By Carl Sagan
"A excellent publication . . . A lively security of technology . . . From the 1st web page to the final, this ebook is a manifesto for transparent thought."
*Los Angeles Times
"POWERFUL . . . A stirring safeguard of expert rationality. . . wealthy in miraculous info and lovely writing."
*The Washington put up e-book World
How do we make clever judgements approximately our more and more technology-driven lives if we do not comprehend the adaptation among the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of technological know-how? Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and unique astronomer Carl Sagan argues that medical pondering is important not just to the pursuit of fact yet to the very overall healthiness of our democratic institutions.
Casting a large internet via heritage and tradition, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the previous as witchcraft, religion therapeutic, demons, and UFOs. And but, disturbingly, in modern day so-called details age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with tales of alien abduction, channeling prior lives, and communal hallucinations commanding turning out to be cognizance and appreciate. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren music of unreason isn't just a cultural fallacious flip yet a deadly plunge into darkness that threatens our most elementary freedoms.
"COMPELLING."
*USA Today
"A transparent imaginative and prescient of what sturdy technology capacity and why it makes a distinction. . . . A testimonial to the facility of technology and a caution of the risks of unrestrained credulity."
*The Sciences
"PASSIONATE."
*San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
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Additional resources for The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Her early experiences in chemistry, partially lower than the tutelage of Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin, have been key to the UK's powerful and winning advocacy that ozone-depleting CFCs be banned around the world. remark: `Leave not anything to likelihood. fail to remember not anything. mix contradictory observations. let your self adequate time. ' prior to the invention of the thermometer, he charted the temperature curves of many illnesses. He suggested that physicians be ready to inform, from current indicators on my own, the possible prior and destiny process every one disorder. He under pressure honesty. He was once prepared to confess the restrictions of the physician's wisdom. He betrayed no embarrassment in confiding to posterity that greater than part his sufferers have been killed via the ailments he used to be treating. His thoughts in fact have been constrained; the medicine to be had to him have been mainly laxatives, emetics and narcotics. surgical procedure was once played, and cauterization. substantial additional advances have been made in classical instances via to the fall of Rome. whereas drugs within the Islamic global flourished, what in Europe was once actually a depressing age. a lot wisdom of anatomy and surgical procedure was once misplaced. Reliance on prayer and marvelous therapeutic abounded. Secular physicians turned extinct. Chants, potions, horoscopes and amulets have been favourite. Dissections of cadavers have been limited or outlawed, so these who practised drugs have been avoided from buying first-hand wisdom of the human physique. scientific learn got here to a standstill. It was once very similar to what the historian Edward Gibbon defined for the whole japanese Empire, whose capital used to be Constantinople: within the revolution of ten centuries, no longer a unmarried discovery used to be made to exalt the consideration or advertise the happiness of mankind. no longer a unmarried suggestion had been additional to the speculative structures of antiquity, and a succession of sufferer disciples grew to become of their flip the dogmatic lecturers of the subsequent servile iteration. Even at its top, pre-modern clinical perform didn't shop many. Queen Anne was once the final Stuart monarch of significant Britain. within the final seventeen years of the 17th century, she was once pregnant eighteen instances. basically 5 kids have been born alive. just one of them survived infancy. He died prior to achieving maturity, and prior to her coronation in 1702. There appears to be like no proof of a few genetic disease. She had the simplest treatment cash may purchase. ailments that when tragically carried off numerous babies and teenagers were gradually mitigated and cured by means of technology - throughout the discovery of the microbial global, through the perception that physicians and midwives may still wash their palms and sterilize their tools, via food, public health and wellbeing and sanitation measures, antibiotics, medications, vaccines, the uncovering of the molecular constitution of DNA, molecular biology, and now gene remedy. within the constructed global at the least, mom and dad at the present time have an vastly higher probability of seeing their teenagers stay to maturity than did the inheritor to the throne of 1 of the main strong international locations in the world within the overdue 17th century.