... captivating ... Canales’s chapter on quantum theory includes a dazzling exploration of demons in the work of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Max Planck, and other scientists ... a brilliant, challenging overview of the myth-driven scientific endeavors that transform human understandings of the world.
The opening chapters...deftly sprint through centuries of scientific history in the course of introducing the...demons of Descartes, Laplace and Maxwell. But the book’s pace becomes more relaxed once it arrives at the 20th century ... Canales’s impressive facility with the problems and personalities of 20th-century physics serves her story well at this point. In the hands of a lesser scholar, pandemonium would threaten to take hold in the book’s concluding chapters ... Canales remains a steady, if less leisurely, guide ... Bedeviled admirably insists on recording the plain history of science. It just so happens that the history of that most rational of human endeavors reads at times like a Gothic tale, one replete with evil geniuses, time travelers and uncanny intelligences lurking in reality’s obscure corners.
... [for]technologies that threaten human existence, the use of demons feels appropriate...their very identity suggests the workings of a mischievous or malevolent force. Perhaps no group of scientists better understood that than the men and women of the Manhattan Project...and Canales is fascinating on their ethical deliberations ... Chasing every mention of the word 'demon' makes Canales’s census threaten to approach the millions and trillions counted in Reformation-era demonologies, but not every invocation of the word carries an analogous meaning ... Canales’s conclusion, though, does much to redeem her encyclopedic approach ... scientists, like novelists and philosophers, sometimes work best in speculative modes.
Canales explores so many fields and societal implications of scientific debates, from atomic bombs to stock-market fluctuations, that she seems to weave in nearly every demon reference of the past four centuries, however tangential. Some meandering historical asides stray from her solid survey of seminal demonic invocations ... Her history would have benefited from an exploration of the disputes between astrology and science in the medieval period, such as those between figures such as Abu Rayhan al-Biruni and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) in Persia ... Carl Sagan wrote that because scientists frequently use their imagination in their work, they don’t know what to expect as they push against the boundaries of knowledge. Canales has given us a glimpse into this haunted realm.
... thought-provoking and highly readable ... Although this is not a new topic of inquiry, Canales comes at it from a refreshingly original perspective, examining the ways that various scientific thinkers throughout the centuries have made use of imaginary demons ... a welcome contribution to the philosophy of scientific discovery that deserves further scholarly attention.
