Gardner was an uncompromising critic of fringe science. His book "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" (1952, revised 1957) launched the modern skeptical movement. It debunked dubious movements and theories including Fletcherism, Lamarckism, food faddism, Dowsing Rods, Charles Fort, Rudolf Steiner, Dianetics, the Bates method for improving eyesight, Einstein deniers, the Flat Earth theory, the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, the reincarnation of Bridey Murphy, Wilhelm Reich's orgone theory, the spontaneous generation of life, extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis, homeopathy, phrenology, palmistry, graphology, and numerology. This book and his subsequent efforts ("Science: Good, Bad and Bogus", 1981; "Order and Surprise", 1983, "Gardner's Whys & Wherefores", 1989, etc.) provoked a lot of criticism from the advocates of alternative science and New Age philosophy; he kept up running dialogues (both public and private) with many of them for decades.