The continued lack of scientific evidence for SHC [see Mark Benecke’s article “Spontaneous Human Combustion: Thoughts of a Forensic Biologist,” in this issue, pp. 47-51] keeps proponents desperately looking for cases they can attribute to the alleged phenomenon — cases that are often quite disparate. They assign instances of unusual burning deaths to SHC rather like one might blame freak auto accidents on the Highway Gremlin. (For a discussion, see Nickell and Fischer 1987 and Nickell 1996.) Even cases with an obvious solution — like the one illustrated on page 17 — are sometimes hyped. That case, involving the 1980 death of an elderly Englishwoman who fell headfirst into a burning fireplace, was duly reported by Randles and Hough (1992, 84-85, 91) and by Arnold (1995, 130).

Another case, that of Jeannie Saffin, included in Heymer (1996, 179-188) and Arnold (1995, 208-209), is quite instructive. Because the source of the body’s ignition is not obvious in Saffin’s death, paranormalists are especially quick to propose SHC. In doing so, of course, they engage in the logical fallacy called argumentum ad ignorantiam ("arguing from ignorance”), since one cannot prove a cause from a lack of facts. The case also illustrates how crucial details may be omitted and how accounts become exaggerated over time, and therefore it demonstrates the consequent need to return to original sources.

Jean Lucille “Jeannie” Saffin was a sixty-one-year-old woman with the mental age of a child, due to brain damage from a forceps delivery at birth. Her mother having died the previous year, she lived with her eighty-two-year-old father and a brother at the family home in Edmonton, in northern London. On Wednesday, September 15, 1982, a hot, humid day, Jeannie was sitting with her father in the kitchen. The windows were open. Suddenly, about 4:15 p.m., Jack Saffin’s attention was directed to his daughter who was ablaze. He shouted to his son-in-law Don Carroll, and the two men put out the fire with water. Carroll phoned for an ambulance, which arrived quickly, and Jeannie was transported to North Middlesex Hospital. She was later transferred to the burn unit at Mount Vernon Hospital. She died there, nearly eight days later, at 8:10 a.m. on September 23. The cause of death was listed rather perfunctorily as “broncho-pneumonia due to burns.”

To proponents of SHC, the case is a spine-tingling mystery. In a chapter devoted to Jeannie Saffin’s death, Heymer expresses “puzzlement about the source of her burns” (1996, 186), and he includes a statement by Don Carroll (1994) who says “there was nothing alight in the kitchen except the pilot light on the grill.” Even so, Carroll insists that he saw “flames coming out of her mouth and her midriff.” Indeed, he says, “the flames were coming from her mouth like a dragon and they were making a roaring noise.” Yet, he insists, “Her clothes did not burn much at all” (Carroll 1994). Heymer emphasizes the latter point, insisting it is “a mystery how she came to be burned inside unburned clothes” (original emphasis) (Heymer 1996, 187).

Arnold essentially repeats the claims, obtaining his information largely from Heymer and apparently doing little actual investigation of his own. He writes: “As the men battled to save Lucille [sic], the son-in-law swore that ‘she had flames roaring from her mouth like a dragon.'” He adds: “Ambulance men . . . noticed there was no smoke damage in the kitchen; that her clothing was not burned. Only a portion of her red nylon cardigan only [sic] had melted” (Arnold 1995, 208-209).

Certainly the case sounds impressive — at least until investigation takes us back to original sources. First, regarding the allegedly unburned clothing, there is the signed statement Carroll gave to authorities soon after his sister-in-law’s death. In that statement from twelve years earlier, he noted that “[h]er clothes were in ribbons and were charred black. She was black as well. She started to try to pick her clothes off herself but I told her to stop” (Carroll 1982). In addition, a typed account by Constable Leigh Marsden stated: “The clothes were still burning when I [Marsden] got there. I pulled off the rest of her clothes. She and her clothes were burning. I put it out with a towel” (Marsden 1982). The ambulance paramedics supposedly reported that Saffin’s clothing had not burned, but what they actually wrote was that she was “wearing nylon clothes, not on fire” (Heymer 1996, 186) — obviously meaning “no longer on fire,” not “unburned.” It is disingenuous to state, as Heymer does, that the nylon cardigan was “melted not burned” (Heymer 1996, 186). In addition to the cardigan, her clothing consisted of a cotton apron and dress (Marsden 1982; Heymer 1996, 196).

As to Carroll’s statements about the fire, the flames probably did appear to come from Saffin’s midriff. That may have been where the nylon cardigan began burning. Also, flaming blobs of melting nylon may have caused the burns on the victim’s “front of left thigh” and, after she stood up, on her “left buttock” and “patches on the right knee” — as related in the autopsy report. Since damage is typically greatest above a flame rather than below it, it is not surprising that there were also “[f]ull to partial thickness burns on the face, neck, both shoulders, front of upper chest” and “patchily distributed on the abdomen” as well as “affecting both hands” (Post-mortem 1982). ("Full thickness burns” means the skin is destroyed down to the underlying fat.)

As to the flames issuing from her mouth “like a dragon,” that claim is not supported by the medical evidence. A report from Mount Vernon Hospital to the coroner’s office stated that when the victim arrived at the burn unit, “There was soot in her nose, but the back of the mouth appeared undamaged” (Whitlock 1982). This was confirmed by the autopsy. Except for the bronchopneumonia (with the inflammation of the trachea and bronchi), there was “no evidence of natural disease"; nor was there any indication of internal combustion. To the contrary, the autopsy report confirmed: “Total body surface burns being about 30-40%” (emphasis added) (Post-mortem 1982).

But what of Carroll’s description of the flames being expelled from Saffin’s mouth and “making a roaring noise"? That may have been the effect on Carroll — especially after twelve years’ reflection. Those details are absent from his original statement to the police. However, Carroll does say in his later statement that, at the hospital, despite her head being swathed in bandages, “I could see into Jeannie’s mouth and the inside of her mouth was burnt” (Carroll 1994). It is possible that Saffin was breathing excitedly so that the flames attacking her face were partially drawn into, then expelled from, her mouth. Heymer agrees with this possibility (Heymer 1996, 195). As to the alleged “roaring,” although a doctor reportedly told Carroll he must be mistaken (Arnold 1995, 208), and even though he is admittedly technically deaf, “Even so, I heard the sound of the flames coming from Jeannie,” he says (Carroll 1994). Possibly due to expectation and the interrelationship of the senses, he simply thought the flames roared.

The medical evidence makes clear that the fire was not internal but, instead, that Saffin suffered external burning as a result of her clothing catching fire. As usual, SHC proponents are unable to theorize how that could have occurred. But a clue comes from Carroll’s original report in which he states, “I made a point of checking on the gas cooker and saw that it was not on and saw that my father-in-law had his pipe in his hand and I checked it and saw that it was fresh tobacco which had not been lit” (Carroll 1982). This seems to rule out the pipe, and, indeed, there is no further mention of it — by Carroll (1994), Heymer (1996), or Arnold (1995). Yet Her Majesty’s coroner for Greater London (Western District), John Burton, told Arnold, “we usually find some smoking material, particularly in [the case of] the immobile or elderly victim” (Burton 1996).

The pipe represents just the type of “smoking material” one looks for, and Carroll’s insistence that it was freshly filled and unlit overlooks an obvious possibility. Did the elderly Mr. Saffin previously knock the hot ashes from his pipe, and did an ember land in Jeannie Saffin’s lap? To this very plausible scenario we must add the fact that the kitchen window and door were open, as was the back door, so that there was the potential for a draft. This could easily have caused the smoldering clothing to flare up.

If we accept this possibility, only minor mysteries remain, and we may clear them up as well. Jeannie Saffin was sitting on some newspapers in a wooden Windsor chair and SHC proponents wonder why the paper suffered no fire damage (Heymer 1996, 185). The simple answer is that Saffin’s body actually protected the papers; obviously the flames did not extend to her buttock until she stood up and moved away from the chair. Proponents also wonder why there was no smoke damage to the room (Heymer 1996, 186-187). The obvious answer would be that smoke was minimized because the fire was confined to the victim and the open windows and draft effectively helped dispel what smoke there was. Finally, paranormalists wonder whether it was “normal” that the victim was not in pain — either at the time of the accident or subsequently (Heymer 1996, 187, 194). In fact, at the time of the fire, while she failed to cry out, she had “whimpered,"according to her father (Saffin 1982). Her mental condition, her body’s production of endorphins (pain-reducing chemicals), the subsequent shock, and her eventual semi-conscious state may all have played a part in minimizing her response to pain.

A&E’s The Unexplained series included the Saffin case in its hour-long discussion of SHC (September 18, 1997). My brief comments on the cases were included, and, overall, the presentation might have been considered balanced. Unfortunately, at the closing of the program the narrator spoke of “an acupuncturist with remarkable talents. Through meditation and practice, he had learned to harness the electrical currents in his body. . . .” Suiting action to words, the supposed marvel crumpled a newspaper which — with a wave of his hand (and a bit of editing to cover the delay) — burst into flames. Alas, it appears the producers were snookered by a well-known magic trick billed variously as the “Yogi’s Gaze” (Miller 1978) and “fire by mental power” (Premanand 1994). Ironically, the feat depends on the secret combining of two chemicals that do, actually, spontaneously combust.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Tim Binga, Director of the Center for Inquiry Libraries; CSICOP Fellow Ray Hyman, for supplying me with the “Yogi’s Gaze” material; and Ranjit Sandhu, CSICOP Research Associate.

References

• Arnold, Larry E. 1995. Ablaze! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion. New York: M. Evans and Co.
• Burton, John. 1996. Letter from Coroner’s Court to Larry Arnold, June 27.
• Carroll, Don. 1982. Signed witness statement made to Constable Leigh Marsden, October 2.
• —. 1994. Statement of November 20, published in Heymer 1996, 180-182.
• Heymer, John E. 1996. The Entrancing Flame: The Facts of Spontaneous Human Combustion. London: Little, Brown & Co.
• Marsden, Leigh. 1982. Constable’s typed notes, Saffin case, n.d.
• Miller, Hugh. 1978. The Art of Eddie Joseph. England: Supreme Magic Co.
• Nickell, Joe. 1996. Investigative Files column. Not-so-spontaneous human combustion. Skeptical Inquirer 20 (6), November/ December: 17-20.
• Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1987. Incredible cremations: Investigating spontaneous combustion deaths. Skeptical Inquirer 11 (4), Summer: 352-357.
• Post-mortem examination. 1982. Case of Jean Lucille Saffin, Department of Forensic Medicine, Charing Cross Hospital, Sept. 28.
• Premanand, B. 1994. Science versus Miracles. India: Indian CSICOP.
• Randles, Jenny, and Peter Hough. 1992. Spontaneous Human Combustion. London: Robert Hale.
• Saffin, John. 1982. Signed witness statement made to Constable Lee Marsden, October 2.
• Whitlock, Michael. 1982. Report as Registrar in Plastic Surgery, Mt. Vernon Hospital, to Mr. R. Wilde, Coroner’s Officer, Uxbridge, Oct. 27.

1. Bucket indicated to investigators that the victim, an elderly lady, was in the process of relieving herself when she fell.
2. The missing shoe is consistent with this or other possible scenarios. Apparently it came off during fall — or her taking it off caused the fall — and is out of view.
3. In falling, the victim obviously hit her head on the fireplace, knocking her unconscious or possibly killing her outright.
4. Her head struck the iron grate, which has been sharply displaced to the left.
5. The fall caused flaming embers from the now-exposed “open coal fire” to shower upon the body.
6. The victim’s clothing ignited and, as the fire progressed, her own melting body fat contributed to the overall destruction.
7. The rug beneath the body may have retained melted body fat to aid in the severe destruction — a process known in the forensic literature as the wick effect.
8. The fire was probably further aided by the chimney effect — a “drawing” of the flame and venting of smoke — in this case by the chimney itself. At about 9:30 on the previous evening, when it is believed the fire took place, neighbors saw a great amount of smoke and sparks issuing from the chimney.
9. Heavy deposits of soot above the fireplace, tapering toward the chimney opening, are consistent with the chimney effect and the venting of considerable organic material.
10. The destruction of the body was in approximate proportion to its proximity to the fire source, the torso — which contains a large amount of fat — being most severely destroyed, while the lower legs and feet have remained intact.
11. As in many other such cases, the lower extremities were spared because fire burns laterally with difficulty.
12. Nearby objects failed to burn for the same reason. Only radiant heat, and not flame, reached these objects.

Thank you for your letter of the 11th. Yes, the fact that things exist is a bit of a problem. Still, your argument that existence is an enigma, inexplicable, is no reason to believe it’s all a miracle. Since humans first evolved, they have found countless enigmas and inexplicable things that, over the centuries, have been explained, and always without the need for miracles. Miracles have certainly been invoked, but they were never really necessary. Why things exist, why there is something, a universe for example, rather than nothing, is a question that has been asked for many thousands of years. The philosopher Leibniz asked it and then gave an answer, but it slips my mind now what it was, though it had something to do with God. Enigmas and inexplicable questions still exist, but given time, research, and intelligent surmise, there’s no reason to insist they never can be answered in a rational way. We've no cause to assume that, just because something is unanswerable right now, it will be eternally unanswerable. The history of the human race indicates very much the opposite. There is no need (except in ourselves perhaps) to fall back on the miraculous. This is what the history of human thought teaches us.

You have a funny idea of what hubris is. You claim that our minds create all that exists, we create reality by thinking, and when I deny this and say reality is already out there and doesn't need you or me or anyone to make it real, you say I show hubris. You're right, it’s not possible to prove that the universe is not merely a figment of my imagination, or yours, or somebody else’s. At least not while that person is alive. But if that person then dies, and the universe continues to exist, then I think we have a pretty good answer. So I'll make this contract with you: If the universe is my personal creation and I die before you and, as a result, the universe blinks out of existence and is never seen or heard of again, you've won. On the other hand, if you say the universe is a figment of your imagination and you die first and reality just goes on as if nothing has happened, then I win the bet.

Solipsism, like most forms of schizophrenia, can never be argued away; any resourceful schizophrenic can always maintain he can't be proven wrong. As a matter of fact, he can, quite easily. All you need do is beat the hell out of him and then ask why, if the world is his creation, he created it in such a way that he allows himself to have the hell beaten out of him. Or why does he have a toothache? Or piles? Or have all kinds of unpleasant things happen to him, such as getting locked up in an asylum? Of course, if your solipsist is also a masochist, you have a problem.

So I guess the best solution is to believe (until you have some good reason not to) that there is a physical universe out there, outside of our thoughts about it. Look at it this way: If the universe is your thought, your idea, your creation, then why have you created such a disagreeable fellow as I to argue with you and upset you so? Seems pretty illogical, if you ask me. So, yes, I have thought over the possibility that the universe is merely somebody’s idea, and I've come to the conclusion that the notion doesn't make much sense, even within its own frame of logic. Something which, even by its own internal rules of consistency, doesn't add up, is not to be given much credence, or much of our time. Our time is limited, and growing more limited by the hour. It’s not to be wasted. Once it’s finished, there won't be any more.

No, since you ask, I don't think that when all the data are in, we'll find that matter and spirit are the same thing. I'm reasonably sure that mind and matter are the same thing, that what we call mind is a manifestation of the functioning of the brain. But I'm reasonably sure that “All” is not “Mind.” All is space, time, matter, and energy. True, without mind, nothing can be discerned. But that doesn't mean that nothing is there. It’s like the old riddle: If a tree falls and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer is quite obvious: No, there’s no sound, as sound is a product of waves of air hitting a tympanic membrane and then being transported to a brain. But there are sound waves. These are intrinsic and have nothing to do with our minds, so far as their existence goes. Existence exists; it doesn't need us as a crutch.

Hubris? Well, I'm quite sure that when I die, the universe will continue to go its merry way, just as if nothing had happened. After all, it’s been going its merry way for fifteen billion years or so before I was born. Of course, I could argue, as Bertrand Russell did, that the universe came into existence five minutes ago, courtesy of my mind, complete with my dirty socks in the laundry hamper, and then challenge you, and everybody else, to prove me wrong. But, on reflection, I think I'll leave things as they are and just go on pretending that there really is reality out there that I can, if I want to, discern, and let it go at that.

Yes, there’s no getting around the fact that I prefer reason (or what I take to be reason) to what I take to be nonsense. Still, I have to insist once again that no one can disprove a negative (you accuse me of not having “an iota of proof in the opposite direction”). Rational argument requires that the proposer of an idea produce evidence for the idea, not that the rest of the world produce evidence against it; although, of course, if others do happen to have evidence against it, that certainly helps hit it on the head. But this so-called negative evidence isn't required. I cannot prove that there aren't eleven purple and green leprechauns, totally invisible, totally inaudible, totally beyond any sensual experience, even that which is enhanced by machines, right here in my study, cavorting around completely beyond my range of perception. But reason leads me to believe that there aren't, and that the idea there might be, until proven otherwise, is extravagant, unnecessary, and not required.

And this is the best way I know of for separating sanity from insanity. Always assuming we want to.

Yours,

Ralph

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.

I have derived a formula for how many occurrences of given words you would expect to find in a text of a given number of random letters. One must calculate the probability of selection for each letter, which depends on the particular text being examined. This is just the number of occurrences of the letter divided by the total number of letters. Typically, the probability for getting an E is above 0.1, while that for a Q can be just 0.005. For a given word like “Roswell,” you multiply the chances for an R with that for an O, then an S, and so on. The final product is multiplied by the total possible number of equidistant letter sequences for the word, which is roughly the square of the number of letters in the entire text divided by one less than the number of letters in the candidate hidden word.

This formula works quite well. I estimated that I would find 18.7 occurrences of “Clinton” in War and Peace, Book 1 (212,000 characters, 7.5 billion possible seven-letter equidistant sequences); the actual number was 21. I estimated I would find 128.1 matches for the name “Apollo” -- and got 129. With each additional letter in candidate words, the chances fall, because you must multiply your product by another number invariably less than one. And rare letters reduce the expected matches greatly.

At a reporter’s suggestion, I downloaded the chapter excerpt of Michael Drosnin’s book, The Bible Code, from Simon and Schuster’s Web site and began searching away. Even though the chapter was only about 4,000 characters in length, I was able to produce a number of hits. One puzzle held a lunar theme: “space,” “lunar,” “craft,” and several “moon’s,” all authentic hidden words. I found the ubiquitous “Hitler/Nazi,” even though the excerpt did not mention those words directly, talking instead mainly about the Rabin assassination. One puzzle has the hidden message “The code is a silly snake-oil hoax.” And I even found “The code is evil” hidden in Drosnin’s book (a mixed message he is sending us here).

Reporter Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune had me look for the name of a very recently disgraced Chicago alderman in Zorn’s old editorials. Sure enough -- the alderman’s demise had been predicted years before. The Zorn Code was announced on October 27, 1997, in the Tribune.

Drosnin has been stumping Australia and the world, flattering code-buster Brendan McKay with compliments such as “clown,” “liar,” “fraud"; and me with, “Thomas appears not to understand the Bible Code at all.” Drosnin accuses us of “counterfeiting” codes, even though McKay and I do not need to alter even one letter of various texts -- either the puzzles are there, or they're not. (And to Drosnin’s dismay, the puzzles continue to turn up everywhere). But Drosnin is also attacking us because our puzzles allegedly do not have “minimality.” Not only must hidden words appear close together in a puzzle, they must also be the shortest skip distances for the given word in a fair-sized portion of the text. Drosnin only mentions minimality in passing, buried in the chapter notes at the end of his book: “All of the Bible code print-outs displayed in this book have been confirmed by statistics to be encoded beyond chance. The word combinations are mathematically proven to be non-random. . . . The computer scores the matches between words, using two tests -- how closely they appear together, and whether the skips that spell out the search words are the shortest in the Bible. (For a more detailed explanation see Appendix.)”

Interestingly, some of Drosnin’s own puzzles are not “minimal.”

His match for “Clinton” has the largest step of all four “Clinton’s” found in the Hebrew Torah, and the other three occur entirely within the chosen match. Each of these three serves to give the chosen “Clinton” a “domain of minimality” of zero. (In contrast, the close matches of “Hitler” and “Nazi” I found in Drosnin’s own book are both minimal over the entire chapter, and the mention of “Roswell” I found in the King James Bible is minimal over the complete text of the Book of Genesis.)

I downloaded the Torah (Koren edition) from McKay’s Web site, and modified my program to handle the Hebrew characters via the Michigan-Claremont transliteration scheme (in which, for example, the Hebrew letter “Shin” is represented as “$”). I have since reproduced a number of Drosnin’s puzzles to the letter, including his nonminimal “Clinton/President” match. I also contrived a method for printing the puzzles out in the actual Hebrew characters. (Pretty good for someone who doesn't “understand the Bible Code at all.”)

Amazingly, Drosnin found “Shoemaker-Levy” (transliterated as $WMKRLWY, eight characters), not in the five books of the Torah, but in Isaiah. Eliyahu Rips used Isaiah as a control, an example of an ancient Hebrew text without the “code,” and found no unlikely codes therein. Drosnin also found “computer” in the book of Daniel. Perhaps he forgot that the code is supposed to occur only in the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

McKay is vigorously pursuing a response to the 1994 Statistical Science article by Rips et al. that gave the “code” its first big boost. Rips studied the Genesis “code” by finding names of post-Biblical rabbis linked to birth/death years, appellations (titles), etc. But using the very same rules restricting choices of names, appellations, and so forth, McKay was able to find an “impossible by chance” result -- in the Hebrew text of War and Peace. Full details can be found on the Internet at cs.anu.edu.au.

A new book written by Jeffrey Satinover has appeared, published by William Morrow. The book, called Cracking the Bible Code, strongly supports the code phenomenon. Interestingly, most of the true-blue code promoters despise Drosnin as the proverbial bull in the china shop -- Satinover alludes to him, but won't even mention him by name.

In the September 1997 Notices of the AMS (American Mathematical Society), Harvard mathematics professor (and Orthodox rabbi) Shlomo Sternberg blasted the code phenomenon. In particular, he pointed out that the elaborate “codes” found by both Rips and Drosnin would collapse even if just a few letters were added to or dropped from the text they used.

And Sternberg notes, “but any serious student of the Talmud knows that there are many citations of the Hebrew Bible which indicate a differing text from the one we have. . . . One of the oldest complete texts of the Bible, the Leningrad codex (from 1009) (also available electronically) differs from the Koren version used by Rips and Witztum in forty-one places in Deuteronomy alone. In fact, the spelling in the Hebrew Bible did not become uniformized until the sixteenth century with the advent of a printed version that could provide an identical standard text available at diverse geographical locations.”

The search for the truth about equidistant letter sequences goes on. One thing I am looking at is how “clumpiness” of letters in real texts sometimes produces many more or fewer matches than would be expected for a purely randomized text. I found one 934-letter chunk of a book about science by Isaac Asimov that produced an amazing seven matches for the word “Nazi,” even though only one was expected. This result is apparently “beyond chance,” with odds of at least two thousand to one against. But it is not really that surprising -- the chunk of text happened to contain several instances of the word "generalization.” And inside every instance, at a step of three, lurks a Nazi: geNerAliZatIon.

It looks like we have to be more careful about what we write!