The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage into the World of the Weird

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We don’t know the answers to any of these questions (that includes the shower-curtain one, which is a mystery that has eluded scientists for decades, and which they are still trying to solve). But don’t worry, no matter what questions you have, you can bet on the fact that there is someone (or something) out there, investigating it on your behalf – and this book collects their latest findings. But nonsense also emerges from less expected quarters. In professional sports, where superstition collides with lavish budgets, players and owners will indulge every whim in the name of victory. Between 2005 and 2010, the Los Angeles Dodgers secretly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Russian scientist named Vladimir Shpunt who believed he could “transmit powerful energy through his hands and thoughts,” thereby improving the team’s batting average. And I did try a Ouija board once and definitely still kind of think it worked (it knew the name of my dead grandma which no one else in the room knew).

Questo libro racchiude teorie che per fortuna al momento sono molto meno pericolose di questa che vi ho appena raccontato (quella di Rugiati, non la mia) ma che ai loro tempi hanno scatenato dibattiti infiniti di scienziati e improvvisati tali. Dan is well-known from the "no such things as a fish" podcast, where he is often explores crazy theories with his fellow hosts. In this book he takes a very factual and complete approach, but with all of the passion that he puts forward in the podcast. If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire. I do sometimes think I’ve predicted what will happen that day (usually something that was very likely to happen anyway - we don’t talk about that).The writing was however under par, which I didn’t expect from Dan Schreiber, being a No Such Thing as a Fish fan. It felt like a book full of “have you heard of this? O wait, this is fun as well! And now I’m thinking of ghosts. And of presidents. Have you heard of …”. Many of the chapters and anecdotes did not really feel rounded, without a clear purpose. It’s up to the reader, then, how closely to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Edison, who slept in his work clothes because he was convinced that “changing into pajamas at night messed with your body’s chemistry and gave you insomnia.” Or to support Kary Mullis — the chemist who invented the polymerase chain reaction that helped give us the Covid-19 PCR test — in his assertion that he was once politely greeted by a glowing raccoon outside his cabin in Northern California. Let me also mention that the audiobook (read by the author himself) is a really fun way to experience this book.

Io da piccola pensavo che di notte la Terra si scoperchiasse dal suo cappuccio celeste per lasciare spazio al cielo blu della notte e che per piovere la procedura fosse più o meno quella espressa dal cuoco neo climatologo, o meglio, ci fosse un cappuccio pieno di acqua. Poi non riuscendo mai ad assistere all’esatto momento del cambio di coperchio ho lasciato stare questa mirabolante idea.

Dan Piepenbring is the co-author of “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.” As those examples suggest, scientists, mad and sane alike, are veritable fonts of absurdity: the natural byproduct of all their hypothesizing. Maybe it was only a matter of time before one of them proposed that drinking gin makes women spontaneously combust, or that life on Earth blossomed from aliens’ cosmic jetsam. Some of science’s wildest guesses achieve an elegance in their folly. In the 17th century, Charles Morton ventured that birds disappeared every winter because they migrated to the moon. The Theory of Everything Else is a warm, charming light hearted look at the strange, the odd, the weird and well, the downright batshit.

A cheerful collection of paranormal phenomena, correct prophecies, alien encounters, and unlikely historical events. In queste storie splende come il giorno che anche gli uomini di scienza (veri) incappavano in assurde teorie solo perché non riuscivano a capire il mondo, così come è chiaro che sicuramente anche ora staranno pensando a qualche teoria sbagliata ignari di dati di cui forse beneficeranno i posteri. Teorie assurde, tipo che il Titanic sarebbe affondato per colpa dei viaggiatori nel tempo, o che le piante in vaso potessero essere usate come testimoni oculari di delitti. The rise of the search engine, reference text ad infinitum, spelled doom for many books such as these. So it’s a pleasure to encounter Dan Schreiber’s “The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage Into the World of the Weird,” a willfully miscellaneous survey of the bizarre beliefs that people have held over the centuries: the kind of random, strange-for-the-sake-of-strange compendium that’s seldom published anymore.Quite fun. Some interesting “theories”, some anecdotes of weird shit happening, some really funny chapters.