Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Paleontological fraud. Perhaps the most famous fraud in the history of paleontology, the faked remains of Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsoni) influenced theories about human origins for more than 35 years. The hoax began in 1912, when a lawyer and collector named Charles Dawson visited Arthur Smith Woodward, the keeper of the British Museum geological collection.…

Judging character from features of face or form of body. The idea goes back to Aristotle who argued by analogy: Those with features resembling an animal might be expected to show similar characteristics. So, for example, someone with a face like a fox would be cunning. Despite its long history and its eminent and respected…

Film developed by Semyon Kirlian in the 1940s that had been exposed while in a powerful electric field, showing auras around human skin and other living matter. It was reported in the 1970s in the West in Psychic Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain. Photographs have also been produced to support other claims of strange and…

The invisible material believed for many years to be the source of heat. To heat a body was to add phlogiston phlogistication; to cool it was to take phlogiston away dephlogistication. Today that seems pseudoscientific, but at the time, it was an explanation of what was observed in heating and cooling. The theory had its…

The practice of opening a vein as a therapeutic measure, also called venesection, bloodletting, or “bleeding.” A historically standard treatment for a vast array of ailments and considered the chief remedy for some, phlebotomy did not fall entirely out of fashion until the late 19th century. A symposium conducted by the Philadelphia County Medical Society…

The matter of how pseudoscience is differentiated from science. This is difficult question to address because neither term has a precise and universally accepted definition. A trawl through some dozen books on the philosophy of science shows that only one had considered this question, which is a clear indication that this is not a matter…

A mythological experiment in which the U.S. Navy beamed a ship and its crew between two naval dockyards. The 20th-century myth was put about in the United States after World War II. The story goes that during the war the U.S. Navy carried out top secret experiments using very advanced technology. There are various accounts…

The single best-selling nostrum at the beginning of the 20th century. Peruna appeared on the market at some unknown date, probably in the late 1880s. The formula was discovered (or concocted) by S. B. Hartman of Columbus, Ohio, who believed that the bane of the human race was catarrh, an obsolete term referring to an…

A hypothetical device that remains in continuous motion without any sustaining force or added energy. Long a goal of both tinkerers and inventors, the perpetual motion machine has been contemplated and attempted since classical antiquity. Designs varied widely, and employed various strategies including falling weights, unbalanced wheels, gears, pulleys, belts, sponges, and running water to…