I am a long time San Diegan with a passion for local history. This book does a wonderful job of telling the history of our beloved park. There are plenty of photos with descriptive captions. Excellent text as well. Mr. Showley, My hats off to you! Thanks for a great book.

The book clearly deserves more than five stars for its effective, level-headed exposure of unscientific ideas that don't hold water (like cold fusion, the Roswell incident as a UFO invasion, homeopathy, and perpetual motion machines).

Science is now evolving more rapidly than ever before. Some estimate that the total level of scientific knowledge doubles every few years. If you are like me, you cannot hope to keep up. And politicians, television, friends, and news stories are always touting new and intriguing ideas. What really is going on? What should we pay attention to?

Professor Park has a distinguished background in physics. He directs the Washington office of the American Physical Society, and is a former chairman of the Physics department at the University of Maryland. In his work with the society, he is often called upon by the press to comment about claims made by others. This experience allowed him to develop the information in this book.

If you are like me, you also have heard of or read about many of the claims discussed in the book. But, like me, you probably never heard how it all ended up. Whatever happened to cold fusion, for example?

The book looks at all kinds of badly done science, beginning with amateurs who don't know enough to understand what they are doing. Such amateurs often run the risk of becoming fraudulent if they fail to respond candidly to questions from scientists about their work.

The good news is that society seems to be getting better at challenging the ideas that are wrong. For example, the Supreme Court decided a case, Daubert, that now requires federal judges to get independent scientists to look at claims before allowing a jury to consider a point of view espoused by some "paid" experts. Congress seems to be getting better about asking relevant questions, rather than just supporting any crackpot who shows up with a wild story about perpetual motion machines.

In other cases of voodoo science, the people doing the work just haven't been cautious enough. For example, much of the ESP research done was flawed by a design that permitted those doing the research to throw out the results of any people they suspected of deliberately guessing wrong. As you can imagine, these probably included people who got mostly wrong answers! That certainly skewed the results.

The worst offenders in perpetuating incorrect beliefs about science seem to be television (especially CBS and ABC) and top secret status for information about the government. Apparently, some people in the networks believe that crackpot ideas should be covered as "entertainment" rather than as "knowledge" or "science." So even if they know the story is probably wrong, the reporter often leaves the impression that there may be something to the claim. Shame on them!

Government keeps things as top secret that would become top embarrassments if known. As a result, our confidence in the government is eroded.

Some of the other areas uncovered in the book include Joe Newman's Energy Machine, Star Wars (SDI) technology advanced by Edward Teller, the International Space Station, a manned mission to Mars, silicon gel breast implants, vitamin O, meditation as a solution for violent crime, Dr. Deepak Chopra's invocation of quantum effects from the mind on matter, power lines as a source of disease, healing auras, and James Patterson's metal beads to generate energy.

While I agreed with all of the comments the book made, there are places where other perspectives could change your mind on the issue. For example, manned space exploration is very expensive and dangerous. Essentially, everything can be done by robots faster, safer, and cheaper. Dr. Park concludes that it makes no sense to do such exploration. I disagree. I do agree that the objectives of the manned programs need to be much more intelligently formulated. I suspect that the main advantages from manned space flight will turn out to be in developing improved leadership, innovation, and management practices. If those rewards are great enough, and I think they could be, the expense may well be worth it. But our decision should be more informed and purposeful than it has been in the past about these areas.

I hope that this wonderful book will also become available as an on-going television program, newsletter, or Web site. We need more information like this in order to be thoughtful citizens, consumers, and family members.

After you have read this book, I suggest you think about some likely off-the-wall scientific claim you have heard. Then do some research to see whether that claim is likely to be valid or not, by reading what others already know about the subject. See if you can overcome some of these misconceptions on your own. I suspect that a good place to start would be with ideas for how to add to the energy supply of the United States.

Have fun eliminating false beliefs, wherever you find them!

Park's stated purpose in writing this book is "to help the reader to recognize voodoo science and to understand the forces that seem to conspire to keep it alive." [Page 10.] He approaches this goal by first defining his terms - something that not all writers of general science books remember to do. According to Park, pathological science is when scientists manage to fool themselves. Pseudoscience is when people develop myths that use scientific terminology or pretend to be based on scientific principles, but are nothing more than the modern-day equivalent of witches and faith healers. Junk science consists of arguments deliberately constructed to fool non-scientists like jurists and/or lawmakers. Park uses the term "voodoo science" to apply to all of them.

Park also adopts E. O. Wilson's definition of science as being "the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories."

With the exception of chapter two, almost the entire book consists of different stories about how practitioners of voodoo science sell their wares. Chapter one also serves as a sort of summary of what's to come, with previews of cold fusion, perpetual motion machines, and the Patterson cell.

Chapter two, called "The Belief Engine," explains the evolutionary pressures that led to our ability to find patterns, and how that ability fosters belief in things that may or may not be true. Sprinkled throughout the rest of the book are examples of the belief engine, with reference back to chapter two, reminding the reader of what is going on as Park explains the workings of voodoo science.

Chapter three is about the placebo effect, with examples from the sellers of "Vitamin O" and Homeopathy. A key principle in Homeopathy is that "substances that produce a certain set of symptoms in a healthy person can cure those symptoms in someone who is sick." A second principle is that the less of the curative material one uses, the better its curative effect. Homeopathy thus engages itself with extreme dilution of the "medicine." With determined logic and reason, Park illustrates that the amount of medicine used in the dilution results in less than one molecule per dose. In other words, "there is no medicine in the medicine." Homeopathy is based on nothing more than the placebo effect. That's a real effect, to be sure. The voodoo science comes about in failing to understand that there is nothing else to it.

Chapters four and nine deal with aspects of voodoo science that take their breath from our modern scientific culture. There are examples of people who argue that manned space flight is the best way to do space science. Park eloquently illustrates that space science is - and probably always will be - most efficiently accomplished using space robots. But that is not what inspires politicians and the American public, and so we waste billions of dollars on manned space missions ostensibly in the name of space science. Chapter nine is similar, but deals with the junk science that often hides behind official secrecy in the armed forces. The primary example in this chapter is that of Star Wars.

Perpetual motion and cold fusion take up significant portions of the book. Chapter five, for example, is a condensed version of the cold-fusion story, complete with some rather interesting stories about congressional testimony. The other half of the chapter describes congressional action regarding perpetual-motion machines and Joe Newman (perpetual motion and infinite energy are also discussed in chapter six). One of the highlights is the story of how Senator John Glenn said to Newman: "It's a simple enough problem. You measure the input and you measure the output and you see which is larger." Glenn then asked Newman which laboratory he wanted to do the tests. Newman replied that "he objected to any tests by any laboratory on the grounds that it would be an affront to the scientists who had already vouched for his machine."

Such are the characteristics of voodoo science. They almost always deal with phenomena that are at the edge of detectabilty, there is a perpetual lack of progress, and skeptical inquirers and independent verification are not welcome.

Chapter seven is a most interesting account of the story of electromagnetic fields, power lines, and cancer. Park had some personal involvement in this field, and his accounts make for very interesting reading. With characteristic focus he illustrates how the pandemonium over power lines was derived from the classic situations and driving forces that characterize voodoo science, and how the evidence eventually settled the issue, but the myths and fears live on.

Peppered throughout the book are illustrations of illogical reasoning that forms the basis of voodoo science. One such case is the persistent reliance upon "possibilities" without evidence (what you might call wishful thinking). Park closes his book with a short but illuminating chapter on how scientists deal with possibilities.

This is an excellent book for introducing people to what it means to think like scientists. What the world really needs are more people that actually think and organize knowledge the way scientists do. This is illustrated with an amazing story of how a 9-year-old girl named Emily Rosa thought up a simple double-blind test to determine if certain mystics can actually feel the presence of another body without touching it. She though like a scientist, performed the experiment, organized the data, and formed the logical conclusion that they cannot do what they claim to do. And then she had here results published in the "Journal of the American Medical Association," becoming the youngest scientist ever to publish in a paper in a major medical journal. If only more Americans could think like Emily, we'd have far less voodoo science to worry about.

This book does a wonderful job of explaining bad science to a general reader. You don't need to know any physics or chemistry to read, understand, and enjoy this book. He discusses subjects like cold fusion, electromagnetic radiation, homeopathy, touch therapy, and host of other dubious claims. He does this clearly and logically and he points out that many people start down these paths with honest intentions but somehow cross the line into lunacy or fraud. I would recommend this book to anybody. He doesn't have the usual manner of a skeptic who pokes fun of practitioner of bogus science, he just explains what they are trying to say and clearly demonstrates that they are overwhelmingly wrong and in may cases trying to steal innocent poeple's money. Get the book you won't we sorry. He makes the point that the more the public knows about science the less likely it is to get duped by voodoo science.

The book has a great historical value. It explains the theoretical basis of the simplified methods implemented in most modern design codes. The emphasize is on strength design based on Yield Line method. But, nowadays slab design is governed by the serviceability criteria, rather than strength. The serviceability design is not well covered, which makes this book not very useful. It is an interesting book, but it is not very practical and it is not very relevant to the modern design practice.