Let me note the recent passing of Lyall Watson, aged 69, author of the super bestseller “Supernature,” published in 1973, just in time to ride the tsunami of New Age fads that defined the time.
Articles with Pseudoscience
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Hurry, hurry, step right up…
When P. T Barnum said “There’s a sucker born every minute,” he got it wrong.
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A close shave with Occam’s razor
Why has the scientific community been so unwelcoming to such New Age gurus as Rupert Sheldrake, Russell Targ, Deepak Chopra, Harold Puthoff, and the like?
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Flying high
A friend sent me the following quote, from the now-deceased yogi Neem Karoli Baba: “It is better to see God in everything than to try and figure it out.”
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The meaning of life?
“The most common of all follies,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.”
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If it walks like a quack, and quacks like a quack…
Scientists tend to resist any attempt to infuse their work with spiritual values. They are fearful, rightly so, of diluting a successful knowledge-generating methodology with “mysticism.” With creationists, pseudoscientists and New Agers storming the gates, intent on bringing down the walls, who can blame scientists for jealously maintaining their aloofness from “spirituality.”
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Alternatives: For amusement only
In 1770, an English country doctor named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had previously contracted cowpox, a relatively mild disease of cattle, were immune to the more virulent human affliction, smallpox. His observation led to the development of a cowpox vaccine for the prevention of smallpox.
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Astrology a ‘dirty puddle’
Recently, an astronomer at the Lick Observatory in California found in the institution’s library a horoscope cast by the 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler for an Austrian nobleman, Hans Hannibal Huetter von Huetterhofen.
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Prying open Darwin’s ‘Black Box’
Some weeks ago I described certain South America ants that tend fungal gardens in underground chambers. They leave the nest to cut bits of leaves from nearby vegetation.
A parapsychological experiment • Image by Francis Wickware (Public Domain)
Is it mind over matter, or mind over data?
In a basement lab of Princeton University’s engineering school, a group of scientists is investigating the powers of mind over matter.