In my review of The Accidental Scientist, I raved about how much I enjoyed the book, but that I had reservations about the way the author's style, no matter how entertaining it was. Turns out those reservations are well founded. In When the Earth was Flat, his penchant for pedantry and generalisations are so broad as to be misleading.

The book is broken up into chapters that each cover a "scientific" theory believed to be fact at some point in history. Flat Earth, Hollow Earth, Phrenology, Hysteria, etc. Each includes a basic description of the belief and the effect it had on humanity both at the time, and sometimes, up to the present day.

Most of these are, I believe, pretty well researched, and they are well written; I learned a lot, and while I won't take any of it as gospel truth without some additional fact-checking, I have a level of confidence that the book is generally sound. I'm agog at the implications of certain medical "advancements" of the 1920's and their possible links to HIV.

But where he loses ground is in his breakout boxes that list "Popular Scientific Ideas Debunked". These are just bullet point statements refuting what are widely believed to be scientific facts. Most of them are gimmes; anyone who has read any similar book would recognise them as myths rather than facts. But a number of them are - while factually correct if your pedantic - irresponsibly phrased. For example:

Heat does not rise but disperses itself equally and evenly throughout its environment.

Yes, but no. Or not immediately. A gas that is heated up will have less mass and more volume, and therefore will rise up through a colder gas until the heat is dispersed equally and evenly throughout. That's how weather works. Anyone who has ever seen a thunderstorm form, especially a microcell, has seen the hotter air rising up through the atmosphere (really, the colder air is sinking, but anyway...). This is nature's way of re-establishing equilibrium, or as close as it can get before the sun comes back out.

The same applies to water (until water hits the freezing point); cold water is denser than warm water, so the colder water sinks to the bottom and the warmer water rises to the top, until the temperature is equal throughout. We're lucky that that equilibrium is never achieved in our oceans, else life on Earth would become rather untenable.

So while his statement is factual, it's oversimplified to the point of being wrong, and since he does not trouble himself, or the reader, to explain beyond these casual, throw-way refutations, I find them incredibly irresponsible. This is why there are so many ignorant people who cannot see that they are ignorant: they read things like this and think themselves informed... and then run for political office. Simplification, like everything else in life, should only be practiced in moderation.

To sum up, it's not a bad read; I believe 90% of the information can be relied upon and for the reader who is new to science or just enjoys fun facts, this is entertainingly written. But, as in any non-fiction book, the reader should be cautious of single sentence statements of facts. It's rarely that simple. ( )

This is truly a dreadful and delightful book all in one package. When the Earth Was Flat, All the Bits of Science We Got Wrong is cleverly written. I learned so much about subjects that I thought that I already knew about. The author has a dry sense of humor and down to earth approach that help to acknowledge fun as well as hard facts. Some of the subjects addressed are :

probable origin of HIV,

the horrible work in progress of WWII genocide,

origin of today use of cocaine,

the beginning of the still-continuing and rather questionable trend for colonic irrigation,

or the origin of vibrator commercialization (by the way, it's related to first acknowledge victims of repetitive strain injury, yes ladies and gentlemen, the doctors themselves are the poor victims).
It's a book worth being read again, it's a mine of information which explains so much about the world as we know it today.

( )

This is a populist look at various now discredited scientific theories and how they affected society and subsequently came to be disproved. The range is very wide; dangerous theories with evil consequences (e.g. phrenology, eugenics); well known Medieval scientific theories reflecting the state of scientific knowledge at the time (e.g. alchemy, the four humours, the miasma theory of disease); benevolent views of substances now regarded as harmful (e.g. tobacco smoke cures, Victorian era patent medicines based on cocaine and opium); alternative theories about the Earth (flat earth/hollow earth) that survive in a limited way today; modern-sounding theories that die hard (e.g. the effectiveness of subliminal advertising); and even ridiculous ones such as the treatment of hysterical women in the 19th century by doctors, ahem, using their fingers to massage their patients' lower genital organs, a development which led to the invention of the first mechanical vibrators in the late 19th century so these ladies could effect their own "cure"!

There was one chapter I thought ill-placed here, that on the Black Death, which treated the majority opinion that this was caused by bubonic plague as "bad science", and instead advancing the anthrax theory as the most likely culprit. The latter is a theory held by some, but cannot plausibly be presented as true science superseding the "wrong science" of bubonic plague.

Overall, though, a sometimes amusing, sometimes horrifying, always interesting book. ( )