Crank science is fascinating to me, and the more elaborate the unfounded theories get, the more so. Just as a collection and overview of some of the classics of the cranks, this book is already invaluable. Above and beyond the pure review of mad scientists’ view of the world, this book raises the issue, in several places, of whether or not these cranks should be allowed to do what they do, and how the public should and should not receive them. Gardner wrote this in the late 1950s, and his perspective is clearly heavily influenced by the Velikovsky incident. Velikovsky published fairly outrageous and quite original theories on the influence of catastrophic astronomical events on world history, most notable the two near crashings of a comet that was later to become the planet Venus into historic Earth, and caused a big stir when scientists objected against Worlds in Collision having been published at all, and defenders of free speech rushed to the madman’s defense. Gardner’s position, as that of so many scientists, is unforgiving. He doesn’t want to restrict the ability of cranks to do their thing, but he doesn’t like them getting publicity when very clearly their work is not up to scientific standards. I am somewhat torn on this. I love the strange poetry and creativity in the these works, abd it would be a shame to lose these voices, even if their contributions to scientific discourse are not of the usual, incrementally explarative, kind.
The notion that an unsuspecting an uneducated public needs to be protected from misleading, sensationalist accounts that do damage to science education to me seems overly controlling and snobbish; but on the other hand, the statistics time and again prove that people do in fact believe in UFO’s, the existence of angels, the literal truth of the bible and any number of other theories at obvious odds with accepted scientific fact, and more importantly, more often than not, such beliefs will have negative practical consequences. It probably is a good idea, then, to prevent access of propagandists of these beliefs to institutions of higher education and the academic discourse, to avoid giving the public credibility they so hungrily desire. On the other hand, this shoehorning of thought into usability, fact and value leaves me somewhat uncomfortable.
Deprecated: Function link_pages is deprecated since version 2.1.0! Use wp_link_pages() instead. in /mnt/web224/a3/17/5110917/htdocs/engine/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6170