Pseudoscience: An Amusing History of Crackpot Ideas and Why We Love Them

Physician Kang and journalist Pedersen follow up their 2017 collaboration, Quackery, with a fizzy survey of outlandish theories from throughout history. The authors explain that polygraphs test for fear rather than falsehoods, and that the apocalypse many believed would happen in December 2012 was based on a superficial understanding of the Mayan calendar’s cyclical ages. Offering scientific explanations for seemingly supernatural phenomena, they suggest that the unusual alignment of true and magnetic north in parts of the Bermuda Triangle causes navigational difficulties that have likely contributed to the relatively high number of shipwrecks there. Kang and Pedersen bring dry humor to the proceedings, as when they close out their discussion of “rumpologists” who purport to divine a person’s future from the shape of their rear end with the quip: “No word yet on how a surgical Brazilian butt lift might alter your fate.” Though the authors debunk bigfoot, crop circles, and ghosts, the most intriguing chapters discuss more baroque theories, such as 20th-century Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger’s contention, derived exclusively from dreams, that much of the universe was created after a “waterlogged star” crashed into the sun and sprayed ice blocks deep into space, where they gave rise to countless solar systems. A wry takedown of bogus beliefs, this entertains. Photos. (Feb.)