cultures stuck to technology? Probably the absence of a strong, organised religion allowed them to question the myths about the creation of the world, the why and the how of natural phenomena, the movement of celestial bodies, the shape of the Earth, the origins of diseases, and to consider different explanations. They could attack claims of magic and distinguish the natural from the supernatural; they even dared to state that magic and the supernatural do not exist, that the world is comprehensible and can be explained in a rational manner. It did not always go unpunished as Socrates experienced. They were not always right. Sometimes they very understandably took the wrong path, by lack of knowledge. They also gave us holism (Aristotle) and it took some 2,000 years before reductionism gave a new impulse to the advancement of science.
The first chapters give an overview of the evolution in thinking. Then separate chapters go deeper into astronomy and astrology, into medicine and the life sciences,into biology and alchemy.
The great quality of this book is that it reads like a novel and is (yes!) holistic in its approach. Highly recommended.

Darwin and the Barnacle
by Rebecca Stott
Faber, £14.99, ISBN 0571209661

What happens when someone brought up as a strict Christian fundamentalist abandons her faith and writes a book about Darwin? Not as much as you might imagine. As the title indicates, Darwin and the Barnacle resolutely avoids controversy by concentrating on Darwin’s obsession with this humble sea-creature.
Every student has heard the cliché that Darwin concentrated on barnacles to avoid finishing his work on human evolution. Stott emphasizes that Darwin’s barnacle studies contributed to the development of his evolutionary theories, enabling him to refine his scientific methodology, and making him a respected member of the scientific community. Stott sheds some interesting light on the idiosyncrasies of Darwin’s colleagues and predecessors. Anyone who thinks their own life is boring should compare it with that of early nineteenth century biologist Robert Grant, who spent five years obsessively studying and dissecting sea sponges before proudly announcing that he had watched a sea-sponge excrete continually for five hours.
Victorian medicine could be equally bizarre. Darwin underwent the ‘water cure’ invented by Dr Gully (who later became notorious as a result of the Bravo poisoning case). This involved clairvoyance, mesmerism and several weeks of such strange rituals as being wrapped in cold wet bedsheets for hours on end. It must have done Darwin some good. While in Gully’s Malvern nursing home, separated from his beloved barnacles, he fathered his seventh child. Darwin’s barnacles took over his life for many years.
Stott does her best to account for this, and to interest the reader in Darwin’s obsession. Darwin and the Barnacle is scholarly, well-researched and highly readable – which is more than can be said for many recent academic tomes. But you have to very interested in either Darwin or barnacles to read it.

Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distance Healing to Vitamin O
by Christopher Wanjek
Wiley & Sons, $15.95, ISBN 047143499X

In this enjoyable history of quackery, Christopher Wanjek discusses bad medicine across the centuries, from Ayurveda to Atkins. He makes a strong and heartfelt case against the current rush to the witch doctor, discussing several telling examples including the widespread use of homoeopathy, the rejection of MMR vaccination and the American craze for shark cartilage supplements.
The first section of the book is a concise and entertaining history of folklore medicine, with colourful descriptions of past plagues as a reminder of how unsuccessful it generally was.
The tone is lively and journalistic, bordering on gratingly chatty (“Let’s cut the ancients a break”) – but some background knowledge is assumed, which could be confusing for certain readers. For example, Wanjek rightly stresses the importance of randomised, doubleblind, placebo-controlled medical trials, but never defines these terms or explains why such safeguards are necessary against error and wishful thinking. Each chapter is an interesting essay in its own right, sometimes at the expense of the whole book’s coherence.
The section on bad medicine in the movies, for example, doesn’t contribute much to the main argument (although it’s highly amusing and will allow you to bore your friends witless at any action flick).
Wanjek occasionally falls into the ‘bad medicine’ trap himself. An otherwise excellent chapter on lifestyle and obesity contains an inaccurate account of the supposed long-term effects of dieting on metabolism. More dangerously, he denounces chemotherapy as “the bloodletting of the 20th century”, as if an unpleasant treatment were equivalent to a worthless one.
This approachable and well-written case against bad medicine has much to recommend it. If you’re sick of health scares, its realistic assessments of the dangers of sedentary lard-eating, antibiotic overuse, and not fastening your seatbelt are a dose of sanity.

Skeptical Odysseys: Personal Accounts by the World’s Leading Paranormal Inquirers
by Paul Kurtz
Prometheus Books, $27, ISBN 1573928844

It’s almost impossible to summarise this brick of a book briefly. Each newly-written contribution reviews a specific field and/or gives an autobiographical account of the author’s journey into scepticism, and they are a galaxy indeed: James Alcock, Steve Allen, Susan Blackmore, Antony Flew, Ken Frazier, Martin Gardner, Philip Klass, Joe Nickell, Gary Posner, Kurtz himself, and 27 others, beginning with 25 years of CSICOP, passing on to sections on specifics – parapsychology, UFOs, astronomy and the space age, astrology, creationism, alternative medicine – going from there to scepticism around the world, personal reflections, and religion, and ending with Robert Baker on From Skepticism to Humanism. The book celebrates CSICOP’s 25th birthday and does so in fine style.

Darwin’s Mistake: Antediluvian Discoveries Proves Dinosaurs and Humans Co-existed
By Dr. Hans J Zillmer
Frontier Publishing (Netherlands), £14.99, ISBN 193188207X

“The system of evolution seems convincing”, writes Dr Zillmer, but only because contrary evidence is ignored. “Our world view is so brittle that it will not survive the smallest shake.” It starts with an account of a Texas museum exhibit, a steel hammer which had been completely embedded in solid sandstone, except for the broken end of its wooden handle. A graph reproduced from “sophisticated electron microscopes” (actually from a mass spectrometer) shows that it contains no carbon (and is therefore not steel – see under ‘steel’ in any dictionary), and is 96.6% iron. “Incredibly, this material is almost entirely solid iron!” (steel is between 98% and 99.8% iron).
“Why do we not find a coelacanth that is slightly more evolved? If this species has existed for the past 64 million years, then it should come in a variety of evolutionary stages.” Not having looked up “coelacanth”, in an encyclopedia, Dr Zillmer thinks the many fossil species and the one extant species are all one. Some anti-evolution books are intellectually respectable – I reviewed one previously in The Skeptic (4.6). But this lavish volume is a work of self-satisfied ignorance.