Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

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The Man in the Moon
and the Face on Mars
The moon leaps
In the Great River's current . . .
Floating on the wind,
What do I resemble?
Du Fu, 'Travelling at Night'
(China, Tang Dynasty, 765)
Each field of science has its own complement of pseudoscience.
Geophysicists have flat Earths, hollow Earths,
Earths with wildly bobbing axes to contend with, rapidly rising
and sinking continents, plus earthquake prophets. Botanists
have plants whose passionate emotional lives can be monitored
with lie detectors, anthropologists have surviving ape-men,
zoologists have extant dinosaurs, and evolutionary biologists
have Biblical literalists snapping at their flanks. Archaeologists
have ancient astronauts, forged runes and spurious statuary.
Physicists have perpetual motion machines, an army of amateur
relativity disprovers, and perhaps cold fusion. Chemists still
have alchemy. Psychologists have much of psychoanalysis and
almost all of parapsychology. Economists have long-range
economic forecasting. Meteorologists, so far, have long-range
weather forecasting, as in the sunspot-oriented Farmer's Almanac
(although long-term climate forecasting is another matter).
Astronomy has, as its most prominent pseudoscience, astrology
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