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A mind at play: an interview with Martin Gardner - author of mathematics and science books - Interview

Skeptical Inquirer, March-April, 1998 by Kendrick Frazier

His mind is highly philosophical, at home with the most abstract concepts, yet his thinking and writing crackle with clarity - lively, crisp, vivid. He achieved worldwide fame and respect for the three decades of his highly popular mathematical games column for Scientific American, yet he is not a mathematician. He is by every standard an eminent intellectual, yet he has no Ph.D. or academic position. He has a deep love of science and has written memorable science books (The Ambidextrous Universe and The Relativity Explosion, for instance), and yet he has devoted probably more time and effort to and has been more effective than any thinker of the twentieth century in exposing pseudoscience and bogus science.

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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?

A mind at play: an interview with Martin Gardner - author of mathematics and science books - Interview

Skeptical Inquirer, March-April, 1998 by Kendrick Frazier

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