Martin Gardner

[Brad Reddekopp]

Martin Gardner died last Saturday, May 22, 2010. He was 95. That's not an extraordinary claim. I'm posting this in this section because Gardner was an important part of the modern skeptical movement. I have one of his books, Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience and I've enjoyed it immensely.

He had a long life, well lived, and is now missed by many. Good work.

---

James Randi knew him personally and writes this about Gardner's death:

from http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swi ... arker.html

MY WORLD IS A LITTLE DARKER…
Swift
Written by James Randi
Saturday, 22 May 2010 18:14

gardnerMartin Gardner has died. I have dreaded to type those words, and Martin would not have wanted to know that I’m so devastated at what I knew – day to day – had to happen very soon. I’m glad to report that his passing was painless and quick. That man was one of my giants, a very long-time friend of some 50 years or so. He was a delight, a very bright spot in my firmament, one to whom I could always turn to with a question or an idea, with any strange notion I could invent, and with any complaint or comment I could come up with.

I never had an angry word with Martin. Never. It was all laughs and smiles, all the best of everything.

Forgive me for writing this without any editing. It’s just as it occurs to me.

I can’t quite picture my world without him, and just yesterday I printed up a new set of mailing labels for him, plus stationery, which didn’t get mailed. For the last few years I supplied him with that small favor, assuring him that he should notify me when he ran out, but he never did, because he thought it was too much trouble for me. Only when I received a letter from him last week that was hand-addressed, did I know that it was time for another shipment to Oklahoma.

He was such a good man, a productive and useful member of our society, and I can anticipate the international reaction to his passing. His books – so many of them – remain to remind us of his contributions to us all. His last one was dedicated to me, and I am just so proud of that fact, so very proud…

It will take a while, but Martin would want me to get on with my life, so I will.

It’s tough…

[Brad Reddekopp]

I was re-reading part of Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? last night and I came across something that surprised me the first time I read it. I'm somewhat more jaded now, of course, but it still amuses me and so I'm going to share it here.

In one chapter, Gardner writes about U.S. senator Claiborne Pell's encounter with The Amazing Randi. Pell believed in all sorts of nonsense and was known for trying to secure government funding for the likes of psychic research. Like may others, Pell had been fooled into thinking that Uri Geller had real paranormal abilities. Pell attended a function at which Randi received an award and performed. Randi duplicated Geller's spoon bending stunt, presenting it as a trick, not as a psychic feat. Pell was angry about this so he met Randi backstage and challenged him to duplicate Geller's feat of duplicating a hidden drawing. Doing the normal sorts of things that magicians do, Randi was able to draw the same thing that Pell had tried to draw secretly, just as Geller had done.

Gardner writes: "Was he convinced that Randi had performed a magic trick? Not on your life. His unflappable comment was 'I think maybe Randi is a psychic and doesn't realize it.' Several parapsychologists have come to the same conclusion about Randi, apparently believing themselves too smart to be fooled."
- Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience, p.178, Martin Gardner, Norton, 2000

[Welbexco828]

Can I ask a question here?

[Brad Reddekopp]

You can respond rather quickly in such a way that convinces me that you're a human, not a bot, and then I won't delete your account.

[zero]

``How useful was the advice of a holy monk, who persuaded his friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place, because in that place we usually meet with those very thoughts which possessed us at our last being there; and I find it thus far experimentally true, that at now being in that school, and seeing that very place, where I sat when I was a boy, occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me; sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years numerous pleasures without mixture of cares, and those to be enjoyed when time (when I therefore thought slow-paced) had changed my youth into manhood. But age and experience have taught me that these were but empty hopes; for I now always found it true, as my Saviour did foretell, `Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same recreations, and questionless possessed with the same thoughts that then possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another in their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and death.''

-Sir H. Wotton