The Future of NASA
Michael Griffin is gearin...
More Features
Looking to apply for a Discover Credit Card? Members/Subscribers Log In      
Farewell
My Problem with Big Pharma
Has Newsweek Sold Out to Big Pharma?
Dark Side of Green, Continued
The Dark Side of Green
The Green Bandwagon
Green Book Award: Nominations Wanted
Wilson Wins “Green Book Award”
The End of Total War?
Does the Desire for Peace Cause War?
[ Full Blog Archives ]
[ Who is John Horgan? ]
[ What is Horganism? ]
Mind & Brain
Medicine
Space
Technology
Ancient Life
Environment
All Newsletters
   
Discover Magazine  Blog  Archives
Horganism

« Stevens Greatest Science Books: The Next Ten | Main | Worst Science Books, Continued »



Ten Worst Science Books

A journalist/friend who once excelled at hatchet jobs has recently bought the whole Buddhist bag, including the principle of “right speech,” which commands us not to speak ill of others. Right speech, like the other tenets of Buddhism’s Eightfold Path, supposedly helps us cultivate the selflessness and compassion that are necessary precursors of enlightenment.

But I speak ill of other scientific opinion-shapers not to fulfill some petty selfish need but because of my deep and abiding concern for others. If a pundit promotes falsehoods, perhaps I can help him see what an idiot he is; if my reasoning fails to persuade him, I want to help others perceive his numbskullery. In this way, I humbly nudge all of humanity closer toward Ultimate Truth. This, you might say, is my Boddhissattva way.

It is in this spirit of modest munificence that I offer the following list of the Ten Worst Science Books. These books aren’t merely awful, of course, but harmful. Most have been bestsellers, or had some sort of significant impact, which often means—paradoxically--that they are rhetorical masterpieces.

Feel free to nominate your own Worst Science Books. They may even be on the Stevens or Discover Greatest Science Books lists (because as Yoda or some other sage once said, the opposite of a deep truth is also true: e.g., money can’t buy you love). Books by Discover bloggers whose last names start with H are ineligible. Sorry, I don't make the rules. Now, the list:

Capra, Frifjof, The Tao of Physics. Helped inspire the tedious New Age obsession with quantum mechanics.
Drexler, Eric, Engines of Creation. Bible of the pseudo-scientific cult of nanotechnology.
Edelman, Gerald, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire. Oliver Sacks, inexplicably, reveres the pretentious, obscure neural theories of the egomaniacal Edelman. Why, Oliver, why?
Gladwell, Malcolm, The Tipping Point. Chaos theory and social dynamics re-packaged into inspirational bromides. As an editor once wrote on an article I submitted, “A triumph of style over substance.”
Gould, Stephen Jay, Rocks of Ages. Gould at his pompous, verbose worst. He managed somehow both to pander and condescend to readers.
Greene, Brian, The Elegant Universe. Through this book and the spinoff TV series, Green has duped millions of innocent people into believing in things about as plausible as leprechauns.
Hamer, Dean, The God Gene. Any book by Hamer, “discoverer” of the “gay gene” and “God gene,” would have sufficed. He is an embarrassment to genetics.
Kramer, Peter, Listening to Prozac. Kramer helped Lilly make a buttload of money with his musings on a mythical drug that magically dispels depression.
Kurzweil, Ray, The Age of Spiritual Machines. Bible of the pseudo-scientific cult of cyber-evangelism.
Murray, Charles, and Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve. The worst of the worst, ethically, scientifically, intellectually.
Wilson, Edward, Consilience. Sorry, Ed, but even your writerly charm cannot mitigate this misguided manifesto for scientific imperialism. Stick with ants and biodiversity!

Comments

Joe

Bjorn Lomborg's The skeptical environmentalist must be in the top ten; Velikovsky's Worlds in collision may not make the top ten but certainly the top 20; and everything by Carlos Castenada has to be considered because he managed to fool so many people for such a long time.

csrster

I'm relieved you didn't make room for "The Quark and the Jaguar"':-)

The problem with selecting the worst science books is defining the category in such a way as to exclude run-of-the-mill pseudo-science and anti-science, but including unintentional pseudo-science and anti-science from people who think they're writing real science.

I think there is a class of science books which irritates or disturbs me most. These are beautifully written expositions of current knowledge by people who contributed significantly to that understanding - but which drift off in the final chapters into unconvincing speculation. Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" is a bit like that - you can learn a lot about thermodynamics and cosmology from him, but his ideas about consciousness are just a load of ill-conceived hand-waving. Deutsch ("The Fabric of Reality") is brilliant, weird, mind-opening stuff - until he gets to his "End-Times" stuff which is just tedious. I suppose Gell-Mann is guilty of something similar.

I don't mind the speculation itself, but in these examples the speculative material is treated as the raison d'etre of the entire book, so that it ends up, at least for most readers and reviewers, overwhelming the good stuff.

Alex Mathy

Actually, Edelman's theories (which I admit leave me as cold as they do you) have traction with one other famous neuroscientist whom you do like: Christof Koch! He said that he thought it was the best candidate theory for consciousness at the IBM conference in Almadecen, you can check on Google Video for yourself.

John Horgan

Koch likes neural Edelmanism? Say it ain't so, Christof! If Crick were still alive, he'd be appalled. I'm going to have to tell Christof that if he doesn't recant, I'll put his book Quest for Consciousness on my next Worst Books list. Joe and csrster should know that Castaneda's Teaching's of Don Juan and Gell-Mann's Quark and Jaguar were both on my initial list.

nc

Briane Greene's "The Elegant Universe" made me throw up, not because of his talk about strings (I'm perfectly happy for him to believe whatever religion he wishes), but for the rubbish in chapter 2 about special relativity.

He starts off by claiming that if two muons or people set off in opposite directions, each at speed v relative to the other, each will suffer time dilation relative to the other.

He uses no equations, and creates a real mess with his argument, which is complete gibberish. There is no end of popular books claiming that if you see two supernovas at the same time (to you), you can never work out which occurred first.

This was a fine argument for claiming there's no absolute time frame possible in 1915 when an eternal, static universe was believed in.

Unfortunately, nowadays the big bang does allow astronomers to say what time after the big bang events occurred! The big bang is a curse to special relativity religion.

Briane Greene claims general relativity = special relativity + gravity.

This is the string theorists' perspective, and it's false.

‘The special theory of relativity ... does not extend to non-uniform motion ... The laws of physics must be of such a nature that they apply to systems of reference in any kind of motion. Along this road we arrive at an extension of the postulate of relativity... The general laws of nature are to be expressed by equations which hold good for all systems of co-ordinates, that is, are co-variant with respect to any substitutions whatever (generally co-variant).' - Albert Einstein, ‘The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity’, Annalen der Physik, v49, 1916.

‘... the law of the constancy of the velocity of light. But ... the general theory of relativity cannot retain this law. On the contrary, we arrived at the result according to this latter theory, the velocity of light must always depend on the coordinates when a gravitational field is present.’ - Albert Einstein, Relativity, The Special and General Theory, Henry Holt and Co., 1920, p111.

‘... the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo must be modified, since we easily recognise that the path of a ray of light ... must in general be curvilinear...’ - Albert Einstein, The Principle of Relativity, Dover, 1923, p114.

"U-2 observations have revealed anisotropy in the 3 K blackbody radiation which bathes the universe. The radiation is a few millidegrees hotter in the direction of Leo, and cooler in the direction of Aquarius. The spread around the mean describes a cosine curve. Such observations have far reaching implications for both the history of the early universe and in predictions of its future development. Based on the measurements of anisotropy, the entire Milky Way is calculated to move through the intergalactic medium at approximately 600 km/s." - Muller, R. A., 'The cosmic background radiation and the new aether drift', Scientific American, vol. 238, May 1978, p. 64-74

There's nothing wrong with the tested equations of special relativity - E=mc^2 and the Lorentz transformation (including mass increase, length contraction, time dilation) came from electromagnetic theory in the 1890s while Einstein was a schoolboy.

It's only Einstein's flawed derivation which is in error, not the equations!

Ambitwistor

nc:

"[Greene] starts off by claiming that if two muons or people set off in opposite directions, each at speed v relative to the other, each will suffer time dilation relative to the other."

That happens to be a true statement.

"There is no end of popular books claiming that if you see two supernovas at the same time (to you), you can never work out which occurred first."

If you see them at the same time, the events were spacelike separated, and you can always find two observers who will disagree on which event happened first.

"This was a fine argument for claiming there's no absolute time frame possible in 1915 when an eternal, static universe was believed in."

Eternal, static universes have nothing to do with it.

"Unfortunately, nowadays the big bang does allow astronomers to say what time after the big bang events occurred!"

The symmetry of a Big Bang spacetime allows one to single out a set of observers with respect to which time can be measured. However, two observers who are not in this cosmological set will still disagree on the causality of spacelike separated events.

"The big bang is a curse to special relativity religion."

There is no special relativity "religion". And the Big Bang is part of general relativity, which replaces special relativity.

"Briane Greene claims general relativity = special relativity + gravity. This is the string theorists' perspective, and it's false."

It's not the "string theorists'" perspective, it's Einstein's perspective, and it's true. Special relativity is just general relativity with gravity turned off (flat spacetime).

"It's only Einstein's flawed derivation which is in error, not the equations!"

This is nonsense. The equations of relativity can be used to derive Einstein's postulates just like Einstein's postulates can be used to derive the equations of relativity. You can take either as a starting point and arrive at the other, because they are mathematically equivalent.

Mike Cook

I nominate any book by Carl Sagan. Also SILENT SPRING by Rachel Carson. Also any "environmental science" book that claims that detecting man-made substances in micro-micro amounts is tantamont to rigorously proving that those substances are guilty of something. Almost always there are many, many other factors which were never even considered, much less ruled out.

Also any book which demands that the traditional definition of a species (based on whether individuals can inter-breed with each other) should be supplanted by subjective criteria to be helpfully provided by "experts."

Jonathan Hendry


How about Horgan: The End of Science

Hiro Protagonist

John,

Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein were simply two men (both well respected and politically eclectic) who came to unpopular conclusions - not because they were marginal social scientists who wanted attention - but because they valued truth above all else. The same goes for the much maligned Arthur Jensen.

If you want some truly horrible books, check out your buddy Nick Herbert.


alkali

Kramer, Peter, Listening to Prozac. Kramer helped Lilly make a buttload of money with his musings on a mythical drug that magically dispels depression.

This is not even close to an accurate description of this book.

nc

Ambitwistor:

"There is no end of popular books claiming that if you see two supernovas at the same time (to you), you can never work out which occurred first."

"If you see them at the same time, the events were spacelike separated, and you can always find two observers who will disagree on which event happened first."

This is false: if you see two apparently (to you) simultaneous supernovas, you know time-sequence from their distances (determined by their redshifts).

The further they are, the earlier in the history of the big bang they occurred.

So Einstein was wrong, as he admitted, about special relativity.

This is why it is a lie to claim time is relative: what passes for time dilation is a local slowing down of the moving object.

The electrons consist of electromagnetic energy, with motion shared between spin and orbit etc. Move electrons, and you force them to slow down their internal motions (spin and orbit around a nucleus) so that the speed of the electromagnetic energy remains c.

The complete proof of this is in Electronics World 2003.

After stating "That [special relativity claim about no absolute time] happens to be a true statement" you then state "There is no special relativity "religion". And the Big Bang is part of general relativity, which replaces special relativity."

So you think the 1st postulate of special relativity, despite it being wrong (and admitted to be wrong by Einstein after 1915), to be "true", and then you claim it is not a religion!

Maybe you need to take a look at the rubbish about "Special Relativity Demystified" in book stores, written by minor lecturers who try to make a living off lying.

Finally, you repeat the fact that general relativity replaces special relativity, which was what I pointed out with three quotations.

At school I had this sort of thing because I had a speech defect (due to bad hearing). So people would be patronising and sneering, treating me like an idiot. So go ahead. Be like that! See if I care!!

Tina Rhea

I agree with the first comment, that Lomborg's "Skeptical Environmentalist" MUST be on this list. He was rebuked by his country's (Denmark) national Academy of Sciences for skewing his data, and I still see him cited as reason why environmentalists are fuzzy-minded idiots. Many influential people, including in the US government, use his flawed "science" as justification for blocking and ignoring environmental protection laws. It is not only a bad book, it has done and continues to do great harm.

Hal K

It is one thing to say that Penrose's book doesn't belong on the list of greatest books and another thing to say that it is one of the worst books. Who could expect an irrefutable logical argument that computers can't be conscious? That would be big news indeed. The burden of proof is on those who think computers CAN be conscious.

Ambitwistor

nc:

"if you see two apparently (to you) simultaneous supernovas, you know time-sequence from their distances (determined by their redshifts)."

You can order them chronologically according to cosmological time, but that won't change the fact that there are other observers for which supernova A happened before supernova B, and still others for which supernova B happened before supernova A. Cosmological time has nothing to do with an observer's measure of simultaneity, unless they happen to be a cosmological observer.

"So Einstein was wrong, as he admitted, about special relativity."

Einstein invented general relativity to replace special relativity. That doesn't make SR "wrong", it's just limited. Furthermore, simultaneity is still relative in GR as it is in SR, so Einstein wasn't wrong about that either.

"This is why it is a lie to claim time is relative:"

Time is relative even in Big Bang cosmology, or generically in GR.

"The electrons consist of electromagnetic energy, with motion shared between spin and orbit etc."

Electrons do not "consist of electromagnetic energy", although electromagnetic self-energy presumably contributes to their rest mass.

"Move electrons, and you force them to slow down their internal motions (spin and orbit around a nucleus) so that the speed of the electromagnetic energy remains c."

This is false.

"So you think the 1st postulate of special relativity, despite it being wrong (and admitted to be wrong by Einstein after 1915), to be "true", and then you claim it is not a religion!"

The first postulate says that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference. That remains true in general relativity; Einstein never "admitted it to be wrong". The second postulate says that the speed of light is independent of the motion of its source; that also remains true in general relativity. What general relativity changed the geometry of the spacetime being considered.

"Finally, you repeat the fact that general relativity replaces special relativity, which was what I pointed out with three quotations."

I never denied that GR replaced SR. I was merely pointing out that Greene's statements about relativity are correct.

Mike Cook

I've often wondered if the pathway to reconciling relativity with quantum mechanics lies precisely in the fact that it really does take intelligent observers at two different locations and each in relative motion to a third object being measured. Nature may not care about hypothetical speculations: the necessary criteria of intelligent observation may demand to be satisfied. There really do have to be living astronomers on opposite sides of the Earth arguing about which of two supernova really came first.

But more fundamentally than that, when observer A and observer B attempt to "simultaneously" observe an object C in motion we are already in deep doo-doo because the only phenomena we can ever really be sure are simultaneous are when twin pairs do their spooky action at a distance act.

You just can't check on simultaneity without some type of signal being in motion, which introduces relativistic considerations into the basic mechanism of observation itself. If we are going to send a signal using light we have to make sure that it truly takes the shortest path or we can't be sure of its speed (unless we insist that bent or deflected light is still really moving at c despite how long it takes to get to us.) To illustrate, consider the twin slit experiment. Some photons take a little longer to get to their destination in the diffraction pattern because all destinations in the pattern are not equi-distant from the source. But we can't really be sure of what "speed" a particular photon needed because we aren't sure of what slit it went through. Each photon has two speeds--one if it went through one slit and another if went through the other one. Try to detect which path it takes (even after the fact) and you collapse the wave function.

Even though astronomers on different sides of the planet both have atomic clocks supposedly synchronized to Greenwich mean time to a micro-nano-second, the earth is still rotating as we move through space, etc. We know for a fact that one person can't think of two different things simultaneously and now we know that two different people can't think of the same thing simultaneously!

If I were really into memes I might wonder if ideas don't come in quantum packets. Well, enough hand waving wearing the neon gloves. . .

Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer

Phew! I haven't been mentioned yet.

anomalous4

alkali says: "This is not even close to an accurate description of [Listening to Prozac]."

I agree 100%.

Listening to Prozac is not so much a "science" book per se as a "philosophy, ethics, and social meaning of psychiatric medication" book written for general readers. Kramer raises some important questions about what constitutes legitimate medical treatment of a "mental" illness, and at what point do we cross the line from simply treating the illness onto the shakier ground of creating "designer personalities"?

When I read Kramer's book, I was trying to come to terms with being on meds long-term for my chronic depression. I certainly didn't get the impression that Kramer was trying to promote either antidepressants in general or any specific drug, as did many other books I read, nor did he present himself as a medical or other scientific authority. I found his thoughts on the subject well-reasoned and very helpful in my own situation.

I doubt very much that the book did all much for Prozac sales, either. By the time it came out, Prozac was old news, and many doctors, including my own, had moved on to newer drugs.

anomalous4

Oops, should have been "did all that much for Prozac sales." Sorry!

James McWilliams

Jonathan Hendry:

It's a good thing John horgan didn't anticipate that some smart arse would suggest his book and write "Books by Discover bloggers whose last names start with H are ineligible" or your post might look a little silly
... oh. ;)

Mike Cook

What I am really saying is that nature inherently handicaps "thought experiments" because thought is a part of all real-world measurements. That really isn't such a radical statement, it is just under-appreciated. It also colors anything you say about Albert Einstein's ideas.

Stephen

I've read The Tao of Physics. I've also read The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a very similar book. Both are fine if you ignore anything that is wrong. Most of the Physics in both books are correct.

This list is like saying that BASIC causes people to become brain damaged. BASIC was fine as a beginner's introduction, as long as those beginners were guided onto better things once they were ready for it. Could BASIC be improved? You bet. Are there better choices? Likely.

For the worst Science books, I was expecting books like Darwin's Black Box, The Panda's Thumb, or maybe The Design Revolution.

Blake Stacey

@Stephen:

I suspect "Of Pandas and People" would be a better choice for this list of dismally bad books than "The Panda's Thumb".

Adam Cuerden

I'm a little surprised by the Gould inclusion: It's certainly not his best book, but it's not like it's at nearly the same level as the others.

Blake Stacey

From the original post:

"Greene, Brian, The Elegant Universe. Through this book and the spinoff TV series, Green has duped millions of innocent people into believing in things about as plausible as leprechauns."

OK, at the risk of bringing the String Wars here, I have to call this a gross mischaracterization. Leprechauns were not invented by applying the concepts of quantum mechanics to the motion of wiggly objects defined to obey special relativity. Both quantum mechanics and special relativity are bodies of knowledge in which we have extremely high levels of confidence, assuming we discuss them within their range of applicability. No shrunken Celtic gods arose in the enchanted forest because someone combined two very good ideas to build a structure for generating more ideas.

Leprechauns do not respect energy conservation or Lorentz invariance. Leprechauns do not reliably reproduce known features of the universe --- gravity and electromagnetism both fall out of string theory, when one considers closed and open strings respectively --- while tantalizing us with the difficulty of getting the rest of the details exactly right. Leprechauns never gave a physicist tools for understanding quark-gluon plasmas, never blessed a mathematician with a result in knot theory and never let students understand non-Abelian gauge theories in terms of overlapping Dirichlet branes.

The AdS/CFT correspondence ain't no lucky charms.

Daniel Morgan

I'm with Blake on The Elegant Universe.

It was a little dry in some places, but not so much so as Fabric of the Cosmos, which is a sort of "primer" for TEU. However, to call it one of the ten worst science books ever is a little extreme.

Greene freely admits that (paraphrase), "we only have partial solutions to partial equations" because we don't have the math to solve the models now, and the models themselves, it is known, will need much more refinement.

Therefore, it is hardly fair to say that Greene is "hawking" string theory as an empirically sound idea. He's exploring it, giving background and info on things like supersymmetry. He's talking about what it would mean if it were true from philosophical points of view.

I seriously object to this book being on the list. I doubt you have the expertise to know your hand from your *** when it comes to quantum physics, and therefore I am quite surprised that you feel qualified to pass such a judgment here.

PS: Along that same vein, it appears that we have a genuine relativity expert here in the thread -- nc. He completely refuted dumb ol' Brian Greene's basic errors in relativity and physics... [bwa ha ha ha]

The comments to this entry are closed.



   
Wishful Seeing
Shiny Happy People
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Sleep
Can New Neurons Teach an Old Mouse?
The Woman Who Never Forgets
Why We Get Diseases Other Primates Don't
Vital Signs: Trouble in the Nursery
Natural Selections: The Potential Pandemic You've Never Heard Of
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Death
Natural Selections: The Potential Pandemic You've Never Heard Of
Recently Covered in Discover: The Man Who Finds Planets
Sky Lights: The Dark Side of the Universe
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Meteors
Sky Lights: The Dark Side of the Universe
Islam Hits International Space Station
Neighborhood Watch Goes High Tech
Going Atomic... Again
Jaron's World: The Murder of Mystery
How to Make Anything Look Like a Toy, Round II
Raw Data: The Rigorous Study of the Ancient Mariners
Will We Ever Clone a Caveman?
This Month's Ask Discover
How Life Got a Leg Up
Mammals Stake Their Place in Jurassic Park
You Say "Ook Ook," I Say "Aak Aak"
Guilt-Free Gossip for Greens
A Greener Faith
Whatever Happened To... the Exxon Valdez?
Life After Oil
The Next Katrina
  Full access to all site content requires registration as a magazine subscriber.
© 2005 Discover Media LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
Privacy Policy / Your California Privacy Rights | Terms and Conditions | Educator's Guide | Subscribe Online Today | Online Media Kit
Customer Care | Contact Us