Re: Debunking Pseudoscience

All of McCready Price's books are amazing, with their apparent erudition and
fatal flaws. Gardner dealt with them in his various books. TGF took on the
mantle and it all has a life of its own, despite being cranky pseudoscience.

I have several of Price's work and a photocopy of The New Geology- all 700
pages of it and it appears at first sight like any geology text of the
1920s. One has to root to find the fatal flaws, which are akin to YEC on
geology.

BTW John Blanchard D.D. from Pacific International University in MO is
giving a talk of YEC this Saturday in a village between Lancaster and
Preston. Usual stuff - circular reasoning from fossils etc. But can someone
show me what the status of the PIU is?

Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "gordon brown" <gbrown@euclid.colorado.edu>
To: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 8:17 PM
Subject: 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 17:24:54 2005