author : Martin Gardner

Books

• Fads and Fallacies: in the Name of Science. 1957
• The Annotated Alice. 1960, with Lewis Carroll
• The Annotated Snark. 1962, with Lewis Carroll
• The Ambidextrous Universe. 1964
• [Aha! Insight.] 1978
• The Ambidextrous Universe: 2nd edn. 1979
• [Science: Good, Bad and Bogus.] 1981
• [Aha! Gotcha : Paradoxes to Puzzle and Delight.] 1982
• The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. 1983
• Order and Surprise. 1983
• The Sacred Beetle and other great essays in science: revised edn. 1985
• [The No-sided Professor and Other Tales of Fantasy, Humor, Mystery, and Philosophy.] 1987
• The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown. 1987, with G. K. Chesterton
• Gardner's Whys and Wherefores. 1989
• [On the Wild Side.] 1992
• [Urantia: the great cult mystery.] 1995
• [The Night is Large: collected essays 1938-1995.] 1997
• [Gardner's Workout: training the mind and entertaining the spirit.] 2001
• Mathematical Recreations
1. Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions. 1956
2. More Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions. 1958
3. Further Mathematical Diversions. 1961
4. [The Unexpected Hanging and Other Mathematical Diversion.]
5. [The Incredible Dr. Matrix.]
6. [Sixth Book of Mathematical Games.]
7. Mathematical Carnival. 1975
8. [Mathematical Magic Show.]
9. [Wheels, Life and Other Mathematical Amusements.] 1985
10. [Knotted Doughnuts and Other Mathematical Entertainments.] 1986
11. Time Travel and other mathematical bewilderments. 1988
12. [Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers.] 1997
13. [Fractal Music, Hypercards, and More.]
14. [Last Recreations: Hydras, Eggs, and Other Mathematical Mystifications.]
• Notes of a Fringe Watcher
1. [The New Age.] 1988
2. [Weird Water & Fuzzy Logic.] 1996
3. Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?. 2000

Books : reviews

Martin Gardner.
Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: debunking pseudoscience.
Norton. 2000

rating : 4 : passes the time
review : 26 January 2002

Here are many articles from Gardner's Skeptical Inquirer column "Notes of a Fringe Watcher", about pseudoscience and other way-out whacky beliefs. It covers such bizarre cases as reflexology, egg-balancing, urine therapy, Freud [how did his ideas last so long?], Carlos Castaneda's newage anthropology, the Heaven's Gate mass suicide, numerology, and also Alan Sokal's beautiful hoax. I was left amazed, and saddened, at some of the things people believe, and do.

However, I feel there is something missing from this book. In the introduction, where Gardner laments the population's deplorable ignorance of science, he says that he hopes the book might help an open-minded reader to discard a crazy belief. But I don't see how. He simply lays out the crazy beliefs for our inspection. Yet for those ignorant enough of science to think that these ideas could have any basis in reality, this bald description of those ideas surely will not help them realise otherwise. It clearly cannot be obvious to such people why these ideas are crazy. There needs to be some explanation of why. And that explanation is what is missing.