Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic

by Martin Gardner

At a time when popular knowledge of basic science has sunk to a new low and books promoting angels, parapsychology, and bizarre forms of medicine and healing outnumber skeptical books by more than a thousand to one, Americans need a voice of sanity.Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic introduces readers to mind-wrenching probability paradoxes, recent attacks on the Big Bang Theory, and Marianne Williamson's success promoting The Course of Miracles, which is said to have been channeled by Jesus. Other columns address E-prime, a language that omits all forms of the verb "to be"; Norman Vincent Peale's beliefs in the paranormal; repressed memory therapy; science blunders by famous writers; the influence of Transcendental Meditation on the career of Doug Henning; a critique of "Klingon" and other artificial languages; and much more.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Skepticism

260 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1996

About the author

Martin Gardner was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, and published over 70 books.

Reviews

[John Anderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This would've been closer to three stars without the nearly pointless second half of the book which was made up of very brief book reviews that would've served their purpose fine in the magazine but were far too scanty on details and depth to make reading them in collected form very worthwhile.

My biggest problem otherwise would be Gardner's overall tone in regard to his negative critiques. Too often he comes off as sounding just plain arrogant.

The most glaring example of this is in an early article, when he describes Ronald Coyne who claimed to be able to see out of his glass eye, as "grossly overweight". Although this fact comes in to play later in the article when describing Coyne's stage show, his weight was reiterated at that point anyway and this earlier characterization was completely unnecessary. I very much doubt Gardner would have used those words to describe him if Coyne were a man he liked or respected.

[Rachel]

Gardner goes through published "science" articles that are pretty stupid and points out their logical flaws. This books is probably only interesting to a very few.