Debunked!: ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience

It's a good account of scientific explanation of those physical properties of matter that look paranormal to layman. Unexpected behaviors from a human, animal or even metal creates awe and false beliefs in paranormal activities. Nature is full of such phenomenon and I believe 99% of it is still hidden. I liked reading this book from scientific and a common man's point of view. At some points it may seem a little bit random but that is because it's hard to organize scientific explanation of paranormal for average layman. It's concise and yet adequately comprehensive fullfiling its purpose.

Does the paranormal exist? Is there some basis for ESP, telekinesis, astrology, and the other beliefs to which many so tightly cling? We cannot prove that they are nonsense, but we can show evidence at least that they are highly questionable and that they are used by hoaxers for fame and profit, especially when those hoaxers pretend to be taking a scientific stance. A wonderful lesson that The Amazing Randi and Penn and Teller have taught us is that magicians can make almost anything happen, or _appear_ to happen, and that scientists can get fooled watching these tricks just as well as Las Vegas audiences can. A happy, short, and informative book, _Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience_ (Johns Hopkins University Press), by Nobel prizewinner George Charpak and his colleague in scientific investigation of the paranormal Henri Broch, is a plea for intelligent avoidance of deception. It is translated from the French, but don't worry; the translator, Bart K. Holland, has himself written about the probability errors that people are prone to, and has an interesting preface to tell how he faithfully worked on the translation. Much of the book is devoted to magic tricks. There is the problem of the magician who can do a good trick, and claim it is no such thing; it is a miracle, the suspension of the laws of physics at his command. The authors want readers to know some of these tricks; if they can show you how keys can be magically bent (like rabbits can be magically produced), it makes no sense to assume that the bending is a miracle. Uri Geller is terrific at key bending, but so is author Henri Broch. And he gives away the secret here; it is a physical process no more supernatural than using a lever, but done in a hidden manner, the way all magicians do things. Geller claims a miracle; Broch claims a trick. Quite simply, if both performers produce bent keys in some covert way, whose claim is more credible? There is a wonderful ESP trick given here, illustrating the principle of surreptitiously conveying information so that it looks as if you have telepathically sent it. You can learn to stop your heart just like the yogis do, or at least you can make it seem so. There is an explanation of how the television show _Mysteries_ played up the paranormal origin of water that kept accumulating in an ancient sarcophagus, when there was a good scientific explanation already published.The book is packed with many other examples: the satanic face that appeared in the smoke from the World Trade Center, firewalking, divining rods, amazing coincidences, and more. The authors are amused by these follies, they are happy to demonstrate physical explanations for them, but they are also indignant. They are convinced that minds poisoned by pseudoscience are more tractable by those in power. "Thus we are witnessing a mystification of knowledge, which results in a concept of the world in which many things are forever outside the understanding