This is a review of this book by James P. Hogan. Let me star off by saying I bought the book, I read the book and I gave it to a friend. I had to restrain myself from throwing it against the wall every few pages as the drivel in it is that offensive.
I am a physicist, I am one of these people who according to the book goes about suppressing the real truth of the universe for well I'm not sure what reason exactly. To prop up the establishment what ever that may be? To put things mildly the premise of the book is insulting on a proffesional level.
The book is divided into chapters dealing with a variety of things, the first several such deal with physics so I am quallified to judge the validity of the arguements. I had an incredibly difficult time reading this...it was worse by far then correcting student tests, or reading evaluations of my performance as a teacher.
He starts off with astronomy and that Russian nutjob who thinks that you need to interpret the ancient babylonian sagas literally. Venus and earth apparently suffered a close pass and mana from heaven was petroleum products from venus. Two words: Rochet's Limit. He goes on to further propose re-organizations of the solar system where earth and venus started out elsewhere. Needless to say no one even considers the energy requirements for whole scale re-arrangements of the solar system and instead they focus on what seems to be an error in Dr. Sagan's back of the envelope calculations disproving this whole mess. As a theorist once told us "You have to give some one a factor of 2, pi or even 2 pi." Largely because such things are easy to miss in equations.
He then moves on to cosmology and relativity. Apparently all the careful experiement done with orbiting atomic clocks and the other proofs of relativity are all erronous. My mind just boggles at the drivel and I even went so far as to pull out "Caldrons in the Cosmos" to check what the Astrophysicists had to say.
We next meet intellegent design. Well I suspect an evolutionary biologist would turn over in his grave and pull his hair out reading these arguements but I'm not qualified to comment specificially. Here is where I realized the great danger of the book, it is well written and has persuavely documented arguements (as in there are huge lists of references in the back of the book). But BS is by its nature BS regardless of the pedigree of the bull producing it.
Then next we find out HIV isn't a virus. oh...right so all the researchers on the topic and the huge room full of HIV virus being used for research I saw in a documentary one time mean what?
Then DDT is presented as being the victem of government beurocratic unfair regulation. This might or might not be true as the legal basis of the ban seems a bit odd, but then again I'm not a lawyer.
Of course what quack science book would not have a section on Climate change. The trouble is here again the excellent writing is a true negative. Computer models are subject to GIGO anyone who works with them knows that. The more complex the model the more this is the case. However, no one discounts completely the model predictions. It is also hard to imagine people who do this would not be aware of sunspot data and take it into account. It's painful to read this.
Asbestos comes up. This one would have you believe the twin towers would be still standing if they had used asbestoes in them. There are two kinds of asbestos and yes one is not anywhere near as toxic as the other but...
There are other sections but this covers what I recall. Reading the book was personally painful and very hard not because of poor writing but just because its difficult to read garbage and know, especially since the arguments in areas I have no competency seem quite compelling, that people who don't have my background might actually believe this in the area where I know it is wrong.
As a last comment it is also painful to read this book because part of why people become scientists is to find out why, how, and how come? We are human and generally speaking no more willing to change our beliefs then the next person. But at the end of the day it is hard to argue with the universe and even if one generation does so successfully the next probably won't. If you can borrow this book from a library I would recommend reading it just to get a feeling for the issue of quack sience there is out there. I can't say definitively all statements in the book are false I can say that all the sections dealing with physics are in error and often serious and fundamental errors. I will make the assumption that if James P. Hogan gets them wrong there is a high chance the rest of the book is also erronous in its claims. The first few chapters are available in the Baen site for free.
