Already we hear of Armageddon, in supermarket tabloids, popular magazines, and fundamentalist pronouncements — the first tap-taps of a drum roll of superstitious fervor that will grow in intensity as we approach the end of the millennium, culminating in an apocalyptic hullabaloo in the last days of the year 1999.
Skepticism
Detail from "The Last Judgement" by Michelangelo (ca. 1541)
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Resurrected bliss, and physics too?
Holey moley! Check out the full-page color ad in the New York Times Book Review two Sundays ago.
Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash
Are you reading this, aliens?
Professor John Mack is going big time.
The Nightmare (1781) by John Henry Fuseli
Witches, devils, and UFOs
I’m beginning to feel left out. You’d think I’d be the sort of fellow the aliens would go for. As an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, I spend a lot of time under the night sky.
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Get rich quick with an NTU
Any scientist who finds himself even marginally in the public eye becomes the recipient of assorted new theories of the universe from earnest natural philosophers who work outside of the mainstream of science.
Photo by David Matos on Unsplash
Heads and tails and ESP
Few subjects so rattle the equilibrium of the scientific community as ESP — extrasensory perception — especially when it comes tricked out in the garb of science. When the New York Times Magazine published a story on the work of Princeton ESP researcher Robert Jahn, one could almost hear the collective groan rise from the ivy-covered building of that New Jersey campus. This is the kind of research that most scientists would prefer to have at someone else’s institution.
Negative image of Shroud of Turin (Public Domain)
Science and miracles
By now everyone has heard the result of the carbon-14 dating tests on the Shroud of Turin, the linen cloth preserved in the cathedral at Turin, Italy, bearing the likeness of a man and purported to be the winding sheet of Christ.
Definitely not science (Public Domain)
The astrologer and the scientist
After the Reagan-inspired media blitz of the last few weeks, you have probably heard all you want to hear about astrology.
Image by D J Shin (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Close encounters of the enduring kind
They just won’t go away. They hang around up there, year after year, in their saucer-shaped craft, playing tag with airliners, and causing inexplicable blips on radar screens.
A seminar at CSICon 2018 • Photo by Brian D. Engler (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A skeptical look
Ten years ago [in 1976] a group of distinguished philosophers and scientists, disturbed by what they saw as a rising tide of interest in astrology and other pseudo-sciences, established the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.