Henri Broch - Böcker

Can you walk over red-hot charcoal without burning your feet? Appear to stop the beating of your heart? Bend spoons using the power of your mind? In Debunked! Nobel Prize winner Georges Charpak and physics professor Henri Broch team up to show you the tricks of the trade and sleight of hand that keep astrologers, TV psychics, and spoon benders in business. Using only the simplest of science, the authors explore the effectiveness of horoscopes-the blander the better-and why, with a television audience in the millions, any strange, unlikely prediction is almost certain to come true. If such insider information does not impress your colleagues, why not pierce your tongue with a skewer or demonstrate your eerie powers by using telepathy and the telephone to get a distant friend to intuit the number and suit of a card picked at random. Charpak and Broch show you how. Not merely an expose of magic tricks, this book demonstrates how pseudoscientists use science, statistics, and psychology to bamboozle an audience-sometimes for fun, sometimes for profit. During the most scientifically advanced period in human history, belief in the paranormal and the supernatural is alarmingly common.Entertaining and enlightening, Debunked! is the antidote, vigorously asserting the virtues of doubt, skepticism, curiosity, and scientific knowledge. This lucid translation makes the arguments clear, understandable, and a pleasure to read.

From horoscopes to telekinesis to the Shroud of Turin, much of what is popularly accepted as a mystical or paranormal phenomenon is, in fact, bunk. Henri Broch's charged deconstruction of these and other acts reveals the hucksterism of pseudoscience. Broch provides a scientific explanation for what many accept as supernatural or psychic. He explains how some tricks, such as bending silverware with the mind, actually work. He details plausible, scientifically grounded alternative explanations for others, such as dowsing, which is the practice of finding by nonscientific means hidden veins of water, gems, metals, and other materials under the earth. Broch's hands-on experiments demystify the mysterious and explain the inexplicable. Featuring a foreword by Nobel laureate Georges Charpak and translated from French by Bart K. Holland, this persuasively argued and firmly scientific book exposes some of history's most persistent bamboozling. Be forewarned, you may never be taken in again!