Debunking Pseudoscience

Today I received the latest issue of the Notices of the American
Mathematical Society. It featured an interview with Martin Gardner, who is
well known for his 25 years as author of the "Mathematical Games" column
in Scientific American magazine, but it turns out that he has also written
books debunking pseudoscience such as Scientology and Uri Geller.

What he said that especially caught my interest was his answer to the
interviewer's question "How did you get interested in debunking
pseudoscience?"

He said that at some time during his childhood he read George McCready
Price's "The New Geology" and was convinced by it until he took a geology
course at the University of Chicago and understood where Price went wrong.
He now describes Price's book as "one of the great crank works of all
time".

Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
Received on Wed Jun 15 15:21:45 2005