Miracle Detectives is a new television series that examines miracle claims via a team of investigators—one a believer, the other a scientist. The show premiered with the launch of the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) in January 2011.

The believer of the show’s team is Randall Sullivan, journalist and author of the book The Miracle Detective (Grove Press, 2005). Sullivan reportedly experienced his own personal religious event in Medjugorje, Bosnia. He is an avowed believer in the existence of miracles.

The adept foil for Sullivan is neuroscientist Indre Viskontas. Broadly trained in psychology, specifically in cognition, at UCLA, Viskontas specializes in the neural basis of memory and creativity. She is affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco, Memory and Aging Center and edits the journal Neurocase. (She is also an accomplished opera singer, having obtained a master of music degree at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.)

At least two miraculous claims are highlighted in each episode. The miracle detective team of Sullivan and Viskontas (a setup akin to Mulder and Scully in The X-Files) travels to the location of the event to interview witnesses and also consult with various experts.

Questioning witnesses who believe a miracle has taken place is as much of an art as a science. Viskontas employs both to examine the claims made by people who believe these events are miraculous communications from God. In this interview, she shares with Sharon Hill strategies and some insights into working in television.

In the show’s introduction, you say, “Some would call me a ‘skeptic.’” Do you identify as a skeptic?

Would I call myself a card-carrying skeptic? No. I didn’t know of the whole skeptical community until I started doing research for the show. I hadn’t been involved in it previously, so for me to say “Yeah, I’m a skeptic too” seemed disingenuous. I know what it means to be a scientist because that’s what I’ve been trained to be. I don’t have a good sense of what it means to be a “skeptic.”

What is the scientist’s role on the show?

My goal is to get people to think more deeply about what they believe without threat or disrespect. The target audience is not exactly on “my side,” and so I have to walk a very fine line.

When I talk to people, I try to assess whether their stories are backed up by other evidence. I realize people are very susceptible to all kinds of memory failures. Misremembering things that happened, while at the same time conflating memories from similar but separate events, is very common. Of course, most of us are not very good at resisting the temptation to infer causality when two events follow each other closely in time.

What’s it like to do an episode and a whole season?

The shooting schedule was grueling. It was a twelve-hour day on camera. We’d shoot for twelve hours and then return to the hotel room, where I’d still have to do a diary cam session (talking about your feelings into the camera) and research for the following day.

Also, I’d be preparing for the next week’s case at the same time, so if I got six hours of sleep a night that was great. It was nonstop. I would do so much background research on each case, downloading and reading papers from PubMed, calling up colleagues, talking about the case with my husband, and so on.

For the interviews [with experts and witnesses], I didn’t always have enough preparation time, and sometimes I didn’t know what to expect. That’s part of the challenge on a show like this.

How do you go about interviewing witnesses who have a story about a miracle? How do you use that information?

I look to question witnesses in a way that gets around them just telling the story in the same way they’ve told it before. Instead, we try to access other information they might not share in the regular telling. They might have told this story a hundred times before. When you start to ask them questions about the event—things they aren’t used to talking about, other aspects they aren’t used to recalling—you can find out if what they are saying makes sense or if they are conflating multiple incidents or coloring the past with their knowledge of what happened after the incident.

I assume that people are telling me honestly what they remember, but when there is something out of the ordinary [such as an event they may attribute to paranormal causes] there are other ways in which I can corroborate their story. For example, I can look at a police report and at specific details of the account. Then I can get a sense of how accurate a memory is and to what extent the person’s recollection is faulty.

How does editing for television affect the presentation of the investigation? Have you been pleased with the editing?

For the most part I’ve been pleased. When you have a television show, you need to make a story out of [the content]. There was one episode about a medical intuitive where I felt that . . . [the editors] left out some critical components. We picked a subject with one salient complaint. The intuitive came back with a very long list of potential problems but no mention of that complaint. Many items mentioned on that list were cut out to save time, and the editors decided to keep the relevant bits in—that is, the ones that the subject felt actually did apply to him. They edited out stuff that seemed superfluous. But in the case of an intuitive, this is really problematic! When listing every possible symptom that a person could experience, you’re going to get some hits, but what’s important is the ratio of hits to misses—not simply the hits.

The editing is not designed to show that the skeptic is wrong and Randall is right. The goal is to make good television. Especially given the target audience, [the editors] do a good job. If I felt they were really skewing it, I would have left the show midway. But we have to remember that the target audience won’t watch a show debunking miracles, and what’s important here is to engage that audience, not simply to preach to the choir.

Is it hard to explain the science in a one-hour show?

It’s very hard; it’s one of the biggest challenges. What I say is, “The evidence suggests it’s most likely this thing over the other.” That’s not very satisfying to many people but it’s the truth. To say that God did that or it was some supernatural thing requires such a mountain of evidence.

What has been the viewer reaction?

The feedback has been mixed. I get emails from people who say they like my point of view. They’ll say, “Most of the time I find myself siding with Randall, but you’ve made me think about things that I hadn’t before.” Other times they’ll say, “Wow, I never really thought about that possibility. It’s changing the way I think about my relationship with God because maybe he acts in ways I never considered before.”

It can also be hard to hear the criticisms from the skeptical community, such as “You weren’t hard enough on him!” In some cases they’re right; there were better ways to do it. But I did the best I could, since one of my goals was to engage the audience, not be dismissed outright by them. I think in most cases I did a pretty good job of bringing things to the table that people hadn’t thought about.

To me, it’s not exciting to say, “This is not a miracle.” It’s exciting to say, “There is something here we hadn’t thought about before that’s worth investigating further,” or “Look how interesting the brain is that it can do this.” That’s what fascinates me.

How do you think skeptical/rational advocates can successfully promote their viewpoint?

I’d say don’t simply discount a person’s belief but find what it is that interests you both. For example, a Bigfoot print: Instead of dismissing it by stating that’s not what you think it is, bring up another discussion point. Find something interesting [to discuss] that doesn’t rely on the existence of a mythical creature or supernatural explanation. Perhaps you can find something in common that you can start out with: “Isn’t it odd that there is one footprint here and nothing else around it? How do you think it got there? What are possible explanations? Let’s explore and keep talking.” Once you dismiss them, you’ve lost them. They don’t want to talk to you anymore.

When you ask people questions that force them to come up with answers, they are much more likely to change their belief system if they realize these questions are unanswerable within their viewpoint.

They also want to talk about the experience. So, if you question and try to understand what they base their beliefs on, you can lead them in a direction to show them that their beliefs might be fiction, and you can also develop a rapport with them that will encourage them to trust you.

What are your future plans?

My goal in the future, through this show or other means, is to share my passion for life and to illuminate what I can about the human experience. Just as physicist Richard Feynman has observed, we can enjoy beauty at all levels of observation, from the microscopic to the abstract. Knowledge doesn’t take away; it only adds.

En route to one of the last filming locations in Australia for his new documentary, Last Chance to See, Stephen Fry

snapped a quick photo from his hotel window and posted it on the popular online site Twitter. The whole Twittosphere immediately knew where he was, for the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was in the background. He was in Sydney but only for a short time. Within a few hours, I had contacted Mr. Fry’s agents and organized an interview.

Kylie Sturgess: You have just returned from a lengthy around-the-world investigation based upon Douglas Adams’s book Last Chance to See, written in 1990, which I use when teaching high-school English. What inspired you to recreate the journey that he and Mark Carwardine completed [when they teamed up to find out what was happening to exotic, endangered creatures worldwide—animals that they may never have gotten another chance to see]?

Stephen Fry: Douglas did describe it as his favorite book, and I think that was because it changed his life. [It was] his “second chapter,” if you like. He never had a third chapter because of his early death, but I know how important it was for him to go around the world and look at the extraordinary habitats and the rare creatures that relied on them. And caring for the disappearing species was something he devoted a lot of time to.

Now, what inspired me to recreate the journey was, firstly, that Douglas’s family asked me to; plus it was a desire I’ve always had to go into the wild. Like so many people of my generation I grew up on natural history on TV, and it never occurred to me that one day I would actually be looking at lions close by, that I’d be with hippopotamuses, gorillas, lemurs, rare birds, diving turtles, and all these amazing things ... blue whales breaching in front of your very eyes. It affected me profoundly, and it affected Douglas.

It’s very hard to say which was my most influential experience. There are one or two moments which bring one close to the most ecstatic euphoria that one can ever experience (without the use of pharmaceuticals or alcohol). I’d say it was seeing hundreds of green turtles hatching out of their nest and streaming over the dunes into the sea. This was off the coast of Malaysia.

It’s not until the female turtle is about twenty-five years old that she can lay eggs—that the “turtle is fertile,” as they’d say in America. She mates with the male and then she swims in—not necessarily on a moonlit night; there’s a great mistaken belief that this is keyed to some biodynamic phase of the Moon; it’s not actually true—to the place where she was born and crawls up the beach (not having been on land since she was born, she finds the place again using Earth’s magnetic field), lays 80 to 120 eggs and covers them up. And I was right beside this huge beautiful animal doing just that; she took 90 minutes to lay the eggs, an incredible sight, and then she lumbered back into the water.

Sturgess: In that documentary, apparently there’s an account of a healing ceremony in Madagascar, which is something you’ve touched upon before in your novel The Hippopotamus. Why do you think pseudoscientific claims, such as holistic healing, continue to pervade our society despite advances in medicine?

Fry: Well, my interpretation is no more valid than anyone else’s, but I would say in terms of medicine, people want to take control of their own lives, and ironically they seem to think that they are taking control of their lives more by using so-called complementary or alternative medicines than by using orthodox medicine. In other words, they think it’s a statement of originality and individuality. To you and me it seems self-evidently ridiculous, this homeopathic medicine. It is so preposterous, and yet some people I know and respect insist on believing it.

The powers of the placebo are so strong that it may be morally wrong to call homeopathy a lie because the moment you say it then a placebo falls to pieces and loses its power. I am a great believer in double-blind random testing, which is the basis of all drug testing. People still insist on things like holistic healing and things that have no real basis in evidence because they want it to be true—it’s as simple as that. If you’re dying of cancer or very, very ill, then you’ll cling to a straw. I feel pretty dark thoughts about the kind of people who throw straws at drowning, dying men and women, and I’m sure most of us would agree it’s a pretty lousy thing to do. Some of these people perhaps believe in the snake oil they sell or allow themselves to believe in it. That’s why James Randi is so good, because he knows what magicians know: if you do a card trick on someone, they will report that it was unbelievable, they describe the effect the magician wanted, and they miss out all the steps in between that seemed irrelevant because the magician made them irrelevant, so they didn’t notice them. People will swear that a clairvoyant mentioned the name of their aunt from nowhere, and they will be astonished if you then play a recording that shows that thirty-two names were said before the aunt’s name, none of which had any effect on them. That’s because they wanted to hear their aunt’s name; they wanted the trick to work, so they forgot all the failures in the same way as people forget all their dreams that have no relevance to their lives, but they mark when they dream of someone they haven’t met for ages that they see the next day. I would be astounded if everyone had coincidences like that—yet people say that is somehow closed-minded of me!

Sturgess: Of course, it’s not just the pseudosciences that pervade; there are also paranormal beliefs. I was wondering if you’re surprised that the same beliefs exist today?

Fry: No, I am not surprised. I hope I know enough about history and human nature to agree that there is one born every minute and to know that there is desperation to make sense of things, and making sense of the universe isn’t easy. Making sense of our own lives isn’t easy. There are different ways of doing it—by observing people, by reading novels and poetry, by looking at paintings, listening to music, allowing our minds to concentrate on the experiences we had and the observations we’ve made about how people behave. Then in a wider sense we can look at the world and make observations about how animals behave and what they look like and why they look like it, why rain falls, and all kinds of phenomena that occur, and we can do this by observation, experiment, repetition, and understanding. This is essentially what we call the scientific method, the empirical method, more importantly.

Or, we can cheat—we can just say “there’s an invisible person that makes it happen,” or the stars tell you, or it’s all predestined, or it’s something to do with an inborn power of the mind, which isn’t the power of learning. In other words, you can be lazy; instead of bothering to find how numbers work or observing how animals behave, you just say it’s all according to some cosmic vibration. Sad, but people naturally want to cut corners, much as water wants to go the shortest route to the sea, so human beings want to find the shortest route to the truth, but unfortunately that takes them to the great “ocean of bullshit” that lies out there and to all those people prepared to make money out of them. All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies.... God, if there’s a word that drives me mad it’s “energy” used in a nonsensical way—don’t get me started!

Let’s just say that, to me, the true mystery of the universe is something that is available to all, not through the arcane rules of some nonsensical, unprovable drivel—but is there for your eyes, it is there to see by just simply recognizing observable laws and repeatable instances of things like sunsets and how they work. And seeing what we’ve done on the basis of that understanding, so every time that you flick a light switch or turn on a GPS, you have to realize on what that GPS is predicated, on the science—without it the GPS couldn’t possibly work. The fact that Earth must be round, the fact that it must move at this speed, the fact that geostationary orbit means this, the fact that triangulation means that—all these things tell us so much how science is right.

Sturgess: You’re also the host of a TV show in the United Kingdom called Q.I., which stands for “Quite Interesting.” It’s been described as a “comedy panel quiz,” yet it could very well be called a show that questions illogical thinking and dangerous beliefs. Do you consider comedy to be a “way in” for people to challenge irrational thinking?

Fry: Comedy is always about the real world. Philosophers or religionists will make a pompous, abstract statement and a comedian will say, “Is that true on a Wednesday?” Comedians want a cut and dried example of the facts of the world. Because comedy is about observation—as is science—it’s about repeatable patterns, and it’s testing some statement that may be preposterous or may be true. Statements made of grandeur and abstract truth are always tested by comedians, so in that sense, comedy is a very good way to get the credulous onside, if you like. Because it says “Is that true? Is it really true? Let’s see!”

Sturgess: Finally, your love of technology is well known—you’ve written for many years on technology in a variety of publications; you have a very popular podcast called Podgrams that is available on your Web site and on iTunes. Recently you’ve embraced Twitter and written about the experience and have been the focus of media attention because of it. Do you think that your love of technology is an important part of your appeal to your audience? And what do you hope for technological advances in the future?

Fry: My audiences all share an interest in technology because those that don’t have stopped being my audience. It’s about what one hopes for and what happens. Of course like everyone else I hope for 3-D television and for fantastic robots I can have sex with that then turn into machines that clean my room! I’m a human being—I want slavish satisfaction; I want joy and pleasure to be brought to me by the machines. But I also love the connections that technology gives me with other people. I am worried about privacy and that one day the machines might stop and we won’t know what to do with ourselves and not be able to cope! So my hope for technology is that it will continue to be free and open and will become dominated not by business interests as now, not by politicians, religious fundamentalists, or maniacs, but by the general sum of humanity, whom I think to be good and enlightened for the most part.

I know there are dark and hideous slimy corners of the Internet, but one is able to avoid them. The Internet is like a great city; of course it has slums and red-light districts and weird temples and strange churches, but it also has grand cultural palaces, remarkable museums and libraries, places of entertainment, shops and stores, and exciting parks.

In a new book on autism, Roy Richard Grinker (a professor of anthropology at George Washington University and himself the parent of an autistic daughter) examines the disease from a social and anthropological perspective. Here is an interview based on his book Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism.

How did you first become interested in the subject of autism?

I wear two hats. I am an anthropologist and the father of a child with autism. So, as autism awareness grew, more and more people said, “So you’re an anthropologist, what does autism look like in other cultures? Is the prevalence the same as it is here? What do people do about it?” I wrote Unstrange Minds so that people can see that autism is universal and that autism awareness is increasing everywhere in the world. But the most important reason for writing the book—though this was not my original intention—was to tell the world a simple message: the increase in autism diagnoses is not a crisis but rather evidence that we’re finally beginning to address a kind of human difference that has for too long been misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and mismanaged. More than six decades after autism was first described by Leo Kanner, we’re finally getting it right, and counting it right.

Why do you challenge the idea that autism is an epidemic?

Because so many Americans and Europeans are in a panic that there is a true epidemic, and that if there is an epidemic there must be some new, identifiable cause out there somewhere to be found and eradicated. I thought I could articulate some of the cultural and scientific reasons behind the increase in rates and give a positive message: the higher rates are due to positive changes in the way we understand and treat neurological and psychiatric disorders.

If autism is not an epidemic, how did it come to be viewed as one?

Autism became viewed as an epidemic for the same reason there have been fears of epidemics of other illnesses: there is a dramatic increase in prevalence. But prevalence is just the number of cases counted at a particular point in time and is not evidence of true increases in a disease. The same happened with melanoma and prostate cancer. There were huge increases in prevalence in those diseases, because they were being diagnosed so much more (skin cancer, due to increased awareness and more biopsies of early stage cancers; prostate cancer because of the invention of the PSA blood test, as opposed to the painful method of inserting a tool through the tip of the penis all the way to the prostate). It really is confusing to see diagnosis rates of three or four in ten thousand twenty years ago change to rates of 1 in 150. On the surface it sounds frightening.

So it’s the public’s lack of understanding about the methodology?

I think scientists have not done a good job of explaining to the public that comparing these rates is like comparing apples and oranges. The rates in, say, 1980, were derived using a narrow definition of autism and using administrative statistics (mostly numbers of kids enrolled in programs under the category of “autism”) at a time when autism was not a popular diagnosis. Today’s rates are derived using a very broad definition of autism (people from the severely mentally retarded to people who marry and hold jobs and may even be college professors) and using reliable and valid measurements that have only recently been developed.

In Korea, where I’m doing an epidemiological study, we cannot even try to use administrative statistics, because autism is unpopular as a diagnosis. If you used the enrollment figures, you’d think autism was almost nonexistent in Korea. Yet, we’re finding rates not out of line with the rest of the world. Second, the increased awareness has meant that people see autism more—the decreased stigma has helped too, since people don’t hide their kids anymore. So it feels like an epidemic. But a feeling is different from science.

So what accounts for the apparent increase in the prevalence of autism?

They are described carefully in my book: new epidemiological methods yield many more cases; a much larger number of people are being diagnosed with autism today because autism is a spectrum that can include the profoundly mentally retarded person but also a brilliant scientist; more and more physicians are giving the diagnosis and then kids are being coded in the school system with autism (some epidemiologists who do records-based research then rely on the school records for their information); people who were once called mentally retarded or schizophrenic or a host of other things are now being diagnosed with autism. There is no single factor among all of these that trumps the others, but I think the least understood is the change in epidemiological methods.

What do you think are the biggest misconceptions that the public has about autism?

One misconception is that we need to have an “epidemic” to call attention to a disorder. Some parents and philanthropic organizations have called me a traitor and accused me of betraying the autism community. On the one hand, I don’t agree with the way philanthropic organizations have fueled the fears of an epidemic. An epidemic is a useful fiction for fundraising. On the other hand, the organizations do so much for autism awareness, research, and services that sometimes I feel a little guilty, as if by telling the truth some people might be less likely to give money. But that guilt is fleeting.

The reality is that (1) the higher rates mean that autism is a bigger public health issue than we ever realized; and (2) there is nothing mutually exclusive about saying there’s no epidemic and at the same saying that we’ve finally figured out what’s going on with people on the autism spectrum, and we need more research and services. I recently received an e-mail from a parent who decried my stance: “How can you say there is no epidemic of autism?” she wrote. “When I was in school, there were no kids with special needs in my school. Today, in my daughter’s school there are dozens.” Actually, that is my point. In the past autistic people were not included in our schools. Today they are. And that’s a very good thing.

Another big misconception is that autism is somehow new. I am frequently asked: If there is no epidemic, then where are all the adults with autism? The answer is easy, but also complicated. Finding adults with autism is very hard, not because they do not exist but because they are dispersed in our society. Some live in group homes, others in institutions, others are living and working among us in our everyday lives. Kids are easy to count because they are all in school, neatly recorded in school records. But adults are a different story. Counting adults with autism would be like trying to count adults with speech and language disorders. You can count kids, but where would we find the adults? So many people with speech and language disorders don’t get speech services as adults—they’ve learned to adjust, adapt, and manage. No one “missed” or “ignored” autistic people in the past. They were just called something else, or in some cases (like people with Asperger’s) called nothing at all.

An additional misconception is that an environmental factor equals an environmental toxin. Environment probably plays some very small role in causing autism, but environment can mean everything in the world, from chemicals, to our diet and way of life. No environmental factor has yet been identified by scientists to account for autism, let alone changes in autism prevalence. Looking for environmental factors in autism at this stage in our knowledge is really like looking for needles in haystacks.

Why do you think the news media have engaged in such misleading and alarmist coverage about autism?

Fear, panic, and deep parental concern get a lot of attention. Compare the two messages: “There’s an epidemic and we don’t know what is causing it!” and “More people are being diagnosed with autism today because we understand it better.” Plus, autism in the news is usually about autism in children (despite the fact that autistic children grow into adults), and children are very engaging as television, radio, and newspaper subjects. Advocacy by organizations whose membership is convinced there is an epidemic caused by an environmental toxin has been well funded and supported by politicians, especially by politicians in the states with the most autism services (and hence, because of those services, the highest rates of diagnosis).

What has been the reaction to your book, both by medical professionals and by parents of autistic children?

The scientific community, from what I can tell so far, supports my work strongly (e.g., reviews in Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine). Much of what I’m saying about the reasons for the so-called epidemic has been said before in scientific journals. What I’ve done is to put all those arguments together and place them in a larger context of American social change in a way that is accessible to a wide audience. The fact that the book is being reviewed in both scientific journals and in the popular press, such as People magazine, is an indication to me that I’ve succeeded in reaching a large readership. Among parents of children with autism, the reception has been mixed. Many, many parents find Unstrange Minds to be inspiring because I talk about how many families in the world have turned something potentially devastating into something uplifting and rewarding. Others have sent me hate mail and left angry telephone messages on my answering machine at work. I have been called every kind of name.

What does the science suggest are the causes of autism?

There are probably several different kinds of autism caused by several different genetic pathways. There may be, in total, several dozen different genes involved. Scientists at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory in New York have generated one of the most interesting genetic models, suggesting that some cases are heritable, but usually over the span of a couple of generations through a nonaffected carrier, and other cases are de novo mutations. But the bottom line is: it is largely genetic, so much so that environment probably plays [only] a small role. One way scientists estimate the role of genetics in a certain disorder is to look at concordance of that disorder in identical twins, that is, two people with identical DNA. The concordance, or percentage of people with identical DNA who both suffer from an autism spectrum disorder, is as high as 90 percent in some studies. That’s higher than the concordance for coronary artery disease, depression, or breast cancer. Then, when the scientists look at fraternal twins, who don’t have the same DNA, they find a concordance as low as 0 percent and as high as 10 percent. That makes ASD strongly genetic.

If autism is partly genetic, should there be prenatal testing to determine if a fetus is autistic?

That is a huge ethical question, but perhaps it’s premature. We know that schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, breast cancer, and many other disorders have a strong genetic component, but they cannot be tested for in the womb. Multigenic complex disorders are very different from, say, Down syndrome, which is an identifiable mutation in which there is extra genetic material (a twenty-first chromosome), so it can be tested for. Autism is a totally different kind of condition.

In explaining how disease diagnosis is culturally dependent, you draw from many cultures and countries, including the Navajo and family lines in China and Peru. What are two of the most vivid examples in your mind?

The Korean case is one of the most fascinating to me. This is a country in which scientists and doctors and government officials have said that autism is a rare or nearly nonexistent disorder in Korea. The school and clinic records support that contention, because one seldom finds any mention of anyone with “autism.” Autism, when it is diagnosed, is highly stigmatizing because it is seen as a genetic disorder. If a disorder is genetic, the family feels that the entire family is damaged, and this brings shame and stigma. So parents would rather see themselves as bad parents who caused autism in their child through bad parenting than see the disorder as genetic. This is the opposite of what happened in the U.S., where mothers and fathers used to be blamed, but we now see the disorder as genetic. At any rate, I went into Korea with a team of epidemiologists and psychiatrists and psychologists, and we have screened thirty thousand kids and done extensive testing. And we’re finding lots of autism. The kids just are not called autistic. They are undiagnosed or diagnosed with something else. So, in Korea, we’re seeing a culturally different version of what has already happened in the U.S. and higher prevalence rates in Korea are on their way: not because autism is new as a condition, but because autism is new as a concept.

Joshua Fineberg is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and a composer whose works are widely performed in the United States and Europe. He collaborates with computer scientists and music psychologists to help develop tools for computer-assisted composition, electronic sound manipulation, and in music perception research. In 2004 Fineberg became the U.S. editor of The Contemporary Music Review. In 2006 his book Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture through a Composer’s Ears was published by Routledge. Fineberg is associated with the movement known as “spectral music,” which draws on acoustics and computer technology to explore the fundamental nature of sound (a spectrum is a representation of a sound in terms of the amount of vibration at each of the individual frequencies that make it up). In spectral composition, timbre often eclipses melody as the primary musical element.

What is spectral music?

All such labels are kind of awkward, but the common thread is that rather than taking for granted certain sonic categories as the most musically relevant way to divide up the soundstream—notes, for example, that are played for particular durations at a particular volume—you start from the assumption that what you have is the soundstream itself. Though sound can be parsed in the traditional way, it can be parsed lots of other ways. By understanding the physical and psychophysical principles of sound, you can gain an understanding into the possibilities and methods best adapted to modifying sound over time.

In what ways has spectral composition been influenced by science and technology?

This is a kind of music that couldn’t have happened without the progress in acoustics and psychoacoustics in the late 1960s and 1970s when people started having access to the first analog sonograms and then electronic software sonograms that let you see the interior composition of sound. The personal computer enabled people to analyze sounds more easily with less demanding equipment.

Spectral music has been called a post-electronic approach to music. Sometimes it uses electronic synthesis; often it doesn’t. But the knowledge acquired in order to make (synthesize) sounds from scratch is essential to writing this kind of music. To really control sound as we want to, we must understand enough to be able to make it.

Is the movement French?

Initially it was centered around an ensemble called L’Itinérarie in early 1970s Paris, a very experimentally oriented group that was trying out these ideas. But once you had the basic concepts it became very clear that you needed computer tools. Because in France music in general is not at the universities, except for musicology or music history, the place where a lot of this happened was IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique). It’s a research institute started in the mid-1970s and built on the idea of providing tools to musicians at the interface between science and art. In the early 1980s, the computer-assisted composition techniques that IRCAM was developing prompted them to bring spectral composers into the fold.

Spectral music became one of the first real implementations of computer-assisted composition that went beyond what I would call algorithmically produced music. What spectral composers wanted was much more like what happens in computer-assisted design in architecture.

In music there has been a long tradition of laborious hand-calculation, but the reality is that if you spent four weeks calculating something, you’re going to use it whether it turned out to be what you wanted or not! Whereas if you spent twenty minutes on it with a computer, you might have the courage to go back and try it seven or eight times until you really find the thing you were looking for.

Some see spectral music as a reaction to the artificiality of serialism and 12-tone-row music. Is it somehow more natural?

We are creatures that are tremendously sensitive to timbre because the vowels of language depend on timbral perception, as does our auditory scene analysis. The fact that we are relatively less good at identifying things like pitches and intervals is part of why for a long time they were interesting. But when you start thinking you can do anything that is mathematically possible with musical symbols, you get a kind of speculative music that at a certain time loses all contact with perceptual reality. Spectral music certainly strove to reground musical discourse in human perception and cognition.

Your book asks, Classical Music, Why Bother? What’s your answer?

In order for subsidized art to survive it must be seen as having importance and intrinsic value independent of how much entertainment value it has. You’re not just going out and buying it. You’re supporting it because you believe that the world is a richer place with this art in it. That is a much harder sell than it used to be. Now, most people believe that in most domains, there isn’t better or worse. You also see this in the debate over evolution, in the idea that we should teach all the alternatives.

I don’t mean that these abstract criteria are based on something divine. I think they are based on parameters of human perception and the way the human mind is built, certain things may have richer content than others. I tend to think we’d be better off pretending that it were so, even if it turns out not to be so. The belief that there can be great literature will make you wrestle with, say, James Joyce. You can develop a lot of capabilities in that effort that you probably couldn’t in reading more facile fiction.

Spectral composers are anti-establishment figures in their own way, aren’t they?

I still don’t understand how I got the job I have! In a composition seminar of mine, I’m just as likely to pull out an article from Perception & Psychophysics as a piece by Beethoven. Western classical musicians are quite conservative people. I mean, we’re trained in conservatories, for God’s sake!

You’re challenging their self-conception.

In a lot of the music, we are using the musicians as incredibly sophisticated tone generators. What matters much of the time is the sum of all of the sounds that the musicians are making. Each of their individual parts may not make much sense by itself. And that can be very frustrating for a performer. That is very different from a lot of the Western tradition, where each line should sing and have its own sense.

When will we see a Lincoln Center premiere of a composition written by no one?

The factual answer is that we have already had more than one. But I think the real question is more like a musical Turing test: Will we ever hear a piece written by a computer that feels as successful and original as one written by a gifted human being? And in that context, do not expect one anytime soon.

Music is so tied to the human perceptual system that until one has a complete map of that, I don’t know how you would get a computer to write really effective music. It would have to weigh every choice against the perceptual system. This is what composers are doing, even when they don’t think about it: playing things or thinking through things in their minds and applying them to their own perceptual systems.

What pieces do you recommend as an introduction to spectral music?

First, Gérard Grisey’s Les Espaces acoustiques (The acoustic spaces), which is to my mind the twentieth-century equivalent of the Ring Cycle. Another composer who is essential to the beginning of this music is Tristan Murail. Listen to Gondwana, and what I think is the first piece where electronics and acoustic writing really meet as equals, Désintégrations. More recently, there is Grisey’s last work, Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four songs for crossing the threshold), Murail’s L’Esprit des dunes (Spirit of the dunes), or my Recueil de pierre et de sable (Collections of rock and sand).

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, you mentioned in your talk that one of the most important functions in science is to reward those who disprove our most closely held beliefs. Sir, if you were to look ahead two or three or four generations, which of our most closely held beliefs today do you think are the most likely candidates for disproof?

SAGAN: Maybe the belief that challenges our most closely held beliefs. Prophecy is a lost art. I have no way of doing that. If I could do that, think of the enormous effort we could save. The question flies in the very face of what I was just saying about how the most obvious points, the things we’re absolutely sure of, may turn out to be wrong. So I am not immune to that fallibility and frailty. Let me give another example. It’s the middle of the nineteenth century. The leading futurologist— although the word didn’t exist then; it’s a terrible word— was Jules Verne. He was asked to project a century ahead. What would be the means of transportation, the most exotic means of transportation, in the middle of the twentieth century? He then did whatever he did, looked into his crystal ball metaphorically speaking, and then gave the following conclusion: by 1950 there would be Victorian living rooms with lots of red velvet plush, I imagine, in the gondolas of great airships (they were called, but essentially dirigibles) which would cross the Atlantic Ocean in no more than a week. And people said, “Whew! That Jules Verne, he sure is farseeing. Who could have thought of that?”And he was grossly off. Why was he off? Was he stupid? Was he not a good futurologist? No. He didn’t foresee heavier-than-air aircraft, nor did anybody else. The view in the middle of the nineteenth century was that it was impossible. And in just the same way, whatever I would tell you, where we would be in space or something like that, is bound to be, through the arguments on the idea that unless we destroy ourselves, overtaken by scientific ideas and technological developments that I haven’t a ghost of a chance of foreseeing. So forgive me for not being able to answer your question.

QUESTION: Thank you for your talk.
I just wanted to challenge the idea that the reward system in science is essentially different from any other system. A person who successfully challenges the emperor gets the greatest rewards. An entrepreneur who successfully displaces some other technology or some other entrepreneur gets the greatest rewards. And a scientist who fails to successfully challenge the head of his discipline can see his head rolling, professionally, just as quickly, I think, as the unsuccessful coup d’etat. Thank you.

SAGAN: Thank you. I think you raise a good point; permit me to disagree. There are certainly similarities along the lines that you say and, for example, maybe you remember the novel and television series, Shogun, in which the English sailor, washed ashore in Japan, is brought to meet Tokanaga, the future Shogun, who is very autocratic and authoritarian, hierarchical, as of course all military leaders are. And when he discovers that the Dutch were revolting from their Spanish overlords, he immediately identifies with the Spanish. He never met a Spaniard in his life, but they were in charge, and anybody challenging them must be doing something wrong. The hero then says, “The only mitigating condition is that the upstarts win.” And Tokanaga says “Yes, yes, very true,” and then they are friends. That’s the point you just made. But that doesn’t mean that there’s a reward structure that encouraged the Dutch to revolt against the Spanish. It just means that if they succeed, then they succeed. It’s a tautology. Whereas in science, there is a reward structure from the beginning. It doesn’t mean that if somebody challenges Newton he is immediately rewarded. Einstein had some difficulties with special relativity. His Nobel prize was not even for relativity, it was for the photoelectric effect, because relativity was considered to be worrisome. Nevertheless, there were many scientists who recognized the value of what Einstein said. He was not challenging Isaac Newton; Isaac Newton was dead. The value of what Einstein said was there plain for anyone to see; nobody had thought of it before. As soon as people had worked through the arguments on the idea that simultaneity was a nonsensical idea, many were converted on the spot. I don’t say that everybody was; I don’t say that there weren’t some problems with it, but there is a reward structure built in. And Einstein, just a few years after his 1905 relativity paper, was Full Professor and at the top of his profession.

QUESTION: Did you really say billions and billions of — (Laughter)

SAGAN: Never. Johnny Carson said it. I once saw him put on a wig and a corduroy jacket and pretend to be me, but I no more said it than Sherlock Holmes, in any of the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, said “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

QUESTION: I find it a little surprising that you use the words “science”and “truth” together in the same sentence. You said that science doesn’t seek absolute truths, but asympomatically tries to approach truth. I find truth is something that is very anthropocentric, relative to human being at a given time and a given place. I usually think of science more as seeking asymptomatically a better understanding of reality, not of truth.

SAGAN: I won’t quibble on words. There are as many people who argue about the existence of reality as about the existence of truth. I encourage them to debate each other. (Laughter)

QUESTION: If I understand the theory of relativity, the space/time viewpoint, a causal violation should not be able to create a paradox. Do you think we may ever have as much control over space/time geometry as we do over electricity?

SAGAN: That’s an awfully good question and I don’t know the answer. But yes, a topic that is being hotly debated these days in the gravitational physics community is whether producing a paradox is a contradiction, or whether a paradox of the sort you referred to is just something we are going to have to live with. Can effects precede causes, for example. We have a tendency just to throw up our hands in amazement and despair: “What are you talking about? It’s nonsense!” But there are certain sciences that seem to be in a funny way internally consistent with what else we know about physics and which may say effect can precede causes. I don’t guarantee it’s true, but if it is true it’s just another one of those cases where our common sense doesn’t apply everywhere.

QUESTION: Richard Hoagland has recently got hold of some pictures, Hasselblad pictures from NASA, which were taken some twenty years ago of the moon, and he has been describing those in great detail. He gave a talk at Ohio State University a couple of weeks ago and he had video cameras on and they were supposed to have videos available. I wonder if you’ve heard about this and had previous knowledge of . . . .

SAGAN: You forgot to mention what is on those videos.

QUESTION: Structures on the moon.

SAGAN: Richard Hoagland is a fabulist. By the way, it’s not difficult getting hold of the hand-held Hasselblad camera pictures; NASA freely releases them to everybody. These are in the public domain, they’re available to anybody. You don’t have to do something remarkable to get the pictures. The aspect of this story I know best has to do with the so-called Face on Mars. There is a place on Mars called Sidonia, which was photographed in a mission I was deeply involved in, the Viking mission to Mars in 1976. And there is one picture in which along a range of hulking mesas and hillocks, there is what looks very much like a face, about three kilometers across at the base and a kilometer high. It’s flat on the ground, looking up. It has a helmet or a hair-do, depending on how you look at it, it has a nose, a forehead, one eye—the other half is in shadow—pretty eerie looking. You could almost imagine it was done by Praxiteles on a monumental scale. And this gentleman deduces from this that there was a race of ancient Martians. He has dated them, he purports to have deduced when they were around, and it was 500,000 years ago or something like that, when our ancestors were certainly not able to do space flights, and then all sorts of wonderful conclusions are deduced and “we came from Mars”or “guys from other star systems came here and left a statue on Mars and left some of them on Earth.” By the way, all of which fails to explain how it is that humans share 99.6 percent of their active genes with chimpanzees. If we were just dropped here, how come we’re so closely related to them? What is the basis of the argument? How good is it? My standard way of approaching this is to point out that there is an eggplant that looks exactly like former President Richard Nixon. The eggplant has this ski nose and, “that’s Richard Nixon, I’d know him anywhere.”

What shall we deduce from this eggplant phenomenon? Extraterrestrials messing with our eggplants? A miracle? God is talking to us through the eggplant? Or, that there have been tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of eggplants in history, and they all have funny little knobs, and every now and then there is going to be one that by accident looks like a human face. Humans are very good at recognizing human faces. I think clearly the latter. Now let’s go to Mars. Thousands of low, hilly mesas have all sorts of features. Here’s one that looks a little like a human face. When you bring out the contrast in the shadowed area it doesn’t look as good. Now, we’re very good at picking out human faces. We have so many of these blocky mesas. Is it really a compelling sign of extraterrestrial intelligence that there’s one that looks a little like a human face? I think not. But I don’t blame people who are going into the NASA archives and trying to find things there; that is in the scientific spirit. I don’t blame people who are trying to find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence—I think it’s a good idea, in fact. But I do object to people who consider shoddy and insufficient evidence as compelling.

QUESTION: May we hear your opinion on the canceling of the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas?

SAGAN: Yes. There are many physicists who think that that latter was a great tragedy. My own view is that it was not nearly explained well enough. We’re talking about eight, ten, twelve, fourteen billion dollars to do very arcane experiments — and I don’t think physicists did a good job at all in explaining to Congress why at a time of many pressures on the discretionary federal budget so much money should go to this. It doesn’t build weapons, it doesn’t cure diseases, it isn’t generally known or understood. What is it about and why should we spend money on it? I think the physicists have, not altogether but to a significant degree, themselves to blame.

QUESTION: A question concerning the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It seems that we as skeptics, there’s an argument that seems very disappointing and maybe a bit persuasive in the Fermi paradox, the idea that if civilizations were to arise at any significant level, that even given a very extremely slow rate of expansion in the galaxy, that there’s been more than enough time for them to have populated the galaxy several times over. What’s your view on the Fermi paradox?

SAGAN: The Fermi paradox essentially says, as you said, that if there’s extraterrestrial high technology intelligence anywhere they should have been here because if they travel at the speed of light, the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, it takes you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. The galaxy is 10 billion years old, they should be here. And if you say you can’t travel at the speed of light, take a tenth of the speed of light, a hundredth of the speed of light, still much less than the age of the galaxy. William Newman and I published a paper on this very point, in which we point out: Imagine there is a civilization that has capable interstellar spacecraft and now they start exploring. What are we talking about? That they’re sending out 400 billion spacecraft, all at once, simultaneously, to every star in the galaxy? Not at all. Interstellar space flight is going to be hard, you’re going to go slow, you’re going to go to the nearest star systems first, you’re going to explore those stars. It is not a straight line but a diffusion question. And when you do the diffusion physics with the appropriate diffusivity, that is, the time to random walk, there are many cases in which the time for an advanced civilization to fully explore the galaxy in the sense of visiting every star system is considerably longer than the age of the galaxy. It’s just a bad model, we claim, the straight line, dedicated exploration of every star in the galaxy.

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, you’ve spoken about the need to, as you say, be defenders of science, or to spread the wonders of science and the value of science among those who are perhaps less well educated or have less of an appreciation of it. It seems to be quite a challenge, and I was wondering, in particular, there are many people, of course, plus the people in this room, perhaps a fairly large portion have some background in science. Amongst people who have what is called a liberal education, who may be in the arts or in the humanities, science has among many of them something of a bad name. I wonder if you have any thought on what path might be taken to remedy that situation.

SAGAN: I think one, perhaps, is to present science as it is, as something dazzling, as something tremendously exciting, as something eliciting feelings of reverence and awe, as something that our lives depend on. If it isn’t presented that way, if it’s presented in very dull textbook fashion, then of course people will be turned off. If the chemistry teacher is the basketball coach, if the school boards are unable to get support for the new school bond issue, if teachers’ salaries, especially in science, are very low, if very little is demanded of our students in terms of homework and original class time, if virtually every newspaper in the country has a daily astrology column and hardly any of them has a weekly science column, if the Sunday morning pundit shows never discuss science, if every one of the commercial television networks has somebody designated as a science reporter but he (it’s always he) never presents any science, it’s all technology and medicine, if an intelligent remark on science has never been uttered in living memory by a President of the United States, if in all of television there are no action-adventure series in which the hero or heroine is someone devoted to finding out how the universe works, if spiffy jackets attractive to the opposite sex are given to students who do well in football, basketball, and baseball but none in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, if we do all of that, then it is not surprising that a lot of people come out of the American educational system turned off, or having never experienced, science. That was a very long sentence.

QUESTION: Good evening, Dr. Sagan. Just one point first. Both the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the CTV private network have female science reporters.

SAGAN: Excellent. I was only talking about the U.S. and I recognize that you are within range of Canadian broadcasting here in Seattle.

SAME QUESTIONER: I’m a Canadian myself.

SAGAN: I’m very glad to hear it. David Suzuki has done for many years an excellent job on Canadian television.

SAME QUESTIONER: Absolutely. With the debacle of cold fusion, which may be said to be the ultimate proof of the scientific method with its peer review and its replicability or lack of same, if you were a person who is interested in the question of developing energy sources that would be both safer than the ones we use now and less expensive, would you continue to work in the area of fusion, and if not where would you work?

SAGAN: Cold fusion or hot fusion?

SAME QUESTIONER: I understand that hot fusion takes up a lot more energy than it ultimately produces.

SAGAN: But the margin is shrinking. If it were up to me, there’s nothing in the way of compelling evidence for cold fusion, but if there were such a thing as cold fusion—you know, desktop conversion into enormous energy—we need that. So I can understand why there are companies, especially abroad, that are devoting small resources to it. I don’t think that’s cause for apoplexy. It’ll probably come to nothing, but if there are scientists who want to spend their time on that, let them do it. Maybe they’ll find something else that’s interesting. On hot fusion, the margin, as I said, is shrinking, but the predicted, even optimistic estimates when commercial, large-scale, worldwide hot fusion would be available is too far into the twenty-first century to solve the energy problems we have today.

The energy problems I’m talking about are in particular global warming, the burning of fossil fuels. So what I would encourage is first of all, much greater emphasis on efficient use of fossil fuels—fluorescent rather than incandescent bulbs, you save a factor of several, or to put it another way, with the same amount of photons you put three or four or five times fewer carbon dioxide molecules into the atmosphere from the coal- burning power plant that provides the electricity. And I would put the money into forcing the automobile companies to produce cars that get 75, 85, 95 miles a gallon. Why are we satisfied with 25 miles a gallon when it is commercially perfectly possible to have safe, quick acceleration, spunky-looking cars that are efficient in their burning of petroleum? And then the other area where I would put emphasis is in non-nuclear alternatives to fossil fuel, of which I would stress biomass conversion, solar-electric power, and wind turbines, all of which are technologies that are coming along very swiftly despite, until recently, real hostility in the U.S. government. Let me give you just one political story. There was once a president of the United States recently in the news named Jimmy Carter. He thought that there was an energy problem and he gave, in effect, talks to the nation in his cardigan sweater saying about how you should save electricity. He put into the roof of the White House a solar thermal converter which circulated cold water to the roof, and on sunny days in Washington sunlight heated this water and in repeated passes it made it very hot, and when it was time for a Presidential shower, here was hot water that did not rely on a power plant. He was succeeded by a President named Ronald Reagan. One of the first acts in office of President Reagan was to rip out the solar thermal converter from the roof of the White House at considerable cost—after all, it was in there and working—because he was ideologically opposed to alternatives to fossil fuels. We lost twelve years in research into these alternatives during the Reagan-Bush administration.

QUESTION: The dapper gentleman there, Bill Nye, his work on television bodes well for science education; he’s to be applauded. I also want to thank you for answering all my questions about Richard Nixon; it explains a lot. You expressed some encouragement about the age mixture represented here in this audience. I wonder if you would comment on the conspicuous lack of racial diversity and the implications for science education in general.

SAGAN: Thank you. We also might ask how it is that of the first ten or twelve questioners only one was a woman in an audience in which women are much more strongly represented. These are wide-ranging, difficult questions. I don’t claim to have the answers except to say that I know of no evidence that women and what in the United States are called racial minorities are not as competent as anybody else in doing science. It has to do, I think, entirely, or almost entirely, with the built-in biases and prejudices of the educational system and the way the society trains people. Nothing more than that. Women, for example, who are told that they’re too stupid for science, that science isn’t for them, that science is a male thing, are turned off. And women who despite that try to go into science and then find hostility from the high school math teacher—“What are you doing in my class?”—find hostility from the 95 percent male science classes, with the kind of raucous male culture in which they find themselves excluded, those are powerful social pressures to leave science. I wrote a novel once, Contact, in which I tried to describe what women dedicated to science have to face, that men don’t, in order to make a career in science.

QUESTION: I would like to challenge you to answer the questions without ridicule....

SAGAN: Fire away.

SAME QUESTIONER: ...whether they be about crop circles, Richard Hoagland, or the abductees.

SAGAN: I didn’t think I had any ridicule there.

SAME QUESTIONER: I think you had quite a lot. I was quite offended.

SAGAN: Which one particularly?

SAME QUESTIONER: The crop circles, the jokes you started with, the answer about Richard Hoagland offended me.

SAGAN: Okay, let’s take one. Let’s take Richard Hoagland —

SAME QUESTIONER: I would like to ask you in general to watch the ridicule. There are so many people here that think such ideas are worthy of ridicule. You have spoken about the need for compassion. I would like to see you model that here.

SAGAN: I appreciate that remark, and if I had not done what I preached I apologize. However, you must recognize —

SAME QUESTIONER: I accept your apology.

SAGAN: There was an “if” in front of the apology: However, you must recognize that vigorous debate is an essential aspect of getting to the truth, and the fact that Mr. Hoagland, for example, is not here—unless he is somewhere— I had nothing to do with it. Someone asked me a question about Richard Hoagland; I said what I thought. I happen to know that when Mr. Hoagland is asked questions and I’m not present, he says things about me, that I sometimes wish I had a chance to —

SAME QUESTIONER (interrupting): Are you capable of modeling him?

SAGAN: I don’t understand the question. What do you mean “modeling?”

SAME QUESTIONER: Modeling. Modeling compassion.

SAGAN: I’ve known Richard Hoagland for many, many years. I think I have just the right measure of compassion. (Laughter)

QUESTION: After the lady’s question I don’t know if mine is appropriate. I was going to ask you: We have Scott Peck, psychiatrist, Dr. [Brian] Weiss, he wrote Many Lives, Many Masters, Dr. [John] Mack [the Harvard psychiatrist who contended patients who say they were abducted by aliens are describing real events, and who spoke at the conference], we saw him yesterday, Dr. [Raymond] Moody—they’re all mighty good thinkers. How do you think they went wrong?

SAGAN: I’m being asked to speculate offering psychiatric matters—hard to do. Some of those people I know very well, some I have never met. I don’t think it would be right for me to guess why it is that they don’t agree with me. I think that’s all I want to say about it. I tried to stress before that it doesn’t matter what the character of the debater is, it doesn’t matter what reservations we have about him or her, what matters is the quality of the argument presented. For each of these people, I think the issue is: is there evidence? Yes, Dr. Moody has an M.D. but he uses, as I said, my own memories of my parents speaking to me as evidence of life after death. I know that’s not a good argument. I know better than he what those voices are about, and so, by extrapolation, I think maybe the rest of his argument isn’t so good. To the extent that I have some way of hooking onto the arguments I try to use what I know and see if there’s a good case or not. I want to stress that there are some claims in the areas of parascience or pseudoscience that may well turn out to be right. And I don’t think that is a reason for us not to demand the highest standards of argument about it.

For example, one thing I didn’t mention to the last questioner: when Mars Observer was on its way to Mars with the high-resolution camera that might photograph things about the size of this, I thought that among the many other targets, it ought to take a look at the so-called face and settle the issue. If it’s just some odd aspect of eolian abrasion on Mars, let’s find that out. If it’s something else, let’s find that out. The fact that I think I understand, via the Richard Nixon eggplant, what the face on Mars is, doesn’t mean that I don’t want anyone to check it out. I could be wrong. If we have the tool to, with a few pictures, find out what the answer is, for heaven’s sake let’s do it. So each of these cases. In Johnny Mack’s case I would say: “Never mind anecdotes, let’s ask about physical evidence.”

The claim is that many abductees have probes inserted up their nostrils, into their sinuses, which are, who knows, monitoring devices telling about where they’ve been and what’s happening to their bodies. I say—and I’ve said to Mack a number of times—you give me one of those and we’ll give it a really close scrutiny, and let’s see if can we find evidence of alien manufacture. Are there principles of physical laws we don’t understand? Are there isotopic ratios or the immiscibility of metals that we don’t know about on Earth? Are there elements from the so-called island of stability, heavy elements, transuranic elements that are thought to be stable but we don’t have any of them on Earth? There are many possibilities and you’ve certainly guessed that in some way an object of manufacture by aliens of extremely advanced capability—they travel from interstellar space, they effortlessly slither through walls, those guys really have powerful technology. Let’s look at this. Never has there been one made available. There’s always one about to be made available, there’s always one that is going to be given to a laboratory, but it never happens.

What is that standard story that I get from Mack and others about the implants? It’s that the abductees, going about his or her everyday life, and in many cases like this it is alleged the implant dropped out, clunk. The abductee picks it up, looks at it incuriously, and throws it in the garbage. Never once— and as a rule, this may prove my case—does he give it to some chemist or physicist, a chemist or physicist who could demonstrate the existence of alien technology. They’d give their eye teeth for that. They would be crawling all over each other to be able to examine the artifact. How come we’ve never had one case like that which really works out? I think that is a telling counterargument to all the anecdotal claims.

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, we are fourteen years into the AIDS epidemic, HIV epidemic right now in this country, and apparently scientifically we are not coming any closer to finding a cure, creating a vaccine, even though there’s lots of money being expended. And apparently also now there are new superbugs or new strains of bacteria that are becoming resistant to many of the antibiotics. You spoke about a concern for your children and your grandchildren in terms of what’s happening. I’m just curious; what implications you see with these newfound illnesses, viruses, that are all of a sudden coming to us who believe that we were conquering everything in this day and age.

SAGAN: This is natural selection in action. If we overdose ourselves with antibiotics, we wipe out all the microorganisms not resistant to antibiotics and preferentially amplify the ones that are resistant. Eventually we arrange things, very cleverly, so that the entire population of microorganisms inside our bodies—including the disease-causing ones—are resistant to antibiotics. So overdosing antibiotics, which physicians have done routinely for reasons that are not hard to understand, is a mistake. Part of the answer is of course not to overdose anymore, and also to develop new strains of antibiotics. There ought to be major efforts to do that. On AIDS, my impression is that while there is nothing like a vaccine or a cure, there are substantial advances in the molecular biology of the HIV virus, and I take that to be a sign of significant hope, but of course  not on the time scale of someone who is dying of AIDS. It’s very slow in that respect. I don’t think this is a money-driven situation. I don’t think there just isn’t enough money. I think there is enough money and some things maybe are not supported well enough, but in general there is, and it’s a matter of not enough wisdom, not the right experiments, not having progressed far enough, not having done it swiftly enough. There’s nothing magical about the HIV virus. It will succumb eventually to the ministrations of molecular biology. And I hope, for the reasons you mentioned, that that time will come soon.

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, my question is in regard to the future of the skeptical movement.

SAGAN: Thank you. That’s a good thing to end on.

SAME QUESTIONER: The responsibility that we have now, I feel, is as great as ever. The skeptical movement has been around for a number of years, perhaps thousands. First of all, I’d like to applaud the leadership of the skeptical movement we have here with you and the panel of speakers we have this weekend. But also important is the grassroots movements, the consensus of opinion of those that do adhere to the tenet, logic, reason, skeptical inquiry. We’re at a point in time now that it’s very important, and after having read the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER over a number of years and other articles and books and so forth, I find it somewhat amusing to see some of the investigations on a number of subjects like Paul Kurtz mentioned, we have hundreds of them—crystal power, pyramid power, a Loch Ness monster, whatever, I could go on and on. To be most effective in the long run I would think that would be something we would need to look at.

SAGAN: What would be?

SAME QUESTIONER: To be effective in fostering the logic and reason in skeptical thinking. I have found these various subject matters to be interesting and yet probably a greater area we could look at is the investigation into the major religions of the world.

SAGAN: Now we’re to it. Okay.

SAME QUESTIONER: There are billions and billions of people that adhere to the tenets of these religions and I would imagine that we could spend more time in the skeptical movement—

SAGAN: In essence your question is: Should the skeptical movement devote some of its attention to religion?

SAME QUESTIONER: Well said.

SAGAN: This is a really good question, and I know that Richard Dawkins talked about this a year or so ago, and drew the conclusion that many religious beliefs were not noticeably different from any of the parasciences or pseudosciences beliefs, and why one of them is the object of our attention and the other is off-limits, and he urged that we be, if I may use the expression, more ecumenical in our hostility. I will answer in the following way: first, that there is no human culture without religion. That being the case, that immediately says that religion provides some essential meat, and if that’s the case shouldn’t we be a little careful about condemning something that it desperately needed? For example, if I am with someone who has just lost a loved one, I do not think it is appropriate for me to say, “You know, there’s no scientific evidence for life after death.” If that person is gaining some degree of support, stability, from the thought that the loved one has gone to heaven and that they will be joined after the person I’m talking to, himself or herself, dies. That would be uncompassionate and foolish. Science provides a great deal, but there are some things that it doesn’t provide. Religion is an attempt to provide, whether truly or falsely, some solutions to those problems. Human mortality is one of those where there isn’t a smidgeon of help from science. Yes, it’s a grand and glorious universe, yes it’s amazing to be part of it, yes we weren’t alive before we were born (not much before we were born) so we hope we’re alive after we’re dead. We won’t know about it. It’s a big deal. But that’s not too reassuring, at least to many people.

Take the issue of the Bible. The Bible is in my view a magnificent work of poetry, has some good history in it, has some good ethical and moral scriptures—but by no means everywhere, the book of Joshua is a horror, for example— and on those grounds is well worth our respect. But on the other hand, the Book of Genesis was written in the sixth century B.C. during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. The Babylonians were the chief scientists of the time. The Jews picked up the best science available and put it in the book of Genesis, but we have learned something in the intervening two and a half millennia, and to believe in the literal truth of the attempted science in the Bible, is to believe too much. I know there are Biblical literalists who believe that every jot and tittle in the Bible is the direct word of God, given to a scrupulous and flawless stenographer, and with no attempt to use the understanding of the time, or metaphor or allegory, but just straight-out truth. I know there are people who think that. That seems to me highly unlikely. I think the way to approach the Bible is with some critical wits about us, but not dismissing it out of hand. There’s a lot of good stuff in the Bible. Case-by-case basis is what I’m saying. Where religion does not pretend to do science, I think we should be open within the boundaries of good sense. I think that you cannot extract an “ought” from an “is,”and therefore science per se does not tell us how we should behave, although it can certainly shed considerable light on the consequences of alternative kinds of behavior. From that we can decide how to arrange our legal codes and what to do. So the idea of an all-out attack on religion I think on many grounds would be foolish, but the idea of treating Biblical literalism, for example, with some skeptical scrutiny is an excellent idea. But it is being done, has been done for the last century by Biblical scholars themselves. I don’t think there’s any particular expertise in this movement for a critical examination of the Bible. There are other people who are doing it just fine.

I hope that sort of middle ground is not too different from what you were asking about, but I certainly don’t think that religion should be off-limits. I don’t think anything should be off limits. We should feel free to discuss and debate everything. That’s what the Bill of Rights is about. And in that sense, and many other senses, the constitution of the United States, particularly the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment, and the scientific method are very mutually supportive approaches to knowledge. Both of them recognize the extreme dangers of having to pay attention to and do whatever the authority says.

He is considered a hard-nosed, blunt-speaking scourge of paranormalists and all who would deceive themselves or the public in the name of science, yet in person he is a gentle, soft-spoken, even shy man who likes nothing better than to stay in his home with his beloved wife Charlotte in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and write on his electric typewriter.

His critics see him as serious, yet he has a playful mind, is often more amused than outraged by nonsense, and believes with Mencken that “one horselaugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.” He is deeply knowledgeable about conjuring and delights in learning new magic tricks. He retired from Scientific American more than fifteen years ago, but his output of books, articles, and reviews has, if anything, accelerated since then. (He’s now written more than sixty books, and more are in the works.) His knowledge and interests span the sciences, philosophy, mathematics, and religion, yet he professes no special standing as a Renaissance man. He has received major awards from scientific societies and praise from some of the nation’s leading scholars ("One of the great intellects produced in this country in this century,” says Douglas Hofstadter), some of whom forthrightly consider him an intellectual hero, yet he remains modest about his contributions.

At eighty-three, Martin Gardner reigns supreme as the leading light of the modern skeptical movement. More than four and a half decades ago, in 1952, he wrote the first classic book on modern pseudoscientists and their views, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, and today it remains in print and widely available as a Dover paperback and is as relevant as ever. It has influenced and inspired generations of scientists, scholars, and nonscientists. He followed that up in 1981 with Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus. In an essay in the New York Review of Books entitled “Quack Detector,” Stephen Jay Gould welcomed the book and said Martin Gardner “has become a priceless national resource,” a writer “who can combine wit, penetrating analysis, sharp prose, and sweet reason into an expansive view that expunges nonsense without stifling innovation, and that presents the excitement and humanity of science in a positive way.” After that, in the same genre, came The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher (1988), On the Wild Side (1992), and Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic: More Notes of a Fringe-Watcher (1996).

The subtitles refer of course to his column “Notes of a Fringe-Watcher” (broadened from its original title, “Notes of a Psi-Watcher”), which has graced the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer every issue since Summer 1983. His first SI column, “Lessons of a Landmark PK Hoax,” dealt with James Randi’s then-just-revealed Project Alpha experiment, in which Randi planted two young magicians in a parapsychology laboratory to see if the lead investigator could detect their trickery. The three Gardner anthologies each consist of half SI columns and half reviews and writings for other publications.

When the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer, was established in 1976, Martin Gardner was one of its original founding fellows, and he has remained a member of its Executive Council and Editorial Board ever since. When offered the opportunity fifteen years ago to write a regular column for SI, he quickly agreed. He dedicated The New Age anthology to CSICOP’s founder and chairman: “To Paul Kurtz, a friend whose vision, courage, and integrity started it all.” Although Martin Gardner seldom travels to CSICOP meetings, he remains, through his personal contacts, insights, published writings, and voluminous correspondence, a profound influence on CSICOP, modern skepticism, and intellectual discourse broadly.

He answered questions posed by Skeptical Inquirer Editor Kendrick Frazier.

SI: In your book of essays The Night Is Large: Collected Essays 1938-1995, you organized your lifelong intellectual interests into seven categories: physical science, social science, pseudoscience, mathematics, the arts, philosophy, and religion. Do they have equal importance to you? How do you rank them in importance or interest — to you? to others? Do you see them as complementary aspects of one coherent worldview, or are some separate?

Gardner: My main interests are philosophy and religion, with special emphasis on the philosophy of science. I majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago (class of 1936), having entered the freshman class as a Protestant fundamentalist from Tulsa. I quickly lost my entire faith in Christianity. It was a painful transition that I tried to cover in my semi-autobiographical novel The Flight of Peter Fromm (now a Prometheus Books paperback). I actually doubted the theory of evolution, having been influenced by George McCready Price, a Seventh-day Adventist creationist. A course in geology convinced me that Price was a crackpot. However, his flood theory of fossils is ingenious enough so that one has to know some elementary geology in order to see where it is wrong. Perhaps this aroused my interest in debunking pseudoscience.

After I returned from four years in the Navy as a yeoman, I returned to Chicago and would have gone back to my former job in the university’s press relations office had I not sold a humorous short story to Esquire. This was my first payment for anything I'd written. It persuaded me to see if I could survive as a freelancer, and for the next year or two I lived on income from sales of fiction to Esquire. My second sale was a story based on topology titled “The No-Sided Professor.” It was my first effort at science fiction.

While freelancing, I took a seminar (using GI bill funds) from the famous Viennese philosopher of science Rudolf Carnap. It was the most exciting course I ever took. Years later I persuaded Carnap to have the course tape-recorded by his wife and to let me shape the recording into a book. Basic Books issued it under the title Philosophical Foundations of Physics. The title was later changed to Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. All the ideas in the book are Carnap’s, all the wording mine. Dover recently reprinted it in paperback with an afterword about how the book came about and my memories of Carnap. During the writing of this book, I exchanged many pleasant letters with Mrs. Carnap, but before the book was published, for reasons unknown to me, she killed herself by hanging.

Carnap had a major influence on me. He persuaded me that all metaphysical questions are “meaningless” in the sense that they cannot be answered empirically or by reason. They can be defended only on emotive grounds. Carnap was an atheist, but I managed to retain my youthful theism in the form of what is called “fideism.” I like to call it “theological positivism,” a play on Carnap’s “logical positivism.”

Shortly before he died, Carl Sagan wrote to say he had reread my Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener and was it fair to say that I believed in God solely because it made me “feel good.” I replied that this was exactly right, though the emotion was deeper than the way one feels good after three drinks. It is a way of escaping from a deep-seated despair. William James’s essay “The Will to Believe” is the classic defense of the right to make such an emotional “leap of faith.” My theism is independent of any religious movement, and in the tradition that starts with Plato and includes Kant, and a raft of later philosophers, down to Charles Peirce, William James, and Miguel de Unamuno. I defend it ad nauseam in my Whys.

SI: How have you managed to retain such a phenomenal breadth of interest and knowledge?

Gardner: Philosophy gives one an excuse to dabble in everything. Although my interests are broad, they seldom get beyond elementary levels. I give the impression of knowing far more than I do because I work hard on research, write glibly, and keep extensive files of clippings on everything that interests me.

There are big gaps in my knowledge, one of the largest of which is classical music. I have a poor ear. My tastes run to Dixieland jazz and melodies I am able to hum and play on a musical saw (one of my minor self-amusements). I know nothing about sports other than baseball. I have never played a game of golf or seen a horse race. I never watch football or basketball. I think boxing should be outlawed as too primitive and cruel. Ditto for Spanish bullfighting.

In high school I was on the gymnastic team (specializing in the horizontal bar), and I played lots of tennis. I would enjoy tennis today except that I had cataract surgery early in life. Without eye lenses, one cannot continually alter one’s focus, so there is no way to anticipate exactly where the ball is as it comes toward you.

SI: Do you wish you had pursued one field more, to the exclusion of the others?

Gardner: I'm glad I majored in philosophy, though had I known I would be writing some day a column on math, I would have taken some math courses. As it was, I took not a single math course. If you look over my Scientific American columns you will see that they get progressively more sophisticated as I began reading math books and learning more about the subject. There is no better way to learn anything than to write about it!

SI: You probably could have been either a philosopher or a mathematician — which a lot of fans of your Scientific American recreational mathematics columns probably thought you were. Did you ever think about going into academia?

Gardner: Early on in college I decided I wanted to be a writer, not a teacher, and I have never regretted this decision. It is the reason I took only one year of graduate work, and never cared to go for a master’s.

SI: Given your breadth and variety of interests, how would you describe yourself — your professional field?

Gardner: I think of myself as a journalist who writes mainly about math and science, and a few other fields of interest.

SI: I appreciate the becoming modesty, but I think you may be too self-effacing. Douglas Hofstadter has said, “Martin Gardner is one of the greatest intellects produced in this country in this century.” Stephen Jay Gould has said you have been “the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us.” Certainly you must be pleased to be so highly regarded.

Gardner: Yes, I am pleased, though Hofstadter, a good friend, surely exaggerates, and ditto for Gould, a marvelous writer I hope to meet some day.

SI: What do you consider to be the relationship between your interests in writing about science and in debunking pseudoscience? Which has more appeal to you?

Gardner: In a way, I regret spending so much time debunking bad science. A lot of it is a waste of time. I much more enjoyed writing the book with Carnap, or The Ambidextrous Universe, and other books about math and science.

SI: What motivates you? You have been writing on pseudoscience and fringe-science since at least 1950. The Washington Post reviewer of The Night Is Large described you — correctly, I think — as “almost certainly the most eminent debunker of pseudoscience since World War II.” Do you find pseudoscience and paranormal claims inherently fascinating — you seem both wryly amused and deeply concerned — or do you consider critiquing them more a task that has to be done? If the latter, what keeps you going at it?

Gardner: I'm not sure why I enjoy debunking. Part of it surely is amusement over the follies of true believers, and partly because attacking bogus science is a painless way to learn good science. You have to know something about relativity theory, for example, to know where opponents of Einstein go wrong. You have to know something about probability and statistics to recognize Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code as hogwash. You have to know the power of the placebo and faith to see why Mary Baker Eddy is the very model of a quack.

Another reason for debunking is that bad science contributes to the steady dumbing down of our nation. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders and the result is considerable damage to society. We see this happening now in the rapid rise of the religious right and how it has taken over large segments of the Republican Party. I think fundamentalist and Pentecostalist Pat Robertson is a far greater menace to America than, say, Jesse Helms who will soon be gone and forgotten.

I am happy to see the job of debunking bad science being taken over by others, especially by scientists like the late Carl Sagan who came to realize the importance of speaking up. I am delighted that Philip Klass is doing such a good job on UFO nonsense because it allows me to avoid this dismal topic. I was tempted to wade into The Bible Code. Now I don't need to after reading Dave Thomas’s definitive blast in the Skeptical Inquirer [November/December 1997].

SI: You are generally considered one of the harshest critics of the paranormal and its proponents. How would you characterize your position?

Gardner: I like to think I am unduly harsh and dogmatic only when writing about a pseudoscience that is far out on the continuum that runs from good science to bad, and when I am expressing the views of all the experts in the relevant field. Where there are areas on the fringes of orthodoxy, supported by respected scientists, I try to be more agnostic. I am certain, for example, that astrology and homeopathy are totally worthless, but I have no strong opinions about, say, superstring theory. Superstrings are totally lacking in empirical support, yet they offer an elegant theory with great explanatory power. I wish I could be around fifty years from now to know whether superstrings turn out to be a fruitful theory or whether they are just another blind alley in the search for a “theory of everything.”

There are dozens of monumental questions about which I have to say “I don't know.” I don't know whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, or whether life is so improbable that we are truly alone in the cosmos. I don't know whether there is just one universe, or a multiverse in which an infinite number of universes explode into existence, live and die, each with its own set of laws and physical constants. I don't know if quantum mechanics will someday give way to a deeper theory. I don't know whether there is a finite set of basic laws of physics or whether there are infinite depths of structure like an infinite set of Chinese boxes. Will the electron turn out to have an interior structure? I wish I knew!

I can say this. I believe that the human mind, or even the mind of a cat, is more interesting in its complexity than an entire galaxy if it is devoid of life. I belong to a group of thinkers known as the “mysterians.” It includes Roger Penrose, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Noam Chomsky, Colin McGinn, and many others who believe that no computer, of the kind we know how to build, will ever become self-aware and acquire the creative powers of the human mind. I believe there is a deep mystery about how consciousness emerged as brains became more complex, and that neuroscientists are a long long way from understanding how they work.

SI: What trends have you seen in popular belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal in the past half century? Has it gotten better or worse? What are your greatest concerns?

Gardner: I think popular belief in bogus sciences is steadily increasing. When I was a boy, there were only one or two astrologers who wrote newspaper columns. Now almost every paper except the New York Times, not to mention dozens of magazines, features a horoscope column. Professional astrologers now outnumber astronomers. For Pete’s sake, a president of the United States and his first lady were astrology buffs! This would have seemed unthinkable a hundred years ago.

Alternative medical views are growing rapidly, especially on college campuses where more students are relying on homeopathic remedies than ever in history. Real tragedies occur when persons avoid sound medical help and rely on worthless claims.

SI: What do you see for the future in that regard?

Gardner: I see the immediate future as having a steady increase in superstitions. Fundamentalism, especially the Pentecostal variety, is growing rapidly, not only here but in other nations, notably in South America. And not only among Protestants but also among Catholics and Jews. The Catholic Church is on the brink of its greatest blunder since it condemned Galileo. It is close to declaring that Mary is a “co-redeemer” with Christ! (Mother Teresa was a strong supporter of this.) Of course, if the pope declares infallibly that this doctrine is true, it will kill the ecumenical movement.

Did you know that Dr. Raymond Damadian, the distinguished inventor of magnetic resonance imaging (the MRI test), has declared himself a creationist and a young-Earther?

SI: Apart from popular belief in pseudoscience, how about what we might call experimental parapsychology — work done by Ph.D.'s in the laboratory that some keep pointing to as evidence of ESP or PK — going back to J. B. Rhine’s experiments in the 1930s and 1940s and most recently the ganzfeld experiments, the persistent claims about remote viewing, and Robert Jahn’s random-number-generator work? Where does all that stand in your view?

Gardner: I'm all in favor of parapsychologists continuing to look for evidence of psi, and their experiments certainly are more carefully controlled than in the days of Rhine. It has often been pointed out that as Rhine slowly learned how to tighten his controls, his evidence of psi became weaker and weaker. However, the evidence will not become convincing to other psychologists until an experiment is made that is repeatable by skeptics. So far, no such experiment has been made. Jahn’s evidence for psi is statistical, and there are many ways his statistics, which favor psi to a very slight degree, can be unconsciously biased. As far as I know, no one else has been able to duplicate his computer-generated results.

SI: Are you discouraged by the rejection of science in certain parts of academia heavily influenced by the postmodernist antipathy toward science and reason? The Sokal hoax, which you wrote about so amusingly, certainly exposed that movement’s scientific vacuousness.

Gardner: Yes, I am dismayed by the increasing effort of the postmoderns to view science as a solely cultural phenomenon rather than as a highly successful and ongoing search for objective truths about the universe. No one wants to deny that science is corrigible, but it is a wonderfully successful self-correcting process that gets ever closer to objective truth. Postmodern nonsense has even invaded mathematics, as witnessed by Reuben Hersh’s just-published book What Is Mathematics, Really? I have a lengthy critical review of this book in the Los Angeles Times Book Review (October 12, 1997), defending the opinion of almost all mathematicians today or in the past that mathematics has a curious kind of reality independent of human minds. The universe is made of particles and fields about which nothing can be said except to describe their mathematical structures. In a sense, the entire universe is made of mathematics. If the particles and fields are not made of mathematical structure, then please tell me what you think they are made of!

SI: When you wrote the book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, did you expect that it would become the classic it has become?

Gardner: No, I never expected Fads and Fallacies would long remain in print. The first edition, titled In the Name of Science, sold so poorly that Putnam quickly remaindered it. Not until Dover picked it up did its sales take off, thanks in large degree to Long John Nebel, then a popular all-night radio talk-show host. For many months, he had guests on almost every night to attack the book. I remember one night, when I had gotten out of bed to change a diaper on our first born, I turned on the radio and heard John Campbell, then editor of Astounding Science Fiction, say “Mr. Gardner is a liar.” I had a chapter about his role in introducing L. Ron Hubbard’s dianetics. Campbell claimed it had cured his sinusitis. I never dreamed that Scientology would last more than a few years, because its claims were so preposterous. It maintained, for example (and still does), that immediately after conception, long before the embryo develops ears, it makes recordings (called engrams) of all the words spoken by or to the mother! I would never have dreamed that UFOs, to which I also devoted a chapter, would become a mania that would increase steadily over the next half century. I expected Wilhelm Reich’s orgone therapy to be short lived, yet it is still going strong. Come to think of it, phrenology is the only major pseudoscience I know about that once flourished around the world and has since faded away.

SI: Which of your own books are your favorites? Which have been most popular? Which are most important?

Gardner: Of my books, the one that I am most pleased to have written is my confessional, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, with my novel about Peter Fromm running second.

SI: And which of your books have been the most popular, have sold best? Which do you think have been the most influential?

Gardner: The one book of mine that has sold the most copies is far and away my Annotated Alice. It has never been out of print since it was published in 1960, and has now sold over a million copies in hard- and soft-cover editions here and in England. Of my books about pseudoscience, I suppose the first one, now titled Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, has been the most influential on later writing about similar topics.

SI: Whatever you write about, you seem always to call on great storehouses of specific information — journal papers, magazine articles, newspaper clippings, etc., going back decades. I've heard Randi describe with some awe your filing system. Can you tell us about it?

Gardner: Yes, my files are my number one trade secret. It began in college with 3 3 5 file cards that I kept in ladies shoe boxes. I had a habit then (this was before copy machines) of destroying books by slicing out paragraphs and pasting them on cards. A friend once looked through my cards on American literature and was horrified to discover I had destroyed several rare first editions of books by Scott Fitzgerald.

When I began to earn some money I moved the cards into metal file cabinets, and started to preserve complete articles and large clippings and correspondence in manila folders. These folders are now in some twenty cabinets of four or five drawers each. And I have a large library of reference books that save me trips to the library. I have not yet worked up enough courage to go on line for fear I would waste too much time surfing the Internet.

SI: How do you manage to keep up with everything?

Gardner: I keep up my interests by taking scores of periodicals that deal with topics I may write about, especially science and math journals. I have been a lifelong subscriber to Science News, which you once edited. I could never have written my Scientific American columns without access to math magazines that ran articles and problems that could be considered recreational in nature.

SI: For as world-famous and respected as you are — your writings have been inspirational to two generations of prominent scientists and scholars — you usually have worked alone. You seldom, if ever, go to conferences or meetings. Only a few of your many fans and readers have ever seen or heard you in person. Why? Has this been an advantage to you — no distractions, for instance — more time for writing? Have there been drawbacks to this solitary work style?

Gardner: I have often been called shy, and with justification. I prefer one-to-one relationships to crowds. I hate going to parties or giving speeches. I love monotony. Nothing pleases me more than to be alone in a room, reading a book or hitting typewriter keys. I consider myself lucky in being able to earn a living by doing what I like best. As my wife long ago realized, I really don't do any work. I just play all the time, and am fortunate enough to get paid for it.

SI: You seem to be curious about everything. What most delights you? Scientifically? Professionally? Personally?

Gardner: I am most delighted by learning something new and significant. (I leave aside the delights of relationships with my wife, with relatives, and with friends). This year I had the pleasure of updating and expanding a 1910 book by Sylvanus Thompson called Calculus Made Easy. It was a great pleasure to learn, for the first time, some basic calculus, and to appreciate fully its enormous elegance and power.

Next to learning something about science or math that I didn't know before, my next greatest pleasure is learning a newly invented magic trick. Conjuring has been a hobby since I was a boy. Some of the best magic tricks operate on scientific or mathematical principles. One of my earliest books, Mathematics, Magic and Mystery (still in print as a Dover paperback) deals with this overlap of magic and math.

Let me give one example. Arrange the cards in a deck so they alternate blacks and reds. Cut the deck in half, making sure the bottom cards of each half are of opposite color. Riffle shuffle the halves together once, making the shuffle as careless or thorough as you please. Now remove cards from the top of the deck in pairs. Each pair will contain a red and a black card! Dozens of clever card tricks have been based on this curious principle. To prove that it must work leads straight into nontrivial combinatorial theory.

SI: Many prominent skeptics are likewise knowledgeable about magic. How important is such an understanding in evaluating paranormal claims?

Gardner: I don't think a knowledge of magic is important in countering paranormal claims, except in connection with self-styled psychics who claim extraordinary paranormal powers. Such psychics use methods which have in common the methods of magicians. A man can be a great scientist, or a greater writer, and be so easily fooled by simple methods of deception that his opinions about extraordinary claims of psi powers are utterly worthless. Conan Doyle, for example, would never have believed in the genuineness of spirit mediums who levitate tables and themselves, float trumpets, produce visible spirits of the dead, exude ectoplasm through their noses, and so on, if he had had even the most superficial training in the methods of conjuring. The parapsychologists who once took Ted Serios and others like him seriously would have been spared their embarrassments had they known anything about magic. A knowledgeable magician, watching these “psychics” perform on stage, knows at once how they obtain their wonders. It is a scandal that even today so few parapsychologists think it worthwhile to study the methods of magicians before they test a psychic who performs incredible feats, then publish papers testifying to the genuineness of the psychic’s powers.

An outstanding instance of this failure is John Beloff’s unwillingness to learn anything about magic. Not many years ago, he wrote that the card tricks of a certain magician represented one of the strongest recent proofs of paranormal powers! When Persi Diaconis watched this magician do his simple card magic, it was perfectly obvious how he was obtaining his effects by methods well known to card magicians.

SI: You were a founding fellow of CSICOP and have been a member of the Executive Council since the beginning. How have you seen our role? What advice do you have for us for the future?

Gardner: CSICOP is obviously doing a much-needed job in combating America’s dumbing down, especially in providing a source to which editors of magazines and newspapers, and the makers of TV shows can turn to get information about bogus claims. It is a role that will be increasingly important in the years ahead.

SI: It’s hard to believe you have been writing your “Notes of a Fringe-Watcher” column in SI for almost fifteen years — especially since you didn't start it until retiring from your long-running Scientific American column. Do you miss doing the latter?

Gardner: I do indeed miss writing the Scientific American column. I had reached a point where I could no longer keep up the column and write the books I hoped to write as long as I had my wits about me. Also, I felt it was time for younger writers to take over the column.

One of the lasting benefits of having done the column was getting to know, as personal friends, so many mathematicians, real mathematicians, far more knowledgeable than I, and whose work I could only dimly appreciate. It would take a page just to list their names. Another continuing pleasure is getting letters from mathematicians telling me it was my column that aroused their interest in math when they were in high school and led them to decide on math as a career.

SI: Well, we all hope you will continue writing your “Notes of a Fringe-Watcher” column in SI for a long time to come. It clearly continues to be provocative.

Gardner: Thanks!

SI: Your readers worldwide have been blessed by your thinking and writing over your long and prolific career, well into a time most people have retired. We all hope you can continue for a long time to come. How is your health?

Gardner: At eighty-three, I tell people I don't feel a day over seventy-five. Seriously, I have few complaints except an enlarging prostate that occasionally bothers me at night, and mild high blood pressure, which I control with Hytrin. Short-term memory is not what it used to be. My wife and I frequently spend twenty minutes at the dinner table trying to recall the name of someone we both know well until suddenly one of us shouts it out. I am fortunate in having parents who each lived into their nineties. I hope my dear wife Charlotte outlives me, although we both look forward to celebrating the arrival of the year 2000, and seeing our grandchildren become adults.