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Pseudoscience By Lydia Kang MD and Nate Pedersen, Read By Hillary Huber (Audiobook Excerpt)

On sale February 18th, 2025 A rollicking visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science. The Bermuda Triangle. Personality tests. Ghost hunting. Crop circles. Mayan Doomsday. What do all these have in common? None can quite live up the rigor of actual facts or science and yet they all attract passionate supporters anyway. Divided into broad sections covering the easily disproved to the wildly speculative to wishful thinking and of course hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science—it’s a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things such as Big Foot, astrology, and the existence of aliens. Did you know, for example, that you can tell a person’s future by touching their butt? Rumpology. It’s a thing, but not really. Or that Stanley Kubrick made a fake moon landing film for the US government? Except he didn’t. Or that spontaneous human combustion is real? It ain’t, but it can be explained scientifically. From the authors of Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, Pseudoscience is a wild mix of history, pop culture, and good old fashioned science—one that not just entertains, but sheds a little light on why we all love to believe in a few things we know aren't true.

Duration:: 4m
Broadcast on:: 31 Dec 2024
Audio Format:: other

Mike Hughes led a seemingly quiet life in the arid Apple Valley of Southern California, cohabitating comfortably and simply with four cats he adored, but his resume revealed a varied eccentric background in stark contrast to his simple home life. Hughes had been a limousine driver for more than two decades and a NASCAR crew chief before that. He also had a daredevil streak, once jumping his Lincoln town car stretch limo for a Guinness world record of 103 feet. By 2020, he had added a new line to his unusual bio. Self-styled rocketeer bent on proving once and for all that Earth was flat. To accomplish this, he planned to blast himself into the sky via a homemade rocket, thereby providing the truth to the world of skeptics who believed the Earth was globe-shaped. Hughes openly scoffed at the "scientist" part of the moniker "Rocket Scientist", claiming in a 2019 documentary called "Rocket Man", Mad Mike's mission to prove the flat Earth? That me saying I'm a self-taught rocket scientist is a misnomer because I really don't believe in science. I believe in formulas, some math, I just want the raw truth, and I believe in the flat Earth model. So, Mad Mike Hughes, as he was often called, set out to experience a first-hand view of the world to confirm for himself whether it was truly flat or spherical. For years and years, his hope was to build his own rocket and send it up to the Carmen Line, 62 miles 100 km above sea level, where the Earth's atmosphere ends and space begins. At that elevation, with supplemental oxygen debris and a nice view of Earth, Hughes could finally put to rest the question that most people spent little time considering. Was the Earth really flat? Hughes' early work involved making a rocket propelled by a superheated water tank that spewed steam on launch. In his first attempt at propelling himself skyward in 2014 in Arizona, Hughes crafted a narrow 15-foot-long rocket with stabilizing tail fins and barely enough room to fit a human inside. It was painted white and decorated with a small number of advertisers and his website, Mad Mike Hughes.com, in large lettering. The rocket sprang a pin leak at the last minute, but instead of aborting the mission, Hughes jumped into the rocket and cleared the area for the launch, insisting on flying before it blew up. The craft reached 1,374 feet in less than a minute at an estimated 350 miles per hour or more. After the parachute was deployed and nearly got shredded in the process, Hughes landed hard at 60 miles per hour. The impact injured him so badly, he reportedly needed a walker for two months and his balls were black for a month, according to Waldo's stakes, a fellow amateur rocket enthusiast. The rocket was wrecked. But now that he knew the steam rocket worked, the next steps were faster and higher. Hughes hoped to build a rocket that would reach a speed of at least 500 miles per hour. After fundraising from fellow flat-earth supporters, he launched himself in another rocket that reached a height of 1,875 feet at a speed of approximately 350 miles per hour. But that wasn't enough. Remember, Hughes' goal was 62 miles or 327,360 feet. What a way to climb. Before he got that high, there were still more trials to be done and a lot more money to raise. Once his next rocket iteration was tested and ready, the plan was for a balloon to first carry it 20 miles above the earth, where the rocket would fire, propelling it to the Carmen line. Hughes called his theoretical contraption "a raccoon." Even from the cockpit of said raccoon, Hughes would finally be able to discern the truth. "In 2018," he remarked, "I expect to see a flat disk up there. I don't have an agenda. If it's around earth or a ball, I'm going to come down and say, 'Hey, guys, I'm bad. It's a ball, okay?'"