Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud by Robert L. Park (2000, Hardcover)

Synopsis
Parks humorously cuts his way through a forest of scientific proclamations of varying legitimacy in an effort to raise scientific literacy. His method is out-and-out debunking of fraudulent sciences, popular misconceptions, and scientific malapropisms from Deepak Chopra to the International Space Station.

Key Details
Author:	Robert L. Park
Language:	English
Publisher:	Oxford Univ Pr
Format:	Hardcover
ISBN-10:	0195135156
ISBN-13:	9780195135152

Size
Length:	230 pages
Thickness:	1 in
Weight:	18.4 oz

Publisher's Note
In a time of dazzling scientific progress, how are we to separate genuine breakthroughs from the noisy gaggle of false claims? Touching on everything from Deepak Chopra's "quantum alternative to growing old," and "free energy" machines, to unwarranted hype surrounding the International Space Station, Robert L. Park leads us through the dim back alleys of fringe science, down the gleaming corridors of Washington power and even into our evolutionary past to search out the origins of voodoo science. Along the way, Park offers some simple and engaging science lessons, showing us that you don't have to be a scientist to spot the foolish and fraudulent science that swirls around us.
While incorporating elements of high humor, from Joe Newman and his Energy Machine to the French "sniffer plane," this hard-hitting account also tallies the cost: the billions spent by the public on worthless therapies, the tax dollars squandered on huge government projects that are doomed to fail, the investors bilked by schemes that violate the most fundamental laws of nature. But the greater cost is human: fear of imaginary dangers, reliance on magical cures, and above all, a sort of upside-down view of how the world works.
To expose the forces that sustain voodoo science, Park closely examines the role of the media, the courts, bureaucrats and politicians, as well as the scientific community. Scientists, he observes, insist that the cure for voodoo science is to raise the general scientific literacy. But what is it that a scientifically literate society should know? It is not specific knowledge of science the public needs, Park argues, so much as a scientific world view--an understanding that we live in an orderly universe governed by natural laws that cannot be circumvented by magic or miracles.

Touching on everything from Deepak Chopra's "quantum alternative to growing old," and "free energy" machines, to unwarranted hype surrounding the International Space Station, Robert L. Park leads us through the dim back alleys of fringe science, down the gleaming corridors of Washington power and even into our evolutionary past to search out the origins of voodoo science. Along the way, Park offers some simple and engaging science lessons, showing us that you don't have to be a scientist to spot the foolish and fraudulent science that swirls around us.

Industry Reviews
"Anyone who reads Parks' weekly one-page e-mail missive from the APS, "What's New", knows his deft and humorous touch. His acerbic wit finds a perfect match in the book-length forum of VOODOO SCIENCE...Park is at his best in providing the clear and cogent physics background that exposes the errors in the examples he chooses. The physics lessons that come as part of the book are almost worth the cover price by themselves."
Issues in Science & Technology

"His book reads like news, critically recounted by someone who has had first-hand knowledge of the facts."
Times Literary Supplement - Luciano Floridi (06/15/2001)

"Nothing and nobody are safe from Park's gaze, which ranges across the absurd and the sublime with equal impartiality....Whatever else you may think about pseudoscience, at least its' entertaining."
New York Times - Ed Regis (06/04/2000)