Home : Skeptical Inquirer magazine

Volume 29, Number 1
January/February 2005

• Buy this back issue
• Critical Thinking About Energy
• A Nobel Laureate Confronts Pseudoscience
• Critical Inquiry, and Thinking About Galileo
• In the Land of Galileo, Fifth World Skeptics Congress Solves Mysteries, Champions Scientific Outlook
• Facts and Fiction in the Kennedy Assassination
• A Giant Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Articles

Critical Thinking About Energy

The Case for Decentralized Generation of Electricity

Highly centralized generation of electrical power is a paradigm that has outlived its usefulness. Decentralized generation could save $5 trillion in capital investment, reduce power costs by 40 percent, reduce vulnerabilities, and cut greenhouse gas emissions in half.

Thomas R. Casten and Brennan Downes

Exploring Controversies in the Art and Science of Polygraph Testing

Polygraph testing has always been controversial, with a wide gulf separating practitioners from scientists with relevant expertise. Myths about its alleged objectivity and infallibility stem from a failure to recognize that the polygraph simply records physiological responses and that the validity with which deception can be diagnosed depends on the nature of the examination and its social context.

John Ruscio

A Nobel Laureate Confronts Pseudoscience

A distinguished Russian physicist (co-winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics) battles the pseudoscience and charlatanism that he feels is duping his country’s population.

I. Demagogues against Scientific Expertise

II. Brave Thoughts Are Still Not the Truth

Vitaly L. Ginzburg

Natural Medicine: Will That Be a Pill or a Needle?

Many alternative practitioners promise to reveal “secrets your doctor never told you.” One secret is never mentioned: why alternative remedies are ingested rather than injected. Though most practitioners of alternative medicine are silent on this question, this “missing information,” as previously described by Kardes and Sanbonmatsu, is crucial for evaluating the promised cure.

William H. Baarschers

Columns

Editor's Note

Critical Inquiry, and Thinking About Galileo

News and Comment

• In the Land of Galileo, Fifth World Skeptics Congress Solves Mysteries, Champions Scientific Outlook
• Alien-Abduction Guru Mack Killed in Accident
• Betty Hill, First ‘Alien Abductee,’ Dies
• Critics Ravage ‘Hoax’ New Age Film
• Paranormal Expo Cancelled Under Cloud
• Raelian Update: Sex, Pseudoscience, and Sacrilege
• Metabolife Founder Michael Ellis Charged with Lying to FDA
• Psychics (Don’t) Explain Missing September 11

Investigative Files

Mystery Painting: ‘The Shadow of the Cross’

Joe Nickell

Psychic Vibrations

Hurricane Osama?

Robert Sheaffer

Thinking About Science

Piltdown and How Science Really Works

Massimo Pigliucci

Notes on a Strange World

Facts and Fiction in the Kennedy Assassination

Massimo Polidoro

Science Best Sellers

New Books

Forum

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s . . . an Angel?

Dave Brooks

Stupid Things

Ralph Estling

Follow-up

Some Reasons for Caution about the Bigfoot Film Exposé

Michael Dennett

Letters to the Editor

Reviews

Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time

By Michio Kaku

Greg Martinez

Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson and the World’s Greatest Archaeological Hoax

By Miles Russell

John Whittaker

Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and her Missing Crew

By Brian Hicks

Terence M. Hines