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Transcription

In ancient times, unexplored regions on maps would often be given fearsome legends like "Here Be Dragons". Unknowns were frightening, and it gave some comfort to at least be able to label the unknown. Hypothesized dragons seemed a good enough explanation for what would otherwise be ungraspable. With a made-up concept and a few words, the unknown becomes simple and satisfying. Those ancient cartographers would have felt quite at home today. De facto practice among most people is still to give satisfying labels to quantify and conveniently package the unknown. When faced with a phenomenon for which one does not personally know a rational explanation, like... dreaming of your uncle the night before he dies, it's much easier to accept a simple explanation like "psychic connection" than to grasp the complexities of cognitive phenomena, confirmation bias, and the law of large numbers. Here Be Dragons is so much easier. The vast majority of the population accepts dragons - or their logical equivalents - as natural components of our world that should be taken for granted. Let's have a look at some modern-day dragons. There is something to be said for listening to the body, as opposed to sort of imposing medical information on what you expect the body to do. I do believe in ghosts. I would go see them for all the way from a cold to a cancer. I mean, I believe I really believe in healing, other than our conventional medicine that we have here. 9/11 I think was an attack on our own people, by our own government. I'm a really superstitious person, and I do believe in not stepping on the cracks and if a black cat runs in front of your car I will stop and turn around and go the other way. A great deal of research goes into the development of many pharmaceuticals and I think the primary research they do is how to gain the greatest profits. I think that we have the ability to sort of sense and feel sort of energy movements... Detox tea... it tastes really good and... ...according to the label it's supposed to rid your body of impurities and it seems to work, you know? You drink it and your sweat smells terrible. I had Cranosacrial therapy a therapy where the energy from the fingers goes into your head, around your head. ...and I think that organic foods are often grown by people who care about their bodies and about the Earth. I think that a lot of that is embedded in the food. You can taste it and, in a way, you can sense the love that was put into it. I sort of believe in an additional dimension. Homeopathic medicine is the same as... it's a watered down version of a combination of organic foods and seeking out spiritual truth. My name is Brian Dunning. I have a free weekly audio podcast on the Internet called Skeptoid, at skeptoid. com, dedicated to furthering knowledge by exposing the widespread pseudosciences that infect popular culture. Each week I focus on one topic that you've been hearing about in the news: an urban legend, a useless alternative medicine scheme, a conspiracy theory or whatever the latest supernatural phenomenon is. But you can only reach so many people with a podcast, and I believe that this material is important. So I decided to make this short film to reach a much broader audience, and provide this general introduction to critical analysis of pop phenomena. Other people have made films to distribute on the Internet, of course, but more often than not they're used to spread paranoid conspiracy theories or make political statements. And whenever you turn on the television, you find that the science channels have largely turned into paranormal channels, the news reports free energy machines and miraculous crying statues without critique, and daytime talk programs have devolved into promotions for the latest New Age healing book or celebrity-endorsed diet. and that's why I made this film. You'll often hear me use the word pseudoscience. A pseudoscience is an idea that claims to be real but in fact is not supported by any science or any evidence. Often they'll use scientific sounding language to describe how it works. Usually it's a product that someone's making money from. Most complementary and alternative medical systems are pseudosciences. Psychic powers and astrology and feng shui and telekinesis are all pseudosciences. People on television who pretend to detect ghosts using scientific instruments are practicing pseudoscience. Herbal detoxification is a pseudoscience. Did I just make a whole series of really bold statements? Not really. All I did was point out that these ideas are not supported by any evidence. They have no rational scientific hypotheses behind them, and no experimental data indicating that they work. I'm not the one who made bold statements. It's the people promoting these pseudosciences who need to back up their claims. But they don't, and unfortunately they often don't need to: victims continue wasting money on worthless frauds. But it's much more than that. When we invest our faith in a pseudoscience, without questioning its validity, we're recreating the medieval Dark Ages. For 500 years, there was essentially no progress in any scientific field or in human rights. Scientific experimentation, and thus learning, was often illegal. If we don't test, if we don't experiment, we don't learn. We don't progress. Critical thinking is the single most important driver of the advancement of the human race. The minute we let down our guard and accept absurd pseudoscientific claims at face value, we're giving away our progress back to the dragons. Now, let's take a few minutes and go through some of the common warning signs. These are the red flags that you can watch for that will help you identify pseudoscience. The Appeal to Authority is the use of authoritative imagery to lend the appearance of credibility to a product. Quite often, this means a picture of someone in a white lab coat. Instant credibility! Other examples of authority-based marketing gimmicks include celebrity endorsements, and mentions of certifications, colleges, academies, and institutes. Good science presents good data. It never needs to resort to hokey marketing gimmicks to impress you, and is almost never presented with a white lab coat. Beware of any product or idea that is said to be based on ancient wisdom. In ancient times, very little useful or true information was known about human anatomy and many other sciences. Since those days, scientists have learned entire encyclopedias of information about our universe and our bodies. It's completely illogical and backwards to think that the ancients had a better understanding of anything than modern science. Their hearts were in the right place, but in ancient times, we simply didn't yet have the tools developed over the subsequent centuries of learning. That's why ancient wisdom gave us things like the flat Earth theory, human sacrifice, slavery, a 30-year average human lifespan, rain dances, the burning of witches, and the medical technique of bloodletting to rebalance the four basic bodily humors. But alternative therapies based on ancient wisdom have stood the test of time, haven't they? Well, it doesn't matter how long a treatment has been around. The only criteria medical science has for a treatment is "Does it work?". We don’t care whether the ancient Chinese believed it; we only care about the test results. When you hear any product advertised as being based on ancient wisdom, it's probably because they have no real evidence to support their claims. Ancient wisdom should always be a red flag. Confirmation bias is what we call our tendency to remember events that coincide with our beliefs, and don't take notice events that don't. This is why you can walk out of an hour-long session with a psychic who asked 200 questions, made 300 probing guesses, of which maybe 10 were close to meaningful and say "Wow! She knew everything about me!" Many hospital workers think that a full moon means a crazy night in the ER. They all remember those crazy nights when there WAS a full moon, thus confirming the belief, but they tend to forget the crazy nights when there wasn't a full moon. The data shows that full moon nights are no busier than any other, but we believe the myth because of confirmation bias. Many people will often confuse correlation with causation. If you happened to take an herbal supplement around the same time your cancer went into remission, you're likely to think the supplement caused the remission. We confuse correlation with causation. Here's a valid correlation: People who eat a lot of rice tend to have black hair. I think we can all come up with perfectly logical reasons why these two things happen to go together. But fortunately, I don't think too many of us think one causes the other. Here's another valid correlation: Autistic children are often diagnosed shortly after receiving their regular vaccinations. The reason for this correlation is simply that vaccination age just happens to be about the same age that autism symptoms become apparent. But many people have wrongly drawn a causal relationship, and look at all the trouble that's resulted. Some people are actually preventing their children from getting vaccinated, due to a lack of critical thinking, and irresponsible promotion of alarmism and misinformation by the media. Correlation is not necessarily causation. A red herring is a distraction from following a logical line of evidence. In the old days, if a bloodhound was on your trail, it was believed that dragging a red herring across your path would distract the bloodhound off your scent. Red herrings, therefore, are irrelevant pieces of information thrown into an argument to distract you from the real topic. Red herrings are a favorite of conspiracy theorists. If you listen to the people who try to convince us that September 11 was perpetrated by our own government, their evidence consists of virtually nothing but red herrings. Who crashed the planes into the buildings? "Well, Dick Cheney had business interests in the middle east." Maybe so, but who crashed the planes into the buildings? "Well, the leaseholder had an insurance policy on the skyscrapers." Maybe so, but who crashed the planes into the buildings? "George Bush's younger brother Marvin was a principal in a security company, and the World Trade Center was one of their clients. " Maybe so, but who crashed the planes into the buildings? "Brian Dunning visited the World Trade Center only two years before they collapsed, and isn't it interesting that he did a podcast episode debunking 9/11 conspiracy claims?" Red herrings. These are irrelevant distractions that do not in any way address the point under discussion, they merely have the appearance of relevance because some of the names or places are the same. Be on the lookout for them. And be the bloodhound that keeps his nose on the trail; don't follow the red herring. While we're on the subject of conspiracy theorists, let's talk about their other favorite device. It's called "Proof by Verbosity", and it consists of laying out huge volumes of information, more claims and allegations on more subjects about more people and ideas than anyone could ever possibly respond to. Such a blizzard of information gives the appearance of being comprehensive and thoroughly researched. "If they have all that amazing amount of evidence, their claim MUST be true!" But it's not the quantity of information that matters, it's the quality of information. You can stack cowpies as high as you want; they won't turn into a bar of gold. Pointing out that the evil government fluoridates our water supply does not support the claim that a particular brand of magically "ionized water" cures cancer. Makes no difference whether it's true or not, it's irrelevant. Piling on red herring after red herring will never amount to useful evidence. Pay attention and soon you'll run into another claim supported with Proof By Verbosity. It might be another conspiracy theory, it might be an advertisement for a new type of water with medicinal properties, it might be an herbal product claiming to detoxify your body. Look at all the wild claims they make, and take careful note of how many of them are actually directly relevant, and specific enough to be testable. Notice how it would be impractical to try and respond individually to each of these many claims. It's an endless game of whack-a-mole. The only way to win? Don't play. Virtually every pseudoscientific claim credits some form of "energy". Life force, chi, negative energy, positive energy, the body's energy fields - all meaningless nonsense, which sound plausible simply because they throw in a scientific sounding word: Energy. New Age practitioners seem to think that energy is a hovering, glowing cloud that can go wherever it's needed and from which adepts can draw power and feel rejuvenated or accomplish healings. Imagine a vaporous creature from the original Star Trek series, and you'll have a good idea of what New Agers think energy is. Energy is a measurement of something's ability to perform work. Given this context, when spiritualists talk about your body's energy fields, they're really saying nothing that's even remotely meaningful. Here's a good test. When you hear the word "energy" used in a spiritual or paranormal sense, substitute the phrase "measurable work capability". Does the usage still make sense? There's a good reason why you don't hear medical doctors or pharmacists talking about energy fields: it's meaningless. This is usually a really frail excuse for why mainstream scientists don't take their claim seriously, why the product is not approved by the FDA, or why scientific journals won't publish their articles. You'll often hear this in the form of a a conspiracy of the medical establishment to suppress a quack cure because it's in the interest of the medical industry to keep you sick. In fact, any doctor or pharmaceutical company that could develop a new cure would make a fortune; they'd never suppress it. The same goes for auto manufacturers worldwide who are said to be "suppressing" new efficient engine technologies. As much as some people with particular ideological agendas would like you to believe it, science never suppresses good science. As we've seen time and time again, by no definition can "all natural" mean that a product is safe or healthy. I'm standing next to a gigantic stand of poison oak. Consider other all-natural compounds like hemlock, mercury, lead, toadstools, box jellyfish neurotoxin, asbestos - not to mention a nearly infinite number of toxic bacteria and viruses - E. coli, salmonella, bubonic plague, smallpox. For those natural compounds that are not harmful, synthetic versions have been engineered in many cases to make them even safer, more effective, or able to be produced in large quantities. All natural? Often that's a great thing. Just as often, it's not. Some claimants suggest that it's moral, ethical, or politically correct to accept their claims, to redirect your attention from the fact that they may not be scientifically sound. In some cases, such as the anti-vaccine or anti-fluoridation activists, proponents try to use the court system to force their beliefs to be adopted in place of what we've learned through science. Generally, when a theory is scientifically sound, even if it's brand new it will eventually find its way into the educational curriculum. Good science is done in the lab - not in the courts, not in protest marches, not in blogs, and not on Oprah. A political or cultural campaign to legalize or promote some product or claim is a major indicator that it's bogus. When you learn to identify these warning signs and many others like them, this list is certainly not complete, you'll find that you start seeing them everywhere. And if you're having a conversation with someone who's trying to convince you to try some herbal therapy or New Age meditation, you can point out these fallacies in their arguments and it strips them of the tools they depend on the most. Now that we understand what to look for, let's try applying these skills to some actual claims out there. But keep in mind that critical thinking must not be just about debunking. There’s no benefit in debunking for its own sake. Rather, debunking is only necessary when pseudoscience stands in the way of progress and then, it’s critical! Precognition is where you dream or imagine or foresee some event that later comes true, when there's no possible way you could have known about it. One of the stories or precognition you hear most often is of someone thinking or dreaming about another person only to find later that that person died at that same moment. It sounds like proof positive that there must have been some psychic connection. French Physicists Georges Charpak and Henri Broch made a neat calculation to show that this is not only possible, it's inevitable. On average it should happen to about 1 in every 150 people sometime in their lifetime. Assume that everyone knows about 10 people who die each year - either family, acquaintances, or mostly celebrities and famous people - people who might pop into your thoughts no more than once a year. There are 105,120 five-minute intervals in a year in which each of those 10 people might die. That gives a 1 in 10,512 chance that you'll think about someone during the exact same 5-minute interval in which they happen to die, in any given year. That doesn't sound very probable by itself, but consider that there are 300 million people in the United States. This improbable coincidence must happen to about 28,500 Americans every year. Only a tiny percentage of those get their stories on television or in print, but it's enough to convince an uncritical layperson that precognition and psychic connections must be real. And when you relax the criteria even slightly - you think or dream about someone, then next time you talk to them you find that something unpleasant has happened in their life - the probability goes up exponentially, by a factor of millions. The mathematics behind this concept universally apply to all pseudosciences that depend on extraordinary coincidences for their support. The Law of Large Numbers - the inevitability of improbable events - proves that the most bizarre coincidences are merely mathematical certainties. Understand the math, don't turn first to paranormal explanations. Next, let's consider complementary and alternative medicine. You'd think that with a century of modern medical science behind us, people would not still be looking to the ancient state of knowledge when it comes to their health. But, unfortunately, it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just a tiny sampling of products and techniques still being sold, still in demand among 21st century Americans, and with no empirical or plausible hypothetical foundations: Reflexology. Homeopathy. lonized jewelry. Magnet therapy. Therapeutic touch. Colonic irrigation. Chiropractic. Herbal detoxification. Vitamin megadosing. Psychic healing. New Age blessings. Detoxifying footpads and foot baths. Naturopathy. Aromatherapy. Bioidentical hormone therapy. Chelation. Iridology... You'll notice that these products are not FDA approved. It's legal to sell anything you want that's not overtly dangerous, so long as you don't claim that it is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or illness. And that's how billions of dollars of worthless "supplements" are sold every year. They usually claim that their product has wellness benefits, but in order to avoid running afoul of the law, they leave these claims uselessly vague, saying that their product "restores balance", "builds the blood", "boosts the immune system", "restores vitality" or some other claim that's medically meaningless but that sounds reasonable to an uncritical layperson. When a product does have merit and warrants FDA approval, this merit is established through a process called the randomized controlled trial, more commonly called a clinical trial. A clinical trial is a very special process. It's very different from the way most alternative products demonstrate their effectiveness, which is through personal testimonials and "studies". Spend 5 minutes browsing through Wikipedia, and congratulations, you've just completed a "study". Spend 2 minutes rubbing your chin thoughtfully and looking at the sky, and you've just completed a "study". You can now legally sell your product with the claim "Studies show that this product will repolarize your energy fields". Not good enough for the FDA. To conduct a randomized controlled trial, a statistician will select a sample size large enough to produce a significant result. Care must be taken that the test subjects are properly representative of the target population, and not tainted by selection biases that might skew the results. The subjects are blinded, knowing as little as possible about what's being tested. They are randomly and blindly assigned to one of several groups. There may be a group that will receive the treatment being studied; a group receiving an established treatment; and always at least one control group receiving a control or placebo treatment. Test administrators are also blinded - this is called double-blinding - such that they don't know what group each subject is assigned to, and whenever possible, they also don't know what the treatment is that they are administering. Everything is coded to avoid experimenter bias and to cancel out any effects like patients trying to respond the way they feel the experimenters want them to. The trial lasts long enough to satisfy the statisticians and the scientists. Finally, when the results are tabulated by a blinded statistician (this is called triple-blinding), we get the results. The cloaks of anonymity are whisked aside, and we finally learn for a statistical certainty which treatments are effective, and which are not. When this process shows significant benefits for a new treatment, and the trial can be repeated by other experimenters and yields similar results, then, and only then, do scientists say that this is a product that works, and is supported by evidence. Let's pick just one alternative medicine to examine in closer detail. Homeopathy. This is a system, invented around 1800, intended to bring into balance your four basic bodily humors - blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile - by ingesting a infinitesimally small amount of whatever poison caused the imbalance. Clearly, all of these fundamental assumptions homeopathy is based on are now known to be complete nonsense. Homeopathy is about extreme dilution. The greater the dilution, the more effective the treatment. A tiny amount of extract, usually from some herb, is diluted in water, far past the point of being chemically pure water. Early in the dilution process, they agitate it, and this is said to give the water a "spiritual imprint" of the original compound, and it can then be diluted infinitely without losing its effectiveness. This water is then sold as is, or is infused into sugar pills. Let's look at some of these. These come in pill form. These are standard sugar pills, same as you can get at a pharmacy - sucrose and lactose, are the only listed ingredients. Each pill has supposedly been infused with a single drop of the diluted water. Essentially it's a very small hard candy, without any flavoring. This one is a 30C dilution of sulphur. That doesn't mean 1 part sulphur and 30 parts water; it means C, or roman numeral 100, to the 30th power, or 10^60, which is 1 followed by 60 zeroes. Chemical purity is related to Avogadro's number, 6x10^23, so technically this solution is 37 orders of magnitude more pure than chemically pure. This is far more diluted than one sulphur atom in all the oceans of the planet. How likely is it that there is even a single molecule of sulphur in this bottle? Impossible. It's pure sugar. This whole shelf in the pharmacy, simply pure sugar, infused with pure water. If all of this stuff is actually unsupported by any good evidence, that means that it doesn't really work. But lots of people believe that it does. Smart people, your friends and neighbors, and the professionals you work with. Let's look at some of the reasons smart people believe weird things. First of all, the unexplained is cool! Who doesn't love a fascinating subject? Whether it's the Loch Ness Monster or a black hole at the center of our galaxy, it's cool! Or what about a new meditation technique that will let you change your body's physical appearance? We're all naturally predisposed to be excited about new weird stuff. Not even the smartest people you know are immune to this. It's human. Second, simple answers are seductive. You go to your doctor and he tells you "Gee I'm sorry, but you have kidney failure, and you're going to need dialysis for the rest of your life. " Your neighbor, who sells an exotic fruit juice from Brazil says "Hey no problem, drink this expensive juice, and you'll be cured. " Which sounds more attractive? Is there any surprise that people who sell nonsense continue to get customers? Most pseudosciences sell easy answers. We all want to believe that anything is attainable and easy. Third, our inquisitive nature encourages us to focus on possibilities. Scientific explanations are called theories, and they always are and always will be subject to improvement or change as we make new discoveries. No matter how solid our foundation of knowledge is, and no matter how comprehensively it's validated by experimentation, every theory will always be subject to improvement. Some people take this inherent incompleteness of any theory to its logical extreme. They latch onto that speck of possibility that a theory is wrong, and they give that speck equal or greater significance than the theory! "Gravity is just a theory, it could be wrong; an alternate possibility is that the Earth is expanding and pushing against our feet. " Let Einstein and the others hold up their end; they know their business. Give our strongest theories the respect they are due. It is rational to accept our best theories even if you don't understand them. It is irrational to reject them for that reason, or to claim that you know better. Fourth, people simply lack the tools for critical thinking. We love the unexplained; we love easy answers; we hate complicated stuff. And nobody's ever given us tools, like those we talked about earlier, to tell science from pseudoscience. It's no wonder that most people, no matter how smart they are, believe in all sorts of crazy stuff that's not true. Most of us rely on pop culture for our exposure to science. As a result, our knowledge is generally quite poor, and that illiteracy is constantly being reinforced. What this exposure never seems to include is healthy skepticism. Don't expect pop culture to arm you with the tools you need. You will need to seek those out, and then apply them, yourself. So we know what the red flags are, and we understand why people ignore them. What can we do to become better critical thinkers, and to help other people do the same? Number one, Act Locally. The first thing you can do is to start actively looking for the red flags. Keep your eyes and ears open for claims of ancient Chinese wisdom, the body's energy fields, all-natural ingredients, pictures of people in lab coats, and television shows that uncritically presume the existence of ghosts or psychic powers. And then, question it. Research it. Go online and do a search. But, beware of your sources. A Google search for virtually any pseudoscience is likely to bring up sites that are commercially dedicated to promoting some product or concept, and you're not going to find criticism there. Wikipedia articles about controversial topics always have a section on Criticism or Skepticism. Follow those links. Read the references on the bottom of the page. Your friend recommends acupuncture, or thinks aliens landed in Roswell in 1947? Go and actively search for scholarly criticism, then make an informed decision. Number two, Act Globally. Take a stand when your community considers the question "Should education and the media be balanced?" Isn’t it fair and better to show both sides? Aren't free speech and academic freedom of paramount importance? Well, that depends. In matters of opinion or philosophy, where "academic freedom" applies, yes. In matters of science, absolutely not. Math class does not give equal time to 2+2=5. Geology class does not give equal time to Flat Earth theories. Medical school does not give equal time to bloodletting. History class does not give equal time to Holocaust denial. Pseudoscience should never be given equal time, and that's not being biased or closed-minded. Facts and fallacies are not equally valid. Embrace the information that stands up to the scrutiny of testing, not the information that fails such scrutiny. You want to make a difference globally? Do whatever you can to end this politically correct fad of giving pseudoscience equal time. Next time your TV show or newspaper presents fallacy as fact, let them know that you don't support the harm they're doing. Next time your local school board wants to replace science with opinion, help put an end to the folly of "balanced" science. It might be very politically correct to want to accommodate that 5, but I'm sorry, the question on the board is 2+2. There's one final present I'd like to leave you with, and that's a reading list. Like any list it's woefully incomplete, but I'm going to give you what I consider the best books to get anyone started on the path to critical thinking. First off, everyone in the world should read Carl Sagan's classic "The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. " This book is the magnum opus of critical thinking for everyone. It's easy to read, approachable, and every page is fascinating no matter who you are. Chapter 12 includes Sagan's famous Baloney Detection Kit, quite possibly the handiest Swiss army knife for understanding our universe. The second book is Flim Flam, by James "The Amazing" Randi. Randi makes no effort to be everyone's favorite guy like Carl Sagan; instead he hits the nail on the head hard. This book is chock full of no-nonsense exposure of frauds and rip-offs. You'll learn how easily people can be deceived, and it can be a big wake-up call. If you want to be able to recognize when someone's taking advantage of you with a fraudulent product or service, expertise in the art of Flim Flam is your first line of defense. Third, I'm going to recommend a book that you probably didn't expect, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain was perhaps the most effective critic of human ignorance and folly who ever lived. Although on its surface it appears to be an adventure story, it’s really a collection of quite shocking exposés of human weaknesses, driven by superstition, racism, greed, and ignorance. If you think James Randi pulls no punches, try re-reading Mark Twain with new eyes. Finally, I'm going to recommend my own book, Skeptoid, Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena, with a foreword by James Randi. This is 50 short subjects based on my podcast episodes, quick and easy analyses of 50 phenomena that you've always wondered about: The Amityville Horror, The Philadelphia Experiment, organic food myths, Bigfoot, spirit orbs. There's something in here to challenge everyone. Some people criticize science by pointing out that it does not know everything and doesn't have all the answers. Obviously, this criticism is true. Science is all about the fact that we don't know everything. Science is the learning process. If we want to improve the world, improve the human condition, improve technology; learning, and thus science, is the essential way forward. When your hear someone criticize science because it doesn't have all the answers, don't argue with them; instead point out that that's the central strength of science. We couldn't be learning more every day if we presumed to already know everything. Some people criticize skepticism because it doesn't leave well enough alone. Many paranormal and alternative beliefs bring comfort to those who practice them, and are a positive force in many peoples' lives. But happiness and enlightenment are all around us in our world; you don't have to turn to pseudoscience to find them. And moreover, once we begin investing our faith in unsubstantiated or supernatural phenomena, we are contributing to the redirection of attention, influence, and funding away from technologies and concepts that have been evidenced to be beneficial to humanity and to our world. The choice between pseudoscience and science is the choice between stagnation and progress: progress toward long life, health, happiness, a cleaner planet, bountiful food, knowledge, and peace. There may indeed be undiscovered dragons in our world. But there is also something we know for a fact: we haven't found any dragons yet. We've looked in a lot of places, and seen some extraordinary things; but never yet has science been forced to throw in the towel and admit the reality of magic.