PHILOSOPHY
Science and pseudoscience. How can we distinguish one from the other? p. 4 RHETORIC
Let’s clarify some
scientific terms.
p. 12
ANTHROPOLOGY
PSYCHOLOGY
Mind traps.
Creationism.
What kinds of misconceptions do we hold? p. 18
Who created the universe?
Top 5 myths about the theory of evolution. p. 30
Fortune-telling. Is it possible to read the future? p. 76
p. 24
Homeopathy.
BIOLOGY
Is it possible to cure a person with nothing? p. 36
GMOs. How harmful are these products?
p. 42
CHEMISTRY
TECHNOLOGY
Alchemy. How did pseudoscience become a science? p. 48
Impossible projects. Don’t hold your breath for these inventions. p. 64
Urban legends. UFOs, the Bermuda triangle, Bigfoot and more. p. 88 MATH CULTURE
Numerology
p. 54
Can numbers influence your destiny? Mathematics of chance. How do you win the lottery?
p. 58
A N T HROP OLOG Y
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There are people who are convinced that evolution does not exist, and that the universe and man were created by God. They pretend to be scientists and want their “theories” taught in schools. They are creationists. Most of them like stating that humans did not come from monkeys at all, but were created by God, because the remains of transitional forms between monkeys and humans have not been found. This is, however, simply not true. There are many such transitional forms: from Australopithecines to Homo helmei, the ancestor of humans who lived 130,000 years ago.
Creationism and a Porcelain Teapot
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e do not insist that there is no need to believe in God: this is a very private matter for everyone. Faith in God is a complex concept that can help people through very difficult times in their lives. However, science and faith are different things, and they can not be confused. These are, simply put, faithful people who would very much like their religious ideas to be not just beautiful stories, but scientific fact. This desire, however, is insufficient — we need proof. But there is none. Absolutely none.
A N T HROP OLOG Y
Tales about evolutionary theory Albert Einstein once said “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.� Fairy tales are not just for children though. Truth be told, adults have their own tales. They may not believe in miracles and Santa Claus, but they do believe in yetis, that humans are descended from pigs, and even that Charles Darwin renounced his own theory.
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ut stop! What is the theory of evolution? And who is Charles Darwin? The “theory” of evolution is not even a theory, but a science, about the laws by which all living beings develop. It lies at the basis of another whole system of sciences — biology. Charles Darwin is the famous English naturalist (a scientist who studies nature), who formulated its basic principles. This is a very short introduction. Now let’s get into the details.
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I R Y TA L E
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“Men did not descend from monkeys” …because no intermediate forms of animals have been found between monkeys and men. The basic property of evolution is that some species of living beings, under the influence of external circumstances, “turn” into others. For example, monkeys eventually “turned into” people. But we didn’t just come from monkeys — we are monkeys! Maybe not modern monkeys, but definitely those that lived a few million years ago. Rather, primates, which include both monkeys and people. Let’s get back to the “fairy tale” though: there are not just many, but a great many, remains of intermediary forms between men and monkeys. The same is applicable for the forms themselves: they are very diverse. Let’s start with the most ancient.
BIOLOG Y
1 Start
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Imagine one tiny drop in a whole sea of plain water, or even an ocean. “That’s nothing, inconsequential!” you might say. And you would be right. But there are many medicines, sold every day in pharmacies, that are diluted in just these proportions. These are called homeopathic cures. The word is complicated, but the drugs are simple — their effects are, for the most part, purely psychological. Nevertheless, adult consumers and doctors alike continue to buy and use them.
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3 6 2 5 7 4
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27 28 Finish
M AT H
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NUMEROLOGY Things you don’t want to know about numbers Do you hear the ringing? It is Pythagoras plucking a string, and listening attentively to the sound. In addition to his famous theorem, the ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician, who lived in the 6th century BC, discovered many other interesting phenomena. He noticed that strings produce a pleasant chord if their lengths are correlated as small natural numbers – for example, like 1:2 (today this chord would be called an octave) or 3:4 (a major quartal, or a “fourth”). Pythagoras also experimented with the same strings, finding that they sound harmonious if the masses of the posts that pull the strings taut correspond to squares of the same small integer – a ratio of 1:4 will also give an octave.
Pythagoras of Samos
(570–490 B.C.E.) was an Ancient Greek philosopher, mathematician, mystic, and the creator of the Pythagorean school of religion and philosophy. Pythagoras once said: “To know the world is to know numbers that control it.” One of his many areas of study was to try to learn about the soul of mankind, and the qualities inherent to human beings, based on their date of birth. Subsequently, calculations based on the Pythagorean square (also known as the “psychomatrix” or “magic square”) became a very famous form of numerology.
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t is hard to imagine what the philosopher felt when he discovered the connection between length, mass and … harmony. Pythagoras said: “The number is the essence of all things,” describing this connection through the language of mathematics. Today, these mystical ideas grew into our confidence that everything in the world can be mathematically expressed. We are sure that there is a specific “formula” of a flying projectile, for population growth, for the spread of an epidemic, and even for heating water in a kettle. However, Pythagorean mysticism also led to the notion that everything in the world can be reduced to numbers, and that each number corresponds to certain “vibrations” and other non-mathematical properties. For example, in Pythagorean, or Modern Western Numerology, odd numbers are considered more “manly” than even ones. The number one is associated with creativity, and the five with marriage. Why? Because it “feels” so. In addition, 5 is the sum of the “female” two and the “male” three. According to the Pythagoreans, this explanation is enough. Long after the real Pythagoras died, and his school declined, this mystical notion of numbers was adapted into Numerology, which became especially popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.
T ECHNOLOG Y
IMPOSSIBLE FUTURE what we should NOT expect
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Sometimes, it seems to us that science is capable of everything: it cures diseases, prolongs life, and allows almost instant movement from one point to another. But many scientific ideas are doomed to remain nothing more than pipe dreams of idealists. Pseudo-scientists have been up and working on the following ideas, promising naive folks wonderful inventions in exchange for material wealth.
Digital immortality What could be more tempting than eternal life? Mankind has grappled with this problem for centuries, but so far, immortality remains only a dream. Some ideas, however, deserve special attention. Is it possible to transfer a person’s consciousness from a body into a digital medium? The latter does not age, does not get sick, and, in a certain sense of the word, is eternal. Something similar is depicted in the 2014 science fiction film Transcendence, in which a scientist uploads his consciousness into a computer, becoming, a kind of superman. The combined brain and computer do not fear traumas and illnesses, and the “digital” person, having united all the world’s information flows, became not only immortal, but also supramental.
The idea seems tempting. After all, we already know how to create individual artificial neurons. What prevents us from copying a brain piece by piece and, at the end, creating an entire copy of the original gray matter? In reality, this process would be very, very difficult. The human brain is an incredibly complex object, and is still poorly understood. We know that it consists of 80 billion neurons, that constantly interact with each other. The slightest mistake in copying would result in the copy and the original having different personalities. Moreover, there is not yet a sufficiently powerful computer capable of hosting this copy. To give you a sense of how far away from this we truly are: a simulation of the first second of 1% of the activity of a brain took 40 minutes on a cluster of 82,944 processors!
CU LT U RE
An “urban legend” (a tale or fiction, passed off as truth) is the modern version of a legend, or myth. These are short and, at first glance, plausible (though usually not true) stories, based on modern technical and social reality. They usually concern deep-rooted problems and fears in modern society.
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Urban Legends Each era has its own riddles, myths and superstitions. In the Middle Ages, anything incomprehensible was seen as a scheme of the devil’s minions. Today, in attempts to unravel the secret of this or that mystical event, the majority of people often rely on pseudoscientific ideas or knowledge. These mysterious rumors about the Loch Ness monster, flying saucers, the Abominable Snowman, and others are mythologized, and presented to us in the form of modern urban legends. We will try to clarify and separate truth from fiction.
UFO UFO is one of the most popular and resilient urban legends, and these stories even became the basis for ”ufology,” an entire field of pseudoscience. Every year, thousands of people claim to have seen unidentified flying objects shaped like a disc, a cigar, or a ball. These objects maneuver and move at a very high speed. According to many of the stories, the objects tried to come into contact with observers, but disappeared, as soon as they “figured out” that they were being watched. For this reason, many assume that UFOs are controlled by intelligent beings. Considering the unearthly appearance of the aircraft, these “pilots” are believed to be aliens from outer space. People often mistake the simplest objects for UFOs: clouds, meteorological probes, airplanes, meteorites. But there are also obvious hoaxes, most of which do not stand up to simple verification tests. The most prominent of them is the Roswell incident. In July of 1947, an unidentified flying object allegedly crashed near the town of Roswell in New Mexico (USA). According to the official position of
the US Air Force at the time, the object was a secret weather balloon. However, journalists pushed the narrative that it was an extraterrestrial ship, and that its pilot — an alien — was captured and his body marked as classified material by the US government. This event even entered into American pop culture, and the name of Roswell became synonymous with the UFO incident. The story attracted attention again in 1978 when physicist and ufologist Stanton T. Friedman interviewed Major Jesse Marcel, who was involved in the investigation of events of 1947. The elderly Major Marcel claimed that the military had concealed the crash of an alien ship, and subsequently classified the information. Then, in 1995, a British collector of old music videos named Ray Santilli “accidentally” found a record on which there is an “autopsy” of the Roswell alien. Analysis of the video showed that both the camerawork and procedures conducted by the doctors in the video were done unprofessionally. If this video recording had really been prepared by US intelligence agencies, then they certainly would not have allowed for such inaccuracies.
THE NUMEROLOGICAL “VALUES� OF NUMBERS:
Will, leadership, ambition, creativity.
Order, practicality, reliability
Magic, wisdom, loneliness
Harmony, emotionality, femininity
Luck, joy, masculinity
Curiosity, marriage, sensuality
Devotion, perfection, honesty
Internal balance, prosperity
Inspiration, heavenly love, forgiveness