Pseudoscience
Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen
Workman Publishing Company, $25
Have you ever taken a personality test seriously? Or maybe you’ve wondered if you could freeze yourself in liquid nitrogen to help revitalize your body postmortem?
Human tendencies to believe in such scientific myths are anything but uncommon. In their latest collaboration, Pseudoscience, internal medicine physician Lydia Kang and historian Nate Pedersen examine such myths from the past and present and scrutinize the evidence (or lack thereof) behind them. Through conversational and entertaining prose, the pair explores why people can be so eager to believe the unbelievable — and the very real dangers of doing so.
Pseudoscience touches on a breadth of scientific fallacies, from the trite, such as flat Earth theory and fake moon landings, to the obscure. Take ley lines. First conceived in the 1920s by English archaeologist Alfred Watkins, these imaginary straight lines on maps were thought to represent ancient footpaths and trade routes that connected archaeological landmarks like medieval castles and Bronze Age fortresses. In the 1960s, English esotericist John Michell rejuvenated this false theory, interweaving it with the ancient Chinese mythological concept of “dragon paths,” which were believed to conduct energy across Earth. Michell asserted that ley lines were similar conduits of mystical energy that may have even helped ancient alien visitors land their spaceships on Earth.
What keeps Pseudoscience turning is not just a sprinkling of fascinating facts but the depth and diversity of topics it explores. Though the authors employ a light-hearted tone, their core message remains firm throughout the book: Scientific myths can have shattering consequences in the real world.
For instance, we learn how World Ice Theory, or Welteislehre, played a part in the Nazis’ faith in the false superiority of the Aryan race. Conceived by the Austrian engineer Hanns Hӧrbiger in the early 1900s, World Ice Theory baselessly claimed that ice drove cosmic events and processes — Earth’s moon was a ball of ice; the Milky Way was a ring of ice blocks; and meteors, hailstorms and geologic upheavals could be explained by various forms of ice crashing into our planet.
After World War I, as Germany increasingly became nationalistic, World Ice Theory grew into a popular cultural movement, serving as a homegrown alternative to Albert Einstein’s “Jewish” theory of relativity. As the Nazi Party rose to power and ignited World War II, Heinrich Himmler, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, invoked World Ice Theory to claim that the Aryan race “did not evolve from apes like the rest of humanity,” but rather were “cosmic gods” that emerged from “space ice.” Eventually, Adolf Hitler made World Ice Theory national doctrine.
Aside from a few vignettes of tangential fun facts that at times seem to interrupt the flow of some chapters, Pseudoscience is an engaging and carefully woven braid of science and history, likely to appeal more to fans of science history than those interested in science alone. Still, the book’s message is both timely and timeless: Skepticism about how the world around us operates is valuable, but it must be guided by science.
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