On the Fringe

Why do we believe some ideas are science while others are mere quackery? In On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience, Michael D. Gordin tackles this deceptively simple but endlessly controversial question—and shows why there may never be a neat line separating truth from pseudoscience. His primary argument is that “pseudoscience” isn’t really a coherent category of knowledge; rather, it’s a label we apply to ideas we dislike or reject. Every age and culture has drawn the boundaries of legitimate science differently, often motivated by politics, ideology, or power.

Gordin invites you to see pseudoscience not just as error but as a mirror of science itself. Each fringe movement—from astrology and alchemy to creationism and cold fusion—reveals how the scientific community defines credibility, authority, and rationality. His approach is historical and sociological, not merely philosophical. He reverses the traditional question (“How do we separate science from pseudoscience?”) and instead asks: “What happens when some ideas get pushed to the edge?”

The Demarcation Dilemma

At the heart of the book lies what philosophers call the demarcation problem: how to distinguish science from pseudoscience in principle. Gordin explores this through Karl Popper’s famous criterion of falsifiability—the idea that scientific theories must be testable and possibly disproven. Yet falsifiability, he shows, collapses under scrutiny. Many accepted sciences (like evolutionary biology or cosmology) can’t be easily falsified in a lab. And conversely, many pseudosciences (like astrology or Creation Science) gleefully invoke falsifiability to claim legitimacy. Instead of clear rules, science involves social negotiation—peer review, consensus, and credibility among experts.

The Historian’s Lens

Gordin turns from philosophical puzzles to history. By tracing cases across centuries—from Hippocrates’ dismissal of witch-doctors to modern fights over creationism in schools—he demonstrates that fringe doctrines evolve just as science does. Astrology once counted as rigorous science, with mathematical precision equal to astronomy; alchemy shared techniques with modern chemistry. Over time these ideas were demoted to “pseudoscience” not because their methods changed but because the scientific community redefined what counted as reliable evidence.

Why the Fringe Persists

What makes pseudoscience endure? Gordin shows that “being on the fringe” often comes from social positioning rather than sheer wrongness. Fringe scientists frequently replicate the institutional structures of mainstream science—founding their own institutes, journals, and conferences—to fight what they call the “establishment.” Whether it’s creationists demanding “equal time,” UFO researchers seeking peer review, or proponents of cold fusion holding yearly conferences, the fringe mimics and contests the norms of the center.

The Four Families of the Fringe

Gordin categorizes pseudoscience into four historical families: vestigial sciences (once-legitimate fields overwritten by change, like astrology or alchemy), hyperpoliticized sciences (state-sponsored ideologies like Nazi race science or Soviet Lysenkoism), counterestablishment sciences (movements that consciously imitate scientific credibility, like Creation Science or cryptozoology), and mind-over-matter sciences (parapsychology and ESP research that test the limits of human consciousness). These categories reveal not pure fraud but rather distinct reactions to authority, belief, and evidence.

Why It Matters Today

For you as a reader living in an era of misinformation and social media echo chambers, Gordin’s insights feel strikingly relevant. Labels like “fake news,” “conspiracy theory,” or “pseudoscience” function much like their historical predecessors—ways to establish boundaries around truth. Even within professional science, today’s replication crisis and corporate denialism (from climate change to tobacco) echo the same dynamics: contested evidence, political pressure, and public confusion. Pseudoscience survives because it serves human needs—for certainty, identity, and meaning in a complex, uncertain world.

Core Message

Pseudoscience isn’t a disease to cure—it’s the shadow cast by science itself. Whenever there’s a bright center of knowledge, something will fall outside it. Studying the fringe doesn’t just expose deception or error; it teaches you how science continually polices its borders, revises its standards, and defines what counts as truth.

Ultimately, On the Fringe invites you to approach fringe beliefs not with mockery but with curiosity. Understanding why so many people defend these ideas—sometimes passionately, sometimes dangerously—reveals more about the structure of science itself than about Bigfoot or ESP. The moment you scorn the “pseudoscientist,” Gordin suggests, you’ve already become part of the process that keeps science alive.

Every discussion about pseudoscience starts here: how do you tell real science from the fake kind? Michael D. Gordin dives into Karl Popper’s famous solution—the idea that science advances through bold conjectures that can be proven wrong. Popper proposed this in the mid–20th century to separate Einstein’s testable theories from flexible frameworks like Freud’s psychoanalysis or Marxism, which he thought were too elastic to be falsified.

Popper’s test seemed elegant: if you can imagine an observation that would disprove your theory, it’s science; if not, it’s pseudoscience. Yet Gordin shows how this ideal collapses once you examine how science actually works. Many accepted theories can’t be neatly falsified, and scientists rarely abandon ideas after one failed experiment.

The Trouble with Falsifying Falsification

Popper’s criterion works best in theory, not practice. As Gordin recounts, even the legendary 1919 eclipse experiment that elevated Einstein had ambiguous data—Eddington’s results were cherry-picked to fit relativity. In most science, results require interpretation, and instruments, conditions, and expectations blur the bright line Popper imagined. If every mismatch between prediction and observation counted as falsification, middle-school labs would constantly overthrow physics.

Philosopher Larry Laudan later pointed out an irony: by Popper’s logic, even the wildest fringe claims—Bigfoot sightings, perpetual-motion machines, telepathy—could count as scientific if their proponents could specify how they might be disproven. Falsifiability included too much and excluded too little. Laudan dismissed the whole demarcation problem as a “pseudo-problem.”

How the Courtroom Made Popper Famous

Curiously, falsifiability’s global fame came not from academia but from an American courtroom. During the 1980s battles over teaching “Creation Science” in public schools, philosopher Michael Ruse testified that creationism failed Popper’s test. Judge William Overton echoed him, declaring that falsifiability was a legal standard for defining real science. The U.S. Supreme Court later cited this view, enshrining a flawed philosophical rule as judicial doctrine. Popper’s ghost now haunts high-school biology textbooks even though most philosophers abandoned his criterion decades ago.

Beyond One-Dimensional Boundaries

After Popper, new thinkers looked for multidimensional ways to classify science. Biologist and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci proposed a two-dimensional map where fields could excel in either empirical discovery or theoretical coherence. Under this scheme, geology and cosmology thrive through explanation, not falsification. In contrast, astrology or homeopathy fall near the origin—low empirical success and low theoretical rigor. Pigliucci’s model allows for gradients rather than walls, a view Gordin favors.

Key Takeaway

There’s no universal test distinguishing science from pseudoscience. Falsifiability gave us vocabulary, not truth. Real boundaries emerge from how communities of researchers agree on evidence—and those communities change with history, politics, and persuasion.

By the end of Gordin’s account, you see that every demarcation criterion tells us more about the beliefs of its creators than about nature itself. Popper wanted to save science from Marx and Freud; later courts wanted to save it from Genesis. These battles reveal that defining science is never just an intellectual task—it’s deeply cultural and political.

Imagine waking up to learn that half of what you learned in school is now outdated. That’s what Gordin means by vestigial science—knowledge that was once considered mainstream but got discarded when paradigms shifted. These forgotten theories linger like ghosts, reminding us that science constantly revises itself.

Astrology: The Once-Respected Queen of Sciences

Today, you might glance at a horoscope for fun, but in the Renaissance it was serious business. Astrologers like Kepler and Galileo drafted star charts to help monarchs decide war and marriage. Far from superstition, astrology used precise math, astronomical observation, and the concept of celestial influence. What demoted it? When heliocentric astronomy and Newtonian physics reconfigured the cosmos, astrology’s premises—planetary motion determining human destiny—lost traction. It faded not from proof of falsity but from change in what counted as scientific reasoning.

Alchemy’s Transformation into Chemistry

Alchemy is another classic vestige. In the medieval world, “chymistry” blurred seamlessly into what we now call chemistry. Figures like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton dabbled in transmutation experiments and sought the philosopher’s stone. Their laboratories used controlled heating, measurement, and experimentation—modern enough by eighteenth-century standards. But secrecy, coded symbols, and mysticism later marked alchemists as pseudoscientists. When Antoine Lavoisier’s oxygen theory standardized chemical practice, alchemy became passé. Ironically, modern historians have shown that many alchemical recipes actually worked when decoded; the mystery was linguistic and cultural, not empirical.

From Ether to Feng Shui: Outdated Science in Disguise

Gordin extends the pattern beyond these classics. Before Einstein, physicists believed light traveled through a weightless ether filling space; Darwin replaced divine design; meteorology replaced astrological weather prediction. Even contemporary “ether physics” enthusiasts simply inhabit old scientific time zones. Feng shui, once respected geomancy, exemplifies global vestigial science—knowledge displaced by new physical models but culturally alive.

Lesson for You

Scientific legitimacy expires. What counts as pseudoscience tomorrow may be mainstream today. Rather than mocking the discarded, ask what their fading tells us about how science renews itself. Constant revision isn’t failure—it’s the very engine of progress.

In Gordin’s view, studying vestigial sciences trains you to expect turnover. When the public clings to astrology or alchemy, they aren’t defying science—they’re remembering different versions of it. This historical humility protects you from the illusion that modern science is forever fixed.

At times, science ceases to be a quest for truth and becomes an instrument of power. Gordin calls these moments hyperpoliticized science—when political authority bends research to ideology. Three haunting case studies reveal how political systems can corrupt scientific inquiry: Nazi Germany’s “Aryan Physics,” Stalin’s Soviet “Lysenkoism,” and the global eugenics movement.

Aryan Physics: Racism in the Laboratory

Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, Nobel laureates turned Nazis, declared Einstein’s theories “Jewish physics.” They claimed true “German” science was intuitive and race-bound, aligning nationalism with Newtonian mechanics. This wasn’t mere propaganda—it restructured university curricula and targeted Heisenberg as a “white Jew.” Despite their expertise, Lenard and Stark’s ideology failed because physics itself defied racial essentialism. Gordin’s portrait shows how respected scientists can blend prejudice with method without seeing the contradiction.

Lysenkoism: Politics Over Genetics

Across Stalin’s USSR, Trofim Lysenko’s agrobiology replaced genetics with ideology. He promised crops could inherit environmental conditioning—an appealing Marxist metaphor for infinite malleability. Backed personally by Stalin, Lysenko’s theories became state dogma; dissenters like Nikolai Vavilov were imprisoned or executed. Soviet biology lost decades of progress, and even after Stalin’s death, the stigma lingered. (Historian Loren Graham calls this the most consequential scientific tragedy of the 20th century.)

Eugenics: Democracy’s Own Dark Mirror

Unlike the authoritarian cases, eugenics thrived in democratic societies. In early 20th-century America, biologists proposed improving humanity through selective breeding—often targeting the poor and minorities. Legislators turned science into policy: forced sterilizations, racial hierarchies, and moral panic about “feeblemindedness.” Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed these programs in Buck v. Bell (1927). Eugenics combined real genetics with toxic social prejudice, showing that pseudoscience can wear the mask of reason.

Insight for Modern Readers

Hyperpoliticized science teaches a crucial lesson: no political system is immune to distortion. When ideology dictates outcome, all data become propaganda. The cure isn’t hostility to politics but vigilance about how values infiltrate research.

For Gordin, these examples illustrate a continuum of corruption—from self-deception to state-enforced orthodoxy. Modern parallels—from climate denial to culture-war attacks on vaccines—echo these dynamics. Whenever scientific uncertainty intersects with moral panic or nationalism, history warns that evidence alone may not save reason.

When groups reject mainstream science but imitate its institutions, they form what Gordin calls counterestablishment science. These are movements that declare, “We are the real scientists,” setting up journals, conferences, and degrees to rival the establishment. Their stories—from phrenology to creationism to flat-Earth cults—reveal how dissent repackages authority.

Phrenology: Measuring Minds and Class

In nineteenth-century Britain, phrenologists claimed skull bumps revealed moral faculties. This early attempt to physicalize psychology attracted reformers and radicals who distrusted elite doctors. Its journals and lectures resembled scientific practice, yet its social populism marked it as pseudoscience. Ironically, later neuroscience revived part of Gall’s claim—the brain has specialized regions—proving that pseudoscience sometimes anticipates truth.

Creationism: Fighting Darwin in the Classroom

The most enduring counterestablishment, creationism, built an empire of institutes and research societies after the 1960s. George McCready Price’s flood geology inspired Whitcomb and Morris’s The Genesis Flood (1961), spawning “Creation Science” and later “Intelligent Design.” These groups use the trappings of science—PhDs, peer-reviewed journals, even laboratory experiments on fossil sediment—but their underlying commitment is theological. Courts ruled that creationism cannot be taught as science, but the movement survives through private schools and global offshoots. Creationists depict themselves as Galileo facing the Church—except now the Church is the scientific establishment.

Bigfoot, Aliens, and the Flat Earth

Cryptozoologists catalog unknown creatures such as Bigfoot and Nessie, while UFOlogists debate alien visitation. These groups hold congresses, publish reports, and accuse governments of cover-ups. Their conviction that agencies suppress evidence mirrors how mainstream scientists reject their claims. Flat-Earthers go further: they flip the entire planetary model, insisting global consensus proves conspiracy. Their online videos and conventions form a community united by disbelief.

Shared Pattern

Counterestablishment sciences imitate science to protest exclusion. They aren’t always anti-science—they crave legitimacy. Behind their defiance lies the same desire mainstream scientists have: to uncover truth and gain recognition.

Gordin’s narrative reframes these rebels not merely as fools but as products of science’s own competitive nature. Knowledge systems create outsiders whenever consensus hardens. Understanding their motives—spiritual, political, psychological—makes you see science as less dogmatic and more human.

Few fringes test our sense of reality like parapsychology—the study of extrasensory perception (ESP), telepathy, and psychokinesis. Gordin traces this lineage from eighteenth-century Mesmerism through Victorian Spiritualism to university laboratories. These stories reveal how pseudoscience can sharpen real scientific methods.

Mesmerism and the Birth of the Placebo

In 1780s Paris, Franz Mesmer claimed to heal through “animal magnetism,” a celestial fluid flowing through bodies. His séances drew crowds until Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier’s commission exposed it as imagination, not magnetism. Their experiments introduced a revolutionary design—blind trials separating belief from substance. Today’s double-blind placebo tests descend directly from Mesmer’s debunking.

Spiritualism and the Science of Séances

The Fox sisters’ rapping spirits of 1848 evolved into Europe’s séance culture, attracting policymakers and scholars. Victorians like chemist William Crookes and evolutionary cofounder Alfred Russel Wallace investigated mediums, mixing physics and mysticism. Their Society for Psychical Research (1882) pioneered statistical randomization to test telepathy—another gift to modern science.

University ESP and the Birth of the Debunkers

By the 1930s, J. B. Rhine at Duke University used Zener cards—decks with five symbols—to test telepathy statistically. Though few subjects beat chance, Rhine’s rigor impressed both believers and skeptics. Later, magician James Randi and astronomer Carl Sagan founded CSICOP, attacking frauds like spoon-bender Uri Geller and calling for scientific literacy. The result: parapsychology legitimized experimental scrutiny even as it lost mainstream respect.

What It Shows

Even pseudoscience can be productive. The effort to test extraordinary claims improved scientific practice—from control groups to randomization. Fringe pursuits reveal how science learns from failure.

Gordin’s narrative makes ESP less about gullibility and more about experimentation’s evolution. Each time the mainstream fought psychic research, it refined its own methods. The fringe, in this sense, is science’s permanent challenger and tutor.

If you’ve ever wondered why scientific scandals keep appearing, Gordin argues they’re not bugs—they’re features. Controversy fuels discovery. His case studies of polywater, water memory, and cold fusion show how ordinary mistakes become fringe legends.

Polywater and the Mirage of Discovery

In the 1960s Soviet labs, Boris Deriagin’s team discovered a mysterious viscous “polywater” forming in capillary tubes—a denser, hotter version of ordinary water. Western labs rushed to replicate it. Funding soared, Nobel rumors swirled. Then impurities explained everything. Polywater wasn’t fraud, just contamination. When hype outpaces verification, Gordin notes, even good science can mutate into pseudoscience.

Water Memory and the Homeopathy Wars

In 1988, immunologist Jean Benveniste claimed ultra-diluted solutions retained biological effects—essentially proving homeopathy. Nature published the paper alongside its own skeptical editorial and sent a team including magician James Randi to investigate. The follow-up report, “High-Dilution Experiments a Delusion,” found experimental bias, not deception. Still, the idea persists among alternative healers. Here, the boundary between error, enthusiasm, and pseudoscience blurs completely.

Cold Fusion: The Media’s Meltdown

In 1989, chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced fusion in a tabletop cell—a limitless energy source. The press exploded; labs couldn’t replicate results. Within weeks, the claim collapsed under scrutiny, and the palladium market followed. Yet a subculture still meets yearly to test “condensed-matter nuclear science.” Cold fusion lives on as organized fringe even after debunking.

The Double-Edged Sword

Controversies show science’s strength and vulnerability. They produce innovation but also confusion. Debunkers, too, are part of the cycle; they sharpen skepticism while sometimes amplifying the myths they fight.

For Gordin, controversies sustain science’s dynamism. Fraud, replication failures, and hype remind us that knowledge isn’t static. The risk of error is built into progress. Science without fringe—or friction—would stagnate.

In his final chapter, Gordin frames two haunting questions borrowed from Russian literature—Herzen’s Who Is to Blame? and Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?—to address the persistence of pseudoscience. He suggests that blaming individuals misunderstands the problem and that eliminating fringe ideas would mean eliminating science itself.

Who Is to Blame?

Critics often accuse pseudoscientists of deceit or madness, but Gordin argues that most act sincerely. Fringe researchers mirror mainstream scientists in their obsession, passion, and stubbornness. Labeling them “cranks” obscures the real issue: science’s adversarial competition inevitably produces losers. Every paradigm shift leaves vestiges clinging to the old order. As he puts it, pseudoscience is not an error—it’s the residue of progress.

Denialism and Its New Forms

The modern counterpart to pseudoscience isn’t true belief but strategic skepticism. Denialist campaigns—from tobacco to climate-change disinformation—use the appearance of science to sow doubt. Borrowing tactics from the 1950s PR firm Hill & Knowlton, corporations and ideologues frame consensus as uncertain and demand “more research.” Gordin also explores anti-vaccine movements, fueled first by a retracted 1998 study linking vaccines to autism. Denialists aren’t anti-science; they weaponize its rhetoric against itself.

What Is to Be Done?

So how should society respond? Tightening peer review would stifle novelty, and education alone won’t stop flat-Earthers who already learned about planetary curvature in school. Gordin concludes that pseudoscience thrives because science does. As long as evidence and authority evolve, dissent will mutate. The goal is not eradication but understanding—seeing the fringe as a cultural phenomenon to study and manage, not destroy.

Final Thought

Science casts a shadow, and that shadow is pseudoscience. The brighter the light—the higher the prestige of scientific truth—the darker and sharper the outline of its fringe. Understanding the fringe means understanding science itself.

In Gordin’s closing argument, the fringe is inevitable and mostly harmless, except when politicized or weaponized. Rather than policing boundaries, we should explore them. Science doesn’t need walls—it needs self-awareness.