A book I read in 2004.

Chapter 1. The Most Precious Thing

Chapter 2. Science and Hope

Chapter 3. The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars

The instinct to find faces:

As an unintended side effect, our brain’s pattern-recognition machinery became very effective at extracting a face from assorted details. As a result, we sometimes see faces where none exist. We unconsciously try to combine disconnected fragments of light and dark into a face. The man in the moon is one result. Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Blow-Up” is another example. There are many others. —p60

Chapter 4. Aliens

Artificial satellites are one phenomenon mistaken for extraterrestrial UFOs:

There are so many artificial satellites in Earth’s skies that somewhere in the world we can always see one revealing itself with a flash. Two or three break up in Earth’s atmosphere each day, so their burning debris can often be seen with the naked eye. —p89

Chapter 5. Spoofing and Secrecy

Chapter 6. Hallucinations

Chapter 7. The Demon-Haunted World

The economics of witch hunts:

All costs of investigation, trial, and execution—from the daily wages of private detectives hired to spy on defendants, wine for guards, and banquets for judges, to travel expenses for messengers sent to fetch more experienced torturers from other cities, firewood, tar, and the hangman’s rope—were borne by the accused or their relatives. Court members then received a special payment for every witch burned. The property of convicted witches was divided between church and state. As this legally and morally sanctioned mass murder and theft became institutionalized, and a vast bureaucracy arose to administer it, attention shifted from poor, malicious old women and crones to prosperous middle-class men and women. —p141

The lack of imagination in alien abduction syndrome:

Despite this apparent diversity of extraterrestrial beings, alien abduction syndrome seems to me to describe a banal universe. The supposed aliens’ forms are characterized by a failure of imagination and a preoccupation with human concerns. Nothing in all these stories is even as astonishing as a cockatoo would be to someone who had never seen a bird. Any textbook of protozoology, bacteriology, or mycology contains wonders far more dazzling than the most exotic accounts of alien-abduction believers. Believers take common elements in their stories as signs of truth, rather than evidence that they have concocted them from a shared culture and environment. —p156

Chapter 8. On the Distinction Between True and False Visions

The imperfection of memory:

University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus found that even without hypnosis, subjects can easily be led to believe they saw something they never actually saw. In a typical experiment, subjects watch a film of a car accident. While being questioned about what they saw, they incidentally receive false information. For example, a stop sign is casually mentioned although none appears in the film. Many subjects then dutifully remember seeing it. When the deception is revealed, some protest vehemently, stressing how vividly they remember the sign. The longer the interval between viewing the film and receiving the false information, the more people have their memories manipulated. As Loftus argues, “Memory of an event is more like a continually revised story than a pristine record.” —p161|

Chapter 9. Therapy

Chapter 10. The Dragon in My Garage

Preference for simpler hypotheses:

Nobody seriously argues that quasars are alien civilizations billions of light-years away that have attained enormous levels of power. Why? Because their properties can be explained consistently with known physical laws, without invoking extraterrestrial life. Aliens represent a hypothesis of last resort. Only if every other hypothesis fails should we consider it. —p203

Chapter 11. The City of Grief

Chapter 12. The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

Chapter 13. Obsessed with Reality

Chapter 14. Antiscience

How science differs from other fields:

Science differs from many other human endeavors. Not, of course, in that its practitioners are unaffected by the cultures in which they grew up, or that their ideas are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Rather, it differs in its passion for formulating testable hypotheses, its search for decisive experimental evidence to confirm or refute ideas, the vitality of its substantive debates, and its willingness to abandon ideas found wanting. Yet if we fail to recognize our limitations, seek better data, willingly perform controlled experiments, and respect evidence, our leverage in seeking truth becomes very small. In opportunism and timidity, we may be buffeted by every ideological wind, without enduring values to hold onto. —p304

Chapter 15. Newton’s Sleep

Ignorance creates confidence more than knowledge does:

Ignorance more often breeds confidence than knowledge does. Those who most positively assert that science will never solve this or that problem are not those who know much, but those who know little. —p306,

Chapter 16. When Scientists Know Sin

Criticism of nuclear deterrence:

Edward Teller argued that the hydrogen bomb preserves peace, or at least prevents hot nuclear war, because the consequences of war between nuclear-armed states are so dangerous. We have not yet experienced nuclear war, have we? But all such arguments assume that nuclear-armed states will invariably act rationally, and that fits of anger, vengeance, and madness will never seize their leaders (or military and security-police personnel responsible for nuclear weapons). In a century that produced Hitler and Stalin, this seems naive. —p329-330

Chapter 17. The Marriage of Skepticism and Wonder

Creativity and skepticism working together:

As I have stressed, the heart of science is a balance between two apparently contradictory attitudes: openness to new ideas, however strange or counterintuitive, and vigorous skeptical scrutiny of every idea, old or new. This is how we distinguish profound truths from nonsense. Creative and skeptical thinking must work as a joint enterprise if we are not to lose our way. —p347

The main purpose of public education:

Skepticism and wonder are both skills requiring practice to hone. Harmoniously combining them in every student’s mind should be the main purpose of public education. —p349

Chapter 18. Dust in the Wind

Chapter 19. No Such Thing as a Dumb Question

Chapter 20. A House on Fire

Chapter 21. The Path to Freedom

Books:

Books changed all that. Affordable books let us examine the past with great accuracy. They also cultivated our species’ wisdom, letting us understand the thoughts of ordinary people, not only the powerful (with the best teachers). They allow us to reflect on the insights of the great minds produced throughout Earth’s history, insights painfully distilled from nature. Books invite people to converse thoroughly through their minds. They can take us anywhere. They tolerate our slow understanding, let us reread difficult passages as often as we wish, and never reproach us for setting them aside. Books are keys to understanding the world and participating in democratic society. —p410

Chapter 22. Significance Junkies

Chapter 23. Maxwell and the Nerds

Chapter 24. Science and Witchcraft

“It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion,” said Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the Big Brother government employs bureaucrats whose sole job is to alter records of the past to suit the interests of those currently in power. 1984 is more than an entertaining political fantasy. It was based on the Stalinist Soviet Union, where rewriting history was institutionalized. When Stalin took power, photographs of his rival Leon Trotsky—monumental images of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions—immediately began disappearing. Heroic, entirely ahistorical paintings appeared of Stalin and Lenin directing the Bolshevik Revolution together, with no trace of Trotsky, founder of the Red Army. —p475

The demon haunted world