Reddit reviews Joseph Smith as Scientist

Joseph Smith As Scientist is still available in all its nutty glory. Joseph Smith's radical doctrine is supposedly vindicated by modern science.

I was given that book as a high school graduate. It was a copy that was owned by my deceased great-grandfather 50 years ago and the science in the book is atrocious and embarrassingly outdated. As one flagrant example, the book champions the doctrinal grounding of the theory of "universal ether". This theory was completely demolished via the Michelson Morley experiment in 1887. But Widtsoe apparently was not up on the latest findings in physics.

I know you are right, because after reading Rough Stone Rolling a long time ago, I wasn't even really sure that JS was a polygamist, haha. But by comparison to FAIR, and other apologetics, it is more objective and balanced. I'm reading "Joseph Smith As Scientist" by John A. Widstow (https://www.amazon.com/Joseph-Smith-Scientist-John-Widtsoe/dp/1533544530), and I think you'd be hard pressed to find a book with more proof-texting and twisting of Joseph Smith's words to make them say he was ahead of his time in Scientific Understanding (without JS ever actually talking about the scientific concepts or actually describing anything new or useful) than this one. Not to mention, that all of the scientific thought he claims JS had was all proven to be wrong a few decades later, e.g. belief in the "ether" in space and in the body, etc.