Rating: 
Summary: A paper pill for your mind.
Review: The New Inquistion, by Robert Anton Wilson, is one of those books that sneaks its way into your mind and turns your world upside in front of you. It's a fun and very interesting read. Wilson's style of writing makes the pages fly by like a wild conversation with an ecentric but wonderful uncle or grandfather. You find yourself wondering what kind of rabbit the man is going to pull out of his hat next. Along the way you end up learning more than you ever hoped or wanted to and by the end you end up with a slightly altered vision of the world. Like any such conversationalist however, Wilson has a tendency to prattel at points, making some of the same ones over and over again, while on more than one occasion he will only briefly touch on a topic that I found myself wishing he had gone into in more depth. But to tell you the truth, those things only serve to make you feel all the closer to the author and the writing itself. Somehow, the annoying points only serve to help the book keep that friendly, deep conversational tone that won't let you put it down. And along the way you learn so damn much about the state of modern science and our tendencies to see the world through the lenses of our individual "reality tunnels" that you find yourself wondering how you could have gone on existing in modern America without having read the book... It's an education of a read and I highly suggest that you read it and then push it on everyone that you know
Rating: 
Summary: eclectic, erudite, exceptional
Review: This book is Robert Anton Wilson's look at how science went wrong in the 1900s. There are many books dealing with the same topic, but there are few, if any, writers who can match Wilson's quirky, insightful, and humorous prose:"There remains, of course, Scientific Method (SM), the alleged source of the certitude of those I call the New Idolators. SM is a mixture of SD (sense data: usually aided by instruments to refine the senses) with the old Greek PR. Unfortunately, while SM is powerfully effective, and seems to most of us the best method yet devised by mankind, it is made up of two elements which we have already seen are fallible - SD (sense data) and PR (pure reason) can both deceive us. Again: two fallibilities do not add up to one infallibility. Scientific generalizations which have lasted a long time have a high probability, perhaps the highest probability of any generalizations, but it is only Idolatry which claims none of them will ever again have to be revised or rejected. Too many have been revised or rejected in this century alone.
Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude." The main point of the book is how science fell prey to Fundamentalist Materialism or the New Idolatry, as Wilson calls it. This is basically the failure to adhere to the scientific principle of empirical testing and remain model agnostic. What this means is that scientists begin to pay more heed to pet theories, ego, career, and popular paradigms than to actual data, and let honest, open inquiry fall by the wayside. He uses data from a wide variety of sources, including hard science and some fairly fringe areas. He challenges the status quo and argues quite convincingly that science has followed much the same path as religion in this regard, even to the point of calling dissenters "heretics." Wilson's ability to shake entrenched notions and cause one to entertain new thoughts is quite singular, and I consider him one of the most important writers and thinkers in Amercia today. I highly recommend this and his other works.
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