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Get the right answer, and never mind that you don’t understand what you’re doing.
I was lucky enough to attend one of the great institutions of learning of the time, the University of Chicago. I was a physics student in a department orbiting around Enrico Fermi; I discovered what true mathematical elegance is from Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar; I was given the chance to talk chemistry with Harold Urey; over summers I was apprenticed in biology to H. J. Muller at Indiana University; and I learned planetary astronomy from its only full-time practitioner at the time, G. P. Kuiper.
Lucky? It was destiny
science was presented as an integral part of the gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge.
teachers were valued for their teaching, their ability to inform and inspire the next generation.
He was, in a way, widely read. He knew the various speculative nuances on, let’s say, the “sunken continents” of Atlantis and Lemuria.
there’s so much in real science that’s equally exciting, more mysterious, a greater intellectual challenge—as well as being a lot closer to the truth.
He wanted to know about science. It’s just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our cultural motifs, our educational system, our communications media had failed this man.
Skepticism does not sell
Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience.
It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth.
How can we affect national policy—or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues?
“Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.”
A God of the Gaps is assigned responsibility for what we do not yet understand.
We can pray over the cholera victim, or we can give her 500 milligrams of tetracycline every 12 hours.
In hunter-gatherer, pre-agricultural times, the human life expectancy was about 20 to 30 years. That’s also what it was in Western Europe in Late Roman and in Medieval times. It didn’t rise to 40 years until around the year 1870. It reached 50 in 1915, 60 in 1930, 70 in 1955, and is today approaching 80 (a little more for women, a little less for men).
The sword of science is double-edged. Its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, but of course especially on scientists, a new responsibility—more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive.
Whose interest does ignorance serve? If we humans bear, say, hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn’t self-knowledge the only antidote?
Leon Trotsky described it for Germany on the eve of the Hitler takeover (but in a description that might equally have applied to the Soviet Union of 1933): Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives along side the twentieth century the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms … Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!
What about the US today??
Ignorance is never socialist, nor is poverty.
many proponents of mainstream religions are reluctant to take on extreme conservatives and fundamentalists. If the trend continues, eventually the field is theirs; they can win the debate by default.
If we resolutely refuse to acknowledge where we are liable to fall into error, then we can confidently expect that error—even serious error, profound mistakes—will be our companion forever. But if we are capable of a little courageous self-assessment, whatever rueful reflections they may engender, our chances improve enormously.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish
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Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions.
“Mistrust arguments from authority.”
Because science carries us toward an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be, its findings may not in all cases be immediately comprehensible or satisfying.
so often convinced in their adolescence that science is not for them.
And the cumulative worldwide buildup of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a transnational, transgenerational meta-mind.
to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in the favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them … We receive as friendly that which agrees with [us], we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense.
We are aware that revered scientists have been wrong. We understand human imperfection.
Scientists are intent on testing those theories to the breaking point. They do not trust what is intuitively obvious. That the Earth is flat was once obvious. That heavy bodies fall faster than light ones was once obvious.
In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can color our interpretation of the evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious, and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.
No witness’s say-so is good enough. People make mistakes. People play practical jokes. People stretch the truth for money or attention or fame. People occasionally misunderstand what they’re seeing. People sometimes even see things that aren’t there.
All in all, the alleged evidence seemed thin—most often devolving into gullibility, hoax, hallucination, misunderstanding of the natural world, hopes and fears disguised as evidence, and a craving for attention, fame, and fortune.
But if the suspected signal isn’t available for every grumpy skeptic to pick over, we cannot call it evidence of extraterrestrial life—
Demons sell; hoaxers are boring and in bad taste.
But the tools of skepticism are generally unavailable to the citizens of our society. They’re hardly ever mentioned in the schools,
Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a skeptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging skepticism.
But why, if we see something we don’t recognize, should we conclude it’s a ship from the stars? A wide variety of more prosaic possibilities present themselves.
I’m almost never asked, “How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?”
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.
It’s telling that emotions can run so high on a matter about which we really know so little.
After all, if true, either hypothesis—invasion by sexually manipulative extraterrestrials or an epidemic of hallucinations—teaches us something we certainly ought to know about.
Most of us are somewhere in between.
There’s no doubt that humans commonly hallucinate. There’s considerable doubt about whether extraterrestrials exist, frequent our planet, or abduct and molest us.
It serves their purpose to accept UFOs as real and revile them as instruments of Satan and the Antichrist, rather than to use the blade of scientific skepticism. That tool, once honed, might accomplish more than just a limited heresiotomy.
Science may have evicted ghosts and witches from our beliefs, but it just as quickly filled the vacancy with aliens having the same functions.
Alien abduction accounts were comparatively rare until 1975, when a credulous television dramatization of the Hill case was aired; another leap into public prominence occurred after 1987, when Strieber’s purported first-hand account with a haunting cover painting of a large-eyed “alien” became a best-seller. In contrast, we hear very little lately about incubi, elves, and fairies. Where have they all gone?
Any protozoology or bacteriology or mycology textbook is filled with wonders that far outshine the most exotic descriptions of the alien abductionists.
hypnosis is an unreliable way to refresh memory. It often elicits imagination, fantasy, and play as well as true recollections, with neither patient nor therapist able to distinguish the one from the other.
In a typical experiment, subjects will view a film of a car accident. In the course of being questioned about what they saw, they’re casually given false information. For example, a stop sign is off-handedly referred to, although there wasn’t one in the film. Many subjects then dutifully recall seeing a stop sign. When the deception is revealed, some vehemently protest, stressing how vividly they remember the sign. The greater the time lag between viewing the film and being given the false information, the more people allow their memories to be tampered with.
