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Science Luminary Martin Gardner Dead at 95
From James Randi's blog comes word that science writer Martin Gardner has died at the age of 95. I never met Gardner, but one of his books (Entertaining Science Experiments With Everyday Objects) has been a favorite of mine since I was 6 or 7 years old; I didn't realize until just now quite how many books he authored.
His pages in Scientific American were something I always looked forward to, and from which I always learned something. Glad he was among us.
Before I discovered Martin Gardner's books, I was unable to understand mathematics, and I had very bad grades.
One day, I bought one of his books, and suddenly, I was able to see that math and logic was fun, and we could play with them.
To the amazement of my teachers, my grades increased in a few days, and I wanted to become a mathematician at this moment.
I became a programmer because I wanted to solve some of his puzzles so badly with my computer.
Thanks Martin !
Martin Gardner was one of a kind. I grew up with his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. His book Relativity Simply Explained is what I recommend whenever people ask me for a good intro to relativity. His intelligence and ability to explain were extraordinary compared to a lot of people with much more formal education. He had a long life and seems to have remained sharp and active for almost all of it.
Find free books.
I want to speak for the entire geek community, so I'm posting A.C.
Martin, you will be dearly missed. You've probably changed more lives than you could ever realize, and this planet was a better place because you existed.
Requiescat in pace.
It's guys like Martin that provided some balance against mindless idiots like those on the Texas education boards.
Let's hope there's a thousand more Martins out there. Surely he would hope the same.
RIP.
Martin Gardner was one of the best. Keen intellect, gentle wit, vast knowledge and warm heart. I only met him once, but it was memorable. He will be missed. If he had known the date and hour of his death he would have had a handful of interesting facts tying together all of the numbers. And he would have published it as a puzzle for his readers. Goodbye Mr. Gardner. We will not see your like again soon.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Without his influence, I would not be in the position I am in now to influence the viability of man living in space.
RIP to one of the greatest influences on my life. While the mathematics got beyond me, everything else inspired me.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Let me put in a cheer for the "Alice in Wonderland" he annotated.
Phil Plait has a writeup as well.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
What a sad day. A single book that shaped me even in college from a man who could somehow make Mathematics fun. Now I'll never know him personally but I'll always know that a collection of his puzzles put me on track to be who I am today. While writers as popular as Clarke and Sagan shaped me as well, Gardner is in the lesser known category that shaped me just as much if not more.
A near maniacal thirst to algorithmically solve puzzles was instilled in me from his mind via plain old paper.
Rest in peace, Martin Gardner.
My work here is dung.
He is a man to whom scores of people thank for igniting the first spark of appreciating math and science. He will be terribly missed.
You will never have experience until after you needed it.
In the 1970s and early 80s, before the internet, before personal computers, nothing linked geeks together more than Martin Gardner's monthly column in Scientific American. I amazed myself with his binary card deck, and collected matchboxes to make a tic-tac-toe learning computer.
His work will live on. I'm sitting next to a shelf full of his books as I type this.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Martin Gardner is known to many for his writings in recreational mathematics, but I also came to admire his persistent and vigorous work promoting naturalistic and scientific rigor and his work to discredit fringe science and junk science.
Some of the areas he wrote on were creationism, organic farming, Charles Fort, Rudolf Steiner, Scientology, Dianetics, UFOs, dowsing, extra-sensory perception, the Bates method, and psychokinesis.
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952, revised 1957) is a classic and should be required material in our school systems.
Gardner had a character called Dr. Matrix, an eccentric mathematician (perhaps not unlike the real life Paul Erdos, or Gardner himself) who popped up periodically in his columns. One I remember was Gardner interviewing Dr. Matrix in prison; seems the doc was busted for slicing twenty dollar bills into 20 strips, and "rearranging" them into modified bills composed of 19 strips each. Unfortunately, after that charming episode was published in Scientific American several people were similarly busted for copyright behavior... I suspect Mr. Gardner was amused rather than horrified by this turn of events.
Let me put in a cheer for the "Alice in Wonderland" he annotated.
Thanks for that, I hadn't put him together with "The Annotated Alice." Fine book; mine is well-thumbed.
This ain't rocket surgery.
>He was of the idea that there is no way to prove the non-existence of god
This is, in fact, correct. In natural sciences it is only possible to show that something does exist. It is not possible to prove non-existatnce. (It is not the case in mathematics, but mathematics is not a natural science).
The easiest way to understand it is to realize that the body observations available to science was taken in a limited period of time and area of space. Thus the our current scientific view of the world is only formally valid in this limited domain. What exist outside of it is only our educated guess.
>He was of the idea that there is no way to prove the non-existence of god
This is, in fact, correct. In natural sciences it is only possible to show that something does exist. It is not possible to prove non-existatnce. (It is not the case in mathematics, but mathematics is not a natural science).
The easiest way to understand it is to realize that the body observations available to science was taken in a limited period of time and area of space. Thus the our current scientific view of the world is only formally valid in this limited domain. What exist outside of it is only our educated guess.
This is not generally true. It is true in some specific instances. For instance, you cannot prove that there is no such thing as a non-white swan. So in this sense you are correct to say that "it is not possible to prove non-existence." But as an aside, do note that the existence-refuting claim that there is no such thing as a non-white swan is logically equivalent to the existence-asserting claim that all swans are white, which is something you also cannot prove.
However, natural science can very easily show the non-existence of things. Very trivially, we can take a thing as non-existing if it a priori contradicts itself logically. Suppose a particle physicist has conceptualized a new particle he calls the "nihilon," which is an eternal, non-aging particle that obliterates all matter and energy that comes within a light-year radius of it. Can such a particle be shown to not exist? Of course, and very easily. If it's eternal, it was present in the early years of our universe when the size of the universe was much smaller than a light year. It would have obliterated all matter and energy then, and we wouldn't be here today. The fact that we are here today means the nihilon does not exist.
Now I know some of the particle physicist pedants here will pick apart my made up example, but the point is not to test my ability to come up with particle physics sci-fi, the point is that there are plenty of things which can be shown a priori to not exist. As another example, in biology, we can show that a function for junk DNA does not exist, by noting among many other things, that some segment of DNA is a pseudogene, or that mutations can harmlessly alter some segment of DNA, or (the gold standard) note that we can excise huge chunks of some test organism's genome and note that it is still phenotypically normal.
The belief of a deity amidst overwhelming evidence to the contrary is not an "educated guess," it's wishful thinking.
Wow.
In his honor, I'd like to link to the 3D paper dragon that was created for Gathering for Gardner.
RIP Gardner.
To be perfectly honest, atheism is hurt more by the attitude that leads you to take a dump on a guy who taught so many people about science and mathematics. So he was a theist? Who cares? I had no idea about his views either way reading his books, and it doesn't matter to me. Sounds like you have some single-issue myopia.
After he saw one of my first Klein Bottles, Martin Gardner encouraged me to make them for recreational mathematics enthusiasts. "Even if the Klein Bottles don't work out, you'll have fun meeting these folks"
And so began my zero-volume business.
In high school, I followed his instructions to make hexaflexagons and fooled with Knights tours on chess boards. Much later, I was honored to correspond and meet him.
In person, he was just as curious, creative, and encouraging as you would expect from his writing.
Along with others here, I will miss Martin Gardner - his Scientific American articles, his wide ranging books, and his warm support. He leaves a wide wake behind him.
-Cliff
I guess the pirates finally got his last coin. Or he finally ate the chocolate square with the soap on it.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
> He was of the idea that there is no way to prove the non-existence of god, and therefore it's reasonable to believe in a god.
I've never read his annotated version of Alice in Wonderland, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Gardener would have claimed that he both believed and disbelieved in the existence of God, in a weird sort of spiritual quantum superposition.
> ... hurt the Atheist cause more than anything.
Really? I would have thought that your insensitive post might possibly have done more damage. It certainly raised my bile. You're lucky I know so many atheists who I actually respect.
A kind letter from Gardner after I sent him the results of an investigation I had done into polyominoes went some way to convince me that I had enough symbolic manipulation skills to change career to systems design. This proved the best decision I ever made after deciding to get married. So long, Martin Gardner, resquiescat in pace.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
In order to be a rational human being you must NOT believe in ANYTHING.
OK. I will take your advice. That means that I don't believe in that, either. Now what do I do?
Think, about it, before acting. Like with everything else.
Trying to argue the existence or non-existence of God via logic is pointless.
Not to those who get it. To them it's the red-pill.
But how would you go about it?
Here are some links (provided to you via Arts and Letters Daily):
The Associated Press
Sci Am
Discover
James Randy
Roger Kimball
The Man's last essay. It's titeled Oprah Winfrey: Bright (but Gullible) Billionaire.
I never met Martin Gardner, but he certainly touched my life. In the late 1970s a girlfriend of mine gave me a copy of "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science." She was given a copy but didn't want to read it.
I was not exactly a person who was ready to embrace a message scepticism. The book was mostly written before I was born. I was a hippie, a 20-something working in a natural food store, deeply distrustful of any authority and critical of what I thought of as authority-based science. My life revolved around Macrobiotics, acupuncture, Rolfing, herbalism, est, Primal Scream Therapy, foot reflexology, a syncretic hash of Eastern religions and pretty much every other new age technique that flew in over the transom. I was a pioneering subscriber to "New Age Journal," a publication that introduced the world to Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra.
I was angry when Gardner criticised the things I believed in, but fascinated and amused by the foolishness [b]other [/b] people believed in. I've heard Gardner quoted as saying "..oddly enough, most of [my critics] objected to one chapter only, thinking all the others excellent..." and that pretty much captures my reaction to the book.
I vividly remembered my amazement on reading the chapter on Rhine's ESP studies (a subject that had fascinated in my adolescence). It's been over 30 years since I've seen the book, and I may be conflating it with other books I've since read, but I recall a comparison of ESP results obtained by "sheep" (believers in ESP) and "goats" (nonbelievers), and just how resistant the "sheep/goat" effects were to attempts to blind the studies. This was a revelation,and marked the beginning of a self examination that continues to this day.
I had been drawn to New Age activities because of a deep skepticism of authority figures. Science had been taught to me almost like a religion. I thought it was a set of beliefs, handed down as truth by an older generation that had brought us a war in Vietnam, Racism, sexism, environmental disaster and a host of other evils. Garner set me on the path to discovering what science really is. I began to see that in fact its foundation was the very kind of skepticism that led me to all those New-Age practices, that in fact the scientific method supports a much deeper skepticism that allowed me to question my own cognitive biases. He gave me the courage to follow the evidence even when it conflicted with my firmest beliefs. This has served me well in my life and my careers.
Earlier that decade I had witnessed as a fellow natural-food buff died of cancer while dosing himself with bitter almonds (then though to be a "natural" version of Laetrile, a supposed cancer cure) refusing conventional treatment that might have extended his life. He left behind a wife and child. Watching him get worse and worse as he cheerfully talked of his impending cure was heartbreaking, and I remember thinking about how little his belief in the cure helped him ouut. I know that in the decades that have since passed I've steered one or two of my family and friends away from worthless quack cures, and I'd like to think I've saved a few lives taht way. If so, those people have Martin Gardner to thank.
Well, I've run on far, far longer than I meant,but I wanted to add my thoughts. We'll miss him, but take joy in the fact his work will be there to enlighten people like that 20-something me for a very long time.