The following is a short essay on belief, rationality, science and non-science. Its part of my renewed effort to create more content. This stuff is important to me. I hope its not too heavy. Part two is coming soon.
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Part One
I try not to watch too much TV – much of it bores me, and I’m often dismayed by the bland, stupid, triviality of what is broadcast. Every so often, though, along comes a programme that I really enjoy. Last night’s Horizon was excellent. Titled “Homeopathy – The Test“, it did two things that are rarely done in popular culture. First, it objectively investigated something, in this case homeopathy, which is rarely subject to skeptical enquiry. Secondly, it showed how science works.
I was expecting the usual “on one hand, one the other hand” summary of homeopathy, with maybe a few case studies of people who’d used it, and an only-time-will-tell conclusion about whether it works. But instead, they actually tested it. Right there. On the programme. They identified an experiment that in the past had appeared to confirm that homeopathy worked and had a scientific basis. They assembled a team of scientists who performed the experiment using tissue samples, an automated cell-counter, and a double-blind protocol to avoid personal bias and the placebo effect. In a superb illustration of the scientific method, they showed the scientists defining the theory, doing the experiment, and analysing the results. And the result was: the homeopathic preparation had precisely no effect. This didn’t surprise me. I knew that homeopathy doesn’t have any scientific basis. In fact, it is contrary to fundamental and well-tested knowledge of how the world works. It was an exciting thing to see, though.
Still, there are a lot of people who use homeopathy and seem to feel that it works. Some of them are sufficiently ill, and desperate, that its efficacy is a big deal to them. Similarly, a lot of people read astrological horoscopes and, to varying degrees, use them to guide their lives. And they do this even though astrology, like homeopathy, is contrary to the way we know the universe to work. People say that they believe in homeopathy/astrology/ghosts/clairvoyance/UFOs etc. I find this fascinating, because I don’t understand how the minds of these people work.
When I was about 17 I read Carl Sagan’s wonderful novel Contact. In it, one of the characters (a religious believer) tries to test another character (an astronomer) using the Foucault Pendulum in the Smithsonian Institution. The scientist has to stand at the point where the huge pendulum slows and reverses direction. She then has to wait for it to swing away and return. If she “believes” in science then she won’t step away because there is no way the pendulum can increase its arc and hit her. In the book she flinches a little, but passes the test. After I read this, I decided to made myself a pendulum, with a length of string and piece of wood for the weight, and try it. With my back to a wall I pulled the weight back from its rest position, held it against my forehead, and let go. It swung away and then back, not quite touching my forehead as it returned. Just like it should. And I knew why: because the pendulum lost energy due to friction with the air that it forced out of its way. Simple. Explicable. It remember repeating the experiment again, concentrating hard to see if I could somehow make the pendulum speed up and hit me. It didn’t.
This taught me what in retrospect was a priceless lesson. The Universe just is. The way that it works is just how it works. If you want to, you can find out just how it works by trying something, by doing an experiment. But don’t expect it to care what you want to happen. If you try hard enough, and you’re clever enough, you can understand a little more than you did before. You can do this because the Universe is explicable and consistent, and it doesn’t make special cases for you or anyone else. Its not arbitrary, and it doesn’t care about anyone’s beliefs or desires.
Part Two
(To follow…)