Robert L. Park, American physicist and noted critic of pseudoscience (and fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), died April 29, 2020, at the age of eighty-nine.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Texas, Park got his PhD in physics from Brown University. He spent most of a decade working as a member of technical staff and later director of the Surface Physics Division at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. In 1974, he took a faculty position at the University of Maryland Physics Department and was chairman from 1975 to 1978. He spent most of his career at the university.

In 1983, he also became director of public information for the Washington, D.C., office of the American Physical Society (APS), where he became involved with the intersection of science and public policy and all its hazards and foibles.

Park was best known and respected in scientific and skeptical circles for his well-informed and often pungent critiques of all manner of pseudoscience. His main forum for years was his popular “What’s New” weekly email newsletter, initially issued via the APS and later by the University of Maryland. Recipients eagerly watched for it every Friday. It carried short items of timely scientific news and succinct critiques and pithily written personal comments on various pseudoscientific fads, claims, and beliefs.

In 2000, Oxford University Press published his Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, a book that a New York Times review said was a worthy successor to Martin Gardner’s classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.

Voodoo Science received widespread acclaim and also generated some controversy. Biology professor Ursula Goodenough called Park a “national resource.” Richard Dawkins, in a blurb, wrote, “I finished this brilliant book within a day, and then felt such withdrawal symptom I went right back to the beginning and started again.” After reading it, he said, “you’ll never again waste time or your money on astrologers, ‘quantum healers’, homeopaths, spoonbenders, perpetual motion merchants, or alien abduction fantasists.”

Physicist N. David Mermin reviewed it in Nature, calling it “a fascinating compendium of tales of human folly” and said Park is “a superb storyteller.” Yet he suggested that historians and philosophers of science would find its pronouncements about the nature of science “oversimplified and naïve.” In Science, Kenneth R. Foster called Park “an articulate and skeptical voice of reason about science” and added, “His essays are delightful to read, and their critical views may be unfamiliar to many nonscientists.”

I reviewed Voodoo Science in Physics Today, calling it a classic work that “has freshness and originality—and an importance and potential for influence—perhaps not seen since [Martin] Gardner’s first.” Matt Nisbet, in an online column on csicop.org on January 1, 2001, called it the best skeptic book of 2000. He also noted the irony that one of the few critical reviews came in Park’s “hometown newspaper,” the Washington Post, which thought its attacks on pseudoscience were “overzealous.” The newspaper later published letters countering that criticism.

Voodoo Science was favorably reviewed in the Skeptical Inquirer by professor and educator Gerry Rising (July/August 2000), who wrote, “If only this book could be made required reading for those called upon to make decisions about science, our political leaders and our journalists in particular, how well we would be served.” He enjoyed Park’s outspokenness, which caused some concerns at the APS, and said he supported Park’s “tongue-in-cheek” disclaimer attached to his weekly reports: “Opinions are the author’s and are not necessarily shared by APS, but they should be.”

Rising noted that Park invented the term voodoo science to encompass all four versions of bad and dubious science, each of which Park carefully defined: pathological science, junk science, pseudoscience, and fraudulent science.

The cover article of that same issue of Skeptical Inquirer was Park’s own “Voodoo Science and the Belief Gene,” adapted by Park from the book. It described a physicist’s credulous embrace of transcendental meditation’s claims that it could promote tranquility in Washington, D.C.; discussed at some length the burgeoning “great global warming debate,” which Park said is as much about values as it is about science; talked about what science is; and mentioned “the noisy and unpleasant” processes of science, which include the need to abandon beliefs in the face of new evidence. He wrote that “overall the system works amazingly well … the process transcends the failings of individual scientists.” Then he returned to “the carbon dioxide war” and to transcendental meditation’s ridiculous claims of levitation, noting that “pseudoscience is never open to scientific challenge.”

The Skeptical Inquirer also published several excerpts over the years from some of Park’s “What’s New” columns, especially on such topics as unfounded fears about RF and EMF radiation (cell phones and the like).

Park’s 2008 book Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (Princeton University Press) didn’t get the same attention; it had a slightly different emphasis. Clearly siding with the forces of reason in a world of seemingly increasing superstition, he wrote about scientists of faith, natural selection as the secret of life, prayer studies, searching for the soul and the afterlife, the New Age (“in which anything goes”), quantum mysticism, and the placebo effect, which gets confused with real medical effects. In the introduction, he wrote poignantly about his experience of getting crushed by a falling oak tree while jogging in Washington’s Rock Creek Park, which nearly killed him. “I would not be telling this story had it not been for recent advances in medicine and technology.”

Robert Park’s expertise as a physicist, his experience in Washington-based science and public policy, his clear and pungent writing style, and his courage in calling out nonsense head-on in succinct, topical items helped educate and inform a whole generation of scientists and scientific skeptics.

Park, a longtime Committee for Skeptical Inquiry fellow, has been added to CSI’s Pantheon of Skeptics (see skepticalinquirer.org/pantheon-of-skeptics/).