 A book by the late Bob Schadewald, "Worlds of Their Own," deals with - as the jacket says:
A brief history of misguided ideas: creationism, flat-Earthism, energy scams, and the Velikovsky affair.
To that, I'll add: perpetual motion, general pseudoscience, and end-of-the-world nonsense, all handled in depth and with great perception. Bob was a prolific technical writer, and the best of these are very knowledgeable about real science. He also served on the Board of Directors of the National Center for Science Education, including two years as its president.
Bob's sister Lois has published this fine book and it can be purchased at www.xlibris.com/WorldsofTheirOwn.html or you can purchase it directly from the JREF here.
Martin Gardner, in his review of the book, wrote:
No science fiction writer wrote about pseudoscience with greater accuracy and humor than Bob Schadewald. It is high time that his great contributions to the growing literature of respect for genuine science over bogus science were finally recognized.
Okay? Now I know that you have to have this book...!
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We must give a modicum of credit (as little as possible anyway) to pseudosciences like astrology and alchemy for it was their participants' drive for knowledge seeking power and foresight that then led to astronomy and chemistry. Not that the participants were attempting to achieve the bland, practical, and scientific ends - but they fueled the curiousity and 'research' which eventually culminated in those ends. And of course, this is strictly limited to those of the past that led to the science of today and not the charlatans who continued in the pseudo part of the science despite.
Beyond that, we must show how these archaic notions fail to deliver and how the scientific ones deliver and deliver.