Quotes from Martin Gardner

Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals — the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.

Let us hope that Lysenko's success in Russia will serve for many generations to come as another reminder to the world of how quickly and easily a science can be corrupted when ignorant political leaders deem themselves competent to arbitrate scientific disputes.

The Rail Fence Cipher Suppose

My wife and I own a cat we call Eureka, after Dorothy's cat in the fourth Oz book. In Eureka's dim mind she must be a kind of polytheist, fed as she is by the two of us, and by neighbors when we take a trip; surrounded on all sides by giant creatures who move about on their hind legs to do things utterly beyond her ken. But we who are her gods have a power of speculation far greater than that of her tiny feline brain.

We cannot tell that we are constantly splitting into duplicate selves because our consciousness rides smoothly along only one path in the endlessly forking chains

journalist of the occult, and a firm believer in ghosts, poltergeists, levitations, dowsing, PK (psychokinesis), ESP, and every other aspect of the psychic scene. After dismissing classical astrology as pseudoscience, in his four-column entry on astrology, Wilson goes on to defend what he calls "astro- biology"-the view that positions of the sun, moon, and planets strongly influence human personality and behavior.

University of Chicago is a Baptist school, where atheist professors teach Jewish students about St. Thomas Aquinas.

The notion that relativity physics supports the avoidance of value judgments in anthropology, for example, or a relativism with respect to morals, is absurd. Actually, relativity introduces a whole series of new "absolutes.

Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation …. Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes

Debunking bad science should be constant obligation of the science community, even if it takes time away from serious research or seems to be a losing battle.

It is a fortunate and astonishing fact that the fundamental laws of our fantastic fidgety universe are based on relatively simple equations. If it were otherwise, we surely would know less than we know now about how our universe behaves, and Newton and Leibniz would probably never have invented (or discovered?) calculus.