Dr. Joe Schwarcz - Quack Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience

Ive often been asked about who sparked my enthusiasm, some would say obsession, for separating sense from nonsense. That credit goes to three individuals, two real and one fictional: Harry Houdini with his exposs of the antics of mediums, James Randi with his tireless efforts to unmask charlatans and promote critical thinking, and Sherlock Holmes with his emphasis on coming to conclusions only if they are supported by facts.

I was introduced to magic at a young age by a performer at a birthday party and was intrigued enough to start reading about the subject. You do not have to delve deeply into the field before encountering Houdini, a man whose name to this day is virtually synonymous with magic. While I was taken with his exploits on the stage, my attention was also drawn to Houdinis crusade against charlatans who were using conjuring tricks to convince the gullible that they were communicating with the spirit world. The extent to which some people would go to fool others was an eye-opener for me. And very disturbing.

I became annoyed with claims of bending spoons with the power of the mind, psychic surgeons removing tissues without an incision, and psychics moving objects through psychokinesis when it was clear that all these were performed by standard magic effects. Then when I began to pursue science I encountered a different kind of huckster. One who would use sketchy or outright false concepts to promote products or treatments either out of ignorance or for financial gain. These are the homeopaths, the alkaline water advocates, and the most reprehensible, the quack cancer-cure claimants. There is yet another class of mountebank: highly educated people who have managed to garner publicity for having latched on to some eccentric idea and keep coming up with more and more outrageous arguments in an attempt to prove their point and stay in the limelight. Often they are delusional, but there are also cases of researchers who are so wedded to their ideas that they will not change their mind even in the face of contrary evidence.

Reading Houdinis life story introduced me to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The magician met Conan Doyle in 1920 when he was touring Britain and the two struck up one of the strangest friendships ever. Houdini was the scourge of the spiritualists and Conan Doyle was an ardent believer in the possibility of contact with the departed. That was a real enigma for Houdini, since Sherlock Holmes was totally scientifically minded, yet his creator believed in spirits! Curiously, in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, Holmes firmly states: This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply. Amazingly, Conan Doyle was convinced that Houdini had supernatural powers since he could not explain how he performed his magical feats. This placed the magician in a difficult position because, abiding by the code of magicians, he would not reveal his secrets.