Fight Like a Physicist: Make Physics Your Advantage in the Ring and on the Street. By Jason Thalken. YMAA Publication Center, Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, 2015. ISBN: 1-59439338-9. 161 pp. Paperback, $16.95.
Peter Huston
The martial arts field is many things to many people, and it often confuses not just the general public but also skeptics. What’s an outsider to make of a wide-reaching milieu that includes contact sports, historical reenactment, self-defense training, and New Age pseudohistorical mystical gobbledygook when all are labeled “martial arts”? This question brings us to a new book called Fight Like A Physicist: Make Physics Your Advantage in the Ring and on the Street, written by a PhD physicist. Although Jason Thalken writes well, footnotes carefully, and uses interesting analogies to explain concepts well, one has to ask what, if anything, does this book include that would be of interest to skeptics?
Although most of the 161-page book focuses on subjects such as the best designs and advantages of using helmets and boxing gloves in contact sports as well as the basic physics of strikes of different kinds (and therefore is of limited interest to most skeptics), chapter 9, “Qi and Pseudoscience in the Martial Arts,” is an eighteen-page gem that skeptics should be aware of. It is that brief chapter that this review will focus on. Although chapter 8, “Guns, Knives, and the Hollywood Death Sentence,” discusses the effects of weapons and combat in reality versus the movies for fourteen pages and also contains information of interest to the general skeptic, chapter 9 is of the most interest to most readers of the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER.
In this chapter, the author does a good job of debunking a variety of phenomenal claims. The first of these is the “no touch knock out,” a claim that a highly advanced martial artist can knock people over with just a wave of his hand without physical contact. Unsurprisingly, it works best on people, such as students of the person performing the technique, who believe in it and are aware of what is expected to happen but never on people who don’t believe in it. He discusses a variety of physics stunts that are often credited to “Qi” (also spelled or pronounced as “chi” or “ki”), a mystical life force prominent in traditional East Asian thinking and thus frequently a part of martial arts. These include lying on beds of nails, breaking boards or bricks, and walking on hot coals, among others. He also presents a critical discussion of the idea that Qi can aid one’s health.
Thalken does an excellent job of carefully analyzing these claims and discrediting them. His analysis is intelligent, his explanations clear and well presented, and his facts carefully footnoted. Only an insecure pedant with an axe to grind could find anything there to criticize.
However, being an insecure pedant with an axe to grind, I now offer some minor quibbles and criticisms. (For the record, I am not just a martial artist but am also someone who in the 1990s went so far as to construct a bed of nails simply so I could lie on it and show people how simple it was. Sadly, the bed of nails became rusty and was tossed years ago.)
First, I found it surprising that Thalken not only failed to cite me (“China, Chi, and Chicanery,” by Peter Huston, which is available at http://www.csicop.org/si/show/china_chi_and_chicanery_ examining_traditional_chinese_medicine_and_chi_theo) but he also failed to include Leung Ting’s fascinating book,Behind the Incredibles, Vol. 2.
Additionally, while discussing chi, he also takes a swipe at therapeutic touch, citing the famous Emily Rosa paper in which a young girl allegedly disproved therapeutic touch (TT) in a science-fair project. Although I think it’s fair to say that TT has been thoroughly discredited and is not a scientific healing modality, Thalken does not seem aware that there was a controversy around Rosa’s paper and its methodology. (See “Perception of Conventional Sensory Cues as an Alternative to the Postulated ‘Human Energy Field’ of Therapeutic Touch,” by Rebecca Long, Paul Bernhardt, and William Evans in the Fall/Winter 1999 issue of The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine.)
As described in Long et al.’s book, Emily Rosa’s experiment was based on the valid reasoning that if TT practitioners could detect and manipulate a human energy field, they should be able to feel the presence of an experimenter’s unseen hand more often than predicted by chance, which would be about 50 percent of the time. The subjects in Rosa’s original study detected her hand only 44 percent of the time, and in a repeat of the study for television, detected it only 41 percent of the time. In other words, they did even worse than chance would predict, at a level that was statistically significant, suggesting problems in the study’s methodology.
Long et al. replicated Emily Rosa’s experiment with rigorous experimental controls and found that at the hand distance reportedly used in the Rosa study, the test subjects could correctly identify the location of the unseen hand almost 80 percent of the time. Their ability to detect the unseen hand decreased with distance, and placement of a piece of glass between their hand and that of the experimenter effectively prevented the location of the unseen hand from being sensed. The experimenters concluded from this that the test subjects were able to detect the presence of the unseen hand via body heat, suggesting that perhaps TT practitioners mistake perceptions of body heat for sensing the human energy field. Additional testing showed that in a less rigorously controlled study such as Emily Rosa’s, inadvertent cues such as leaning an elbow on the table could significantly cue, or miscue, the test subjects, a factor that could have accounted for Rosa’s results.
But as stated, these are mere quibbles, minor criticisms at best of an otherwise fine book. If the subjects of this book interest you, seek it out—and even if it doesn’t, consider chapter 9 to be must reading for serious skeptics, particularly if interested in fantastic martial arts claims.
Peter Huston is an author and teacher of English as a second language. His books are available on Amazon.com and elsewhere. In addition to an MS in teaching English to speakers of other languages, he has a master’s degree in East Asian Studies and has lived, taught, and traveled extensively in Asia