No More Learning

The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way. 'A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Pale Blue Dot (1995)
In so far as traditional religions are in decline in the West, their place seems to be taken not by science, with its clearer sighted, grander vision of the cosmos, so much as by the paranormal and astrology. One might have hoped that by the end of this most scientifically successful of all centuries science would have been incorporated into our culture and our
aesthetic sense risen to meet its poetry. Without reviving the mid-century pessimism of C. P. Snow, I reluctantly find that, with only two years to run, these hopes are not realized. Astrology books outsell astronomy books. Television beats a path to the doors of second-rate conjurors masquerading as psychics and clairvoyants. This chapter examines superstition and gullibility, trying to explain them and the ease with which they can be exploited. Chapter 7 then advocates simple statistical thinking as an antidote to the paranormal disease. We begin with astrology.
On 27 December 1997, one of Britain's largest circulation national newspapers, the Daily Mail, devoted its main front-page story to astrology under the banner headline '1998: The Dawn of Aquarius'. One feels almost grateful when the article goes on to concede that the Hale Bopp comet was not the direct cause of Princess Diana's death. The paper's highly paid astrologer tells us that 'slow-moving, powerful Neptune' is about to join 'forces' with the equally powerful Uranus as it moves into Aquarius. This will have dramatic consequences:
. . . the Sun is rising. And the comet has come to remind us that this Sun is not a physical sun but a spiritual, psychic, inner sun. It does not, therefore, have to obey the law of gravity. It can come over the horizon more swiftly if enough people rise to greet and encourage it. And it can dispel the darkness the moment it appears.
How can people find this meaningless pap appealing, especially in the face of the real universe as revealed by astronomy?
On a moonless night when 'the stars look very cold about the sky, and the only clouds to be seen are the glowing smudges of the Milky Way, go out to a place far from street light pollution, lie on the grass and gaze up at the sky. Superficially you notice constellations, but a constellation's pattern means no more than a patch of damp on the bathroom ceiling. Note, accordingly, how little it means to say something like 'Neptune moves into Aquarius'. Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us which are unconnected with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here). A constellation is not an entity at all, and so not the kind of thing that Neptune, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into'.
The shape of a constellation, moreover, is ephemeral. A million years ago our Homo erectus ancestors gazed out nightly (no light pollution then, unless it came from that species' brilliant innovation, the camp fire) at a set of very different constellations. A million years hence, our descendants will see yet other shapes in the sky and we already know
exactly how these will look. This is the sort of detailed prediction that astronomers, but not astrologers, can make. And - again by contrast with astrological predictions - it will be correct.
Because of light's finite speed, when you look at the great galaxy in Andromeda you are seeing it as it was 2. 3 million years ago and Australopithecus stalked the high veldt. You are looking back in time. Shift your eyes a few degrees to the nearest bright star in the constellation of Andromeda and you see Mirach, but much more recently, as it was when Wall Street crashed. The sun, when you witness its colour and shape, is only eight minutes ago. But point a large telescope at the Sombrero galaxy and you behold a trillion suns as they were when your tailed ancestors peered shyly through the canopy and India collided with Asia to raise the Himalayas. A collision on a larger scale, between two galaxies in Stephan's Quintet, is shown to us at a time when on earth dinosaurs were dawning and the trilobites fresh dead.
Name any event in history and you will find a star out there whose light gives you a glimpse of something happening during the year of that event. Provided you are not a very young child, somewhere up in the night sky you can find your personal birth star. Its light is a thermonuclear glow that heralds the year of your birth. Indeed, you can find quite a few such stars (about 40 if you are 40; about 70 if you are 50; about 175 if you are 80 years old). When you look at one of your birth year stars, your telescope is a time machine letting you witness thermonuclear events
that are actually taking place during the year you were born. A pleasing conceit, but that is all. Your birth star will not deign to tell anything about your personality, your future or your sexual compatibilities. The stars have larger agendas in which the preoccupations of human pettiness do not figure.
Your birth star, of course, is yours for only this year. Next year you must look to the surface of a larger sphere one light year more distant. Think of this expanding sphere as a radius of good news, the news of your birth broadcast steadily outwards. In the Einsteinian universe in which most physicists now think we live, nothing can in principle travel faster than light. So, if you are 50 years old, you have a personal news bubble of 50 light years' radius. Within that sphere (of a little more than a thousand stars) it is in principle possible (although obviously not in practice) for news of your existence to have permeated. Outside that sphere you might as well not exist; in an Einsteinian sense you do not exist. Older people have larger existence spheres than younger people, but nobody's existence extends to more than a tiny fraction of the universe. The birth of Jesus may seem an ancient and momentous event to us as we reach his second millenary. But the news is so recent on this scale that, even in the most ideal circumstances, it could in principle have been
proclaimed to less than one 200 million millionth of the stars in the universe. Many, if not most, of the stars out there will be orbited by planets. The numbers are so vast that probably some of them have life forms, some have evolved intelligence and technology.
Yet the distances and times that separate us are so great that thousands of life forms could independently evolve and go extinct without it being possible for any to know of the existence of any other.
In order to make my calculations about numbers of birth stars, I assumed that the stars are spaced, on average, about 7. 6 light years apart. This is approximately true of our local region of the Milky Way galaxy. It seems an astonishingly low density (about 440 cubic light years per star), but it is actually high by comparison with the density of stars in the universe as a whole, where space lies empty between the galaxies. Isaac Asimov has a dramatic illustration: it is as if all the matter of the universe were a single grain of sand, set in the middle of an empty room 20 miles long, 20 miles wide and 20 miles high. Yet, at the same time, it is as if that single grain of sand were pulverized into a thousand million million million fragments, for that is approximately the number of stars in the universe. These are some of the sobering facts of astronomy, and you can see that they are beautiful.
Astrology, by comparison, is an aesthetic affront. Its pre-Copernican dabblings demean and cheapen astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles. It is also an insult to the science of psychology and the richness of human personality. I am talking about the facile and potentially damaging way in which astrologers divide humans into 12 categories. Scorpios are cheerful, outgoing types while Leos, with their methodical personalities, go well with Libras (or whatever it is). My wife Lalla Ward recalls an occasion when an American starlet approached the director of the film they were both working on with a 'Gee, Mr Preminger, what sign are you? ' and received the immortal rebuff, in a thick Austrian accent, 'I am a Do Not Disturrrb sign. '
Personality is a real phenomenon and psychologists have had some success in developing mathematical models to handle its variation in many dimensions. The initially large number of dimensions can be mathematically collapsed into fewer dimensions with measurable, and for some purposes conscionable, loss in predictive power. These fewer derived dimensions sometimes correspond to the dimensions that we intuitively think we recognize - aggressiveness, obstinacy, affectionateness and so on. Summarizing an individual's personality as a point in multidimensional space is a serviceable approximation whose limitations can be stated. It is a far cry from any mutually exclusive categorization, and certainly far from the preposterous fiction of
newspaper astrologer's 12 dump-bins. It is based upon genuinely relevant data about people themselves, not their birthdays. The psychologist's multidimensional scaling can be useful in deciding whether a person is suited to a particular career, or a proposed couple to each other. The astrologer's 12 pigeonholes are, if nothing worse, a costly and irrelevant distraction. Moreover, they sit oddly with our current strong taboos, and laws, against discrimination. Newspaper readers are schooled to regard themselves and their friends and colleagues as Scorpios or Libras or one of the other 12 mythic 'signs'. If you think about it for a moment, isn't this a form of discriminatory labelling rather like the cultural stereotypes which many of us nowadays find objectionable? I can imagine a Monty Python sketch in which a newspaper publishes a daily column something like this:
Germans: It is in your nature to be hard-working and methodical, which should serve you well at work today. In your personal relationships, especially this evening, you will need to curb your natural tendency to obey orders.
Spaniards: Your Latin hot blood may get the better of you, so beware of doing something you might regret. And lay off the garlic at lunch if you have romantic aspirations in the evening.
Chinese: Inscrutability has many advantages, but it may be your undoing today . . .
British: Your stiff upper lip may serve you well in business dealings, but try to relax and let yourself go in your social life.
And so on through 12 national stereotypes. No doubt the astrology columns are less offensive than this, but we should ask ourselves exactly where the difference lies. Both are guilty of facile discrimination, dividing humanity up into exclusive groups based upon no evidence. Even if there were evidence of some slight statistical effects, both kinds of discrimination encourage prejudiced handling of people as types rather than as individuals. You can already see advertisements in lonely hearts columns that include phrases like 'No Scorpios' or 'Tauruses need not apply'. Of course this is not as bad as the infamous 'No blacks' or 'No Irish' notices, because astrological prejudice doesn't consistently pick on some star signs more than others, but the principle of discriminatory stereotyping - as opposed to accepting people as individuals - remains.
There could even be sad human consequences. The whole point of advertising in lonely hearts columns is to increase the catchment area for meeting sexual partners (and indeed the circle provided by the workplace and by friends of friends is often meagre and needs enriching). Lonely people, whose life might be transformed by a longed-for compatible
friendship, are encouraged to throw away wantonly and pointlessly up to eleven twelfths of the available population. There are some vulnerable people out there and they should be pitied, not deliberately misled.
On an apocryphal occasion a few years ago, a newspaper hack who had drawn the short straw and been told to make up the day's astrological advice relieved his boredom by writing under one star sign the following portentous lines: 'All the sorrows of yesteryear are as nothing compared to what will befall you today. ' He was fired after the switchboard was jammed with panic-stricken readers, pathetic testimony to the simple trust people can place in astrology. In addition to anti-discrimination legislation, we have laws designed to protect us from manufacturers making false claims for their products. The law is not invoked in defence of simple truth about the natural world. If it were, astrologers would provide as good a test case as could be desired. They make claims to forecast the future and divine personal foibles, and they take payment for this, as well as for professional advice to individuals on important decisions. A pharmaceuticals manufacturer who marketed a birth control pill that had not the slightest demonstrable effect upon fertility would be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act, and sued by customers who found themselves pregnant. Once again it feels like over-reaction, but I cannot actually work out why professional astrologers are not arrested for fraud as well as for incitement to discrimination.
The London Daily Telegraph of 18 November 1997 reported that a self- styled exorcist who had persuaded a gullible teenage girl to have sex with him on the pretext of driving evil spirits from her body had been jailed for 18 months the day before. The man had shown the young woman some books on palmistry and magic, then told her that she was 'jinxed: someone had put bad luck on her'. In order to exorcise her, he explained, he needed to anoint her all over with special oils. She agreed to take all her clothes off for this purpose. Finally, she copulated with the man when he told her that this was necessary 'to get rid of the spirits'. Now, it seems to me that society cannot have it both ways. If it was right to jail this man for exploiting a gullible young woman (she was above the legal age of consent), why do we not similarly prosecute astrologers who take money off equally gullible people; or 'psychic' diviners who con oil companies into parting with shareholders' money for expensive 'consultations' on where to drill? Conversely, if it be protested that fools should be free to hand over their money to charlatans if they choose, why shouldn't the sexual 'exorcist' claim a similar defence, invoking the young woman's freedom to give her body for the sake of a ritual ceremony in which, at the time, she genuinely believed?
There is no known physical mechanism whereby the position of distant heavenly bodies at the moment of your birth could exert any causal
influence on your nature or your destiny. This does not rule out the possibility of some unknown physical influence. But we need bother to think about such a physical influence only if somebody can produce any evidence that the movements of planets against the backdrop of constellations actually has the slightest influence on human affairs. No such evidence has ever stood up to proper investigation. The vast majority of scientific studies of astrology have yielded no positive results whatever. A (very) few studies have suggested (weakly) a statistical correlation between star 'sign' and character. These few positive results turned out to have an interesting explanation. Many people are so well versed in star sign lore that they know which characteristics are expected of them. They then have a small tendency to live up to these expectations - not much, but enough to produce the very slight statistical effects observed.
A minimal test that any reputable method of diagnosis or divining ought to pass is that of reliability. This is not a test of whether it actually works, merely a test of whether different practitioners confronted with the same evidence (or the same practitioner confronted with the same evidence twice) agree. Although I don't think astrology works, I really would have expected high reliability scores in this sense of self-consistency. Different astrologers, after all, presumably have access to the same books. Even if their verdicts are wrong, you'd think their methods would be systematic enough at least to agree in producing the same wrong verdicts! Alas, as shown in a study by G. Dean and colleagues, they don't even achieve this minimal and easy benchmark. For comparison, when different assessors judged people on their performance in structured interviews, the correlation coefficient was greater than 0. 8 (a correlation coefficient of
1. 0 would represent perfect agreement, -1. 0 would represent perfect disagreement, 0. 0 would represent complete randomness or lack of association; 0. 8 is pretty good). Against this, in the same study, the reliability coefficient for astrology was a pitiable 0. 1, comparable to the figure for palmistry (0. 11), and indicating near total randomness.
However wrong astrologers may be, you'd think that they would have got their act together to the extent of at least being consistent Apparently not. Graphology (handwriting analysis) and Rorschach (inkblot) analyses aren't much better.
The job of astrologer requires so little training or skill that it is often handed out to any junior reporter with time on his hands. The journalist Jan Moir relates in the Guardian on 6 October 1994 that, 'My very first job in journalism was writing horoscopes for a stable of women's magazines. It was the office task always given to the newest recruit because it was so stupid and so easy that even a wet-eared geek like me could do it. ' Similarly, when he was a young man the conjuror and rationalist James Randi took a job, under the pseudonym Zo-ran, as
astrologer on a Montreal newspaper. Randi's method of working was to take old astrology magazines, cut out their forecasts with scissors, stir them around in a hat, paste them at random under the 12 'signs', then publish them as his own 'forecasts'. He describes how he overheard a pair of office workers in their lunch break in a cafe eagerly scanning 'Zo- ran's' column in the paper.
They squealed with delight on seeing their future so well laid out, and in response to my query said that Zo-ran had been 'right smack on' last week. I did not identify myself as Zo-ran. Reaction in the mail to the column had been quite interesting, too, and sufficient for me to decide that many people will accept and rationalize almost any pronouncement made by someone they believe to be an authority with mystic powers. At this point, Zo-ran hung up his scissors, put away the paste pot, and went out of business. Flim-flam (1992)
There is evidence from questionnaire research that many people who read daily horoscopes don't really believe them. They state that they read them only as 'entertainment' (their taste in what constitutes entertaining fiction is evidently different from mine). But significant numbers of people really do believe and act upon them including, according to alarming and apparently authentic reports, Ronald Reagan during his time as president. Why is anybody impressed by horoscopes?
First, the forecasts, or character-readings, are so bland, vague and general that they fit almost anybody and any circumstance. People normally read only their own horoscope in the newspaper. If they forced themselves to read the other ones they'd be far less impressed with the accuracy of their own. Second, people remember the hits and overlook the misses. If there is one sentence in a paragraph-long horoscope which seems to strike home, you notice that particular sentence while your eye skims unseeingly over all the other sentences. Even if people do notice a strikingly wrong forecast, it is quite likely to be chalked up as an interesting exception or anomaly rather than as an indication that the whole thing might be baloney. Thus David Bellamy, a popular television scientist (and genuine conservationist hero), confided in Radio Times (that once-respected organ of the BBC) that he has the 'Capricorn caution' over certain things, but mostly he puts his head down and charges like a real goat. Isn't that interesting? Well, I do declare, it just bears out what I always say: it's the exception that proves the rule! Bellamy himself presumably knew better, and was just going along with the common tendency among educated people to indulge astrology as a bit of harmless entertainment. I doubt if it is harmless, and I wonder whether people who describe it as entertaining have ever actually been entertained by it.
'Mum Gives Birth to 8 lb Kitten' is a typical headline from a paper called Sunday Sport which, like its American equivalents such as the National Enquirer (with a circulation of 4 million), is entirely devoted to printing ludicrously tall stories as if they were fact. I once met a woman who was employed full time to invent these stories for an American publication of this kind, and she told me she and her colleagues vied with each other to see who could get away with the most outrageously ridiculous items. It turned out to be an empty competition, because there doesn't seem to be any limit to what people will believe if only they see it in print.
On the page following the eight-pound kitten story, the Sunday Sport carried an article about a magician who couldn't stand his wife's nagging so he turned her into a rabbit. In addition to this pandering to the prejudiced cliche? of the nagging wife, the same issue of the paper added
a xenophobic flavour to its fantasies: 'Mad Greek Turns Boy into Kebab'. Other well-loved stories from these papers include 'Marilyn Monroe Comes Back as a Lettuce' (complete with green-tinted photograph of the late screen goddess's face nestling in the heart of a fresh young vegetable) and 'Statue of Elvis Found on Mars'.
Sightings of a resurrected Elvis Presley are numerous. The cult of Elvis, with its treasured toenails and other relics, its icons and its pilgrimages, is well on the way to becoming a fully fledged new religion, but it will
have to look to its laurels if it is not to be overtaken by the younger cult
of Princess Diana. The crowds queuing to sign the condolence book after her death in 1997 reported to journalists that her face was clearly seen through a window, peering out of an old portrait hanging on a wall. As in the case of the Angel of Mons, who appeared to soldiers during the darkest days of the First World War, numerous eye-witnesses 'saw' the spectre of Diana, and the story spread like a bush-fire among the
keening crowds, whipped up as they were by the tabloid newspapers. Television is an even more powerful medium than the newspapers, and we are in the grip of a near epidemic of paranormal propaganda on television. In one of the more notorious examples of recent years in Britain, a faith healer claimed to be the receptacle for the soul of a 2,000- year dead doctor called Paul of Judea. With not a whisper of critical inquiry, the BBC devoted an entire half-hour programme to promoting
his fantasy as fact. Afterwards, I clashed with the commissioning editor
of this programme, in a public debate on 'Selling Out to the
Supernatural' at the 1996 Edinburgh Television Festival. The editor's main defence was that the man was doing a good job healing his patients. He seemed genuinely to feel that this was all that mattered. Who cares whether reincarnation really happens, as long as the healer can bring some comfort to his patients? For me, the real crusher came in a
publicity hand-out that the BBC released to accompany the show. Among those acknowledged for advice, and listed as overseeing the
content, was none other than . . . Paul of Judea. It is one thing for people to be shown on their screens the eccentric beliefs of a psychotic or fraudulent individual. Perhaps this is entertainment - comedy even, although I find it as objectionable as laughing at a fairground freak show, or the current vogue in America for setting up violent marital disputes on television.
But it is quite another thing for the BBC to lend the weight of its long built-up reputation by appearing to accept the fantasy at face value in the billing.
A cheap but effective formula for paranormal television is to employ ordinary conjurors, but repeatedly tell the audience they are not conjurors but genuinely supernatural. In an added display of cynical contempt for the viewer's IQ, these acts are subjected to less control and precaution than a performing magician normally would be. Bona fide conjurors at least go through the motions of demonstrating that there is nothing up their sleeve, no wires under the table. When an artist is billed as 'paranormal' he is excused even this perfunctory^ handicap.
Let me describe an actual item, a telepathy act, from Carlton television's recent series, Beyond Belief, produced and presented by David Frost, a veteran British television personality whom some government saw fit to knight and whose imprimatur, therefore, carries weight with viewers. The performers were a father-and-son team from Israel in which the blindfolded son would see 'through his father's eyes'. A randomising device was spun, and a number came up. The father stared fixedly at it, clenching and unclenching his fists under the strain, and asked his son in a strangled shout whether he could do it. 'Yes, I think so,' croaked the son. And, of course, he got the number right. Wild applause. How astounding! And don't forget, viewers, this is all live TV, and it is factual programming, not fiction like The X-Files.
What we have witnessed is nothing more than a familiar, rather mediocre conjuring trick, a favourite in the music halls dating back at least to Signor Pinetti in 1784. There are many simple codes by which the father could have transmitted a number to his well-rehearsed son. The word- count in his apparently innocent shout of 'Can you do it, son? ' is one possibility. Instead of goggling with amazement, David Frost should have tried the simple experiment of gagging the father as well as blindfolding the son. The only difference from an ordinary conjuring show is that a reputable television company has billed it as 'paranormal'.
Most of us don't know how conjurors do their tricks. I'm often dumbfounded by them. I don't understand how they pull rabbits out of hats or saw boxes in half without harming the lady inside. But we all know that there's a perfectly good explanation which the conjuror could tell us if he wanted to but, understandably enough, he doesn't. So why
should we think it a genuine miracle when exactly the same kind of trick has the 'paranormal' label , slapped on it by a television company?
Then there are those performers who seem to 'sense' that somebody in the audience had a loved one whose name began with M, owned a Pekinese, and died of something to do with the chest: 'clairvoyants' and 'mediums' with apparent knowledge that they 'couldn't have got by any normal means'. I haven't space to go into details, but the trick is well known to conjurors under the name 'cold reading'. It's a subtle combination of knowing what's common (many people die of heart failure or lung cancer) and fishing for clues (people involuntarily give the game away when you are getting warm), aided by the audience's willingness to remember hits and overlook misses. Cold readers also often use narks, who eavesdrop conversations as the audience walks into the theatre, or even cross-examine people, and then report to the performer in his dressing room before the show.
If a paranormalist could really give a properly researched demonstration of telepathy (precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation, perpetual motion, whatever it is) he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle, unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy, or of the new fundamental force that moves objects without trickery around a table-top, deserves a Nobel Prize, and would probably get one. If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why waste it on gimmicky television entertainment? Why not prove it properly and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the real answer. You can't do it. You are a fake. But, thanks to gullible or cynical television producers, a well-heeled fake.
Having said that, some 'paranormalists' are skilled enough to fool most scientists, and the people best qualified to see through them are not scientists but other conjurors. This is why the most famous psychics and mediums regularly make excuses and refuse to go on stage if they hear that the front row of the audience is filled with professional conjurors. Various good conjurors, including James Randi in America and Ian Rowland in Britain, put on shows in which they publicly duplicate the 'miracles' of famous paranormalists - then explain to the audience that they are only tricks. The Rationalists of India are dedicated young conjurors who travel round the villages unmasking so-called 'holy men' by duplicating their 'miracles'. Unfortunately, some people believe in miracles, even after the trickery has been explained. Others fall back on desperation: 'Well, maybe Randi does it by trickery,' they say, 'but that doesn't mean others aren't doing real miracles. ' To this, Ian Rowland memorably retorted: 'Well, if they are doing miracles, they're doing it the hard way! '
There is a great deal of money to be made out of misleading the gullible.
A normal workaday conjuror could not ordinarily hope to break out of
the children's party market and hit nationwide television. But if he
passes his tricks off as genuinely supernatural, it may be another matter. The television companies are eager collaborators in the deception. It is good for ratings. Instead of applauding politely when a competent conjuring trick has been performed, presenters gasp histrionically and lead viewers on to believe that they have witnessed something that defies the laws of physics. Disturbed people recount their fantasies of ghosts and poltergeists. But instead of sending them off to a good psychiatrist, television producers eagerly sign them up and then hire actors to
perform dramatic reconstructions of their delusions - with predictable effects on the credulity of large audiences.
I am in danger of being misunderstood, and it is important that I confront this danger. It would be too easy to claim complacently that our present scientific knowledge is all that there is to know - that we can be sure astrology and spooks are rubbish, without further discussion, simply because existing science cannot explain them. Is it, after all, so obvious that astrology is a load of bunk? How do I know that a human mother didn't give birth to an eight-pound kitten? How can I be sure that Elvis Presley has not ascended in glorious resurrection, leaving an empty tomb? Stranger things have happened. Or, to be more precise, things that we accept as commonplace, such as radio, would have seemed, to our ancestors, every bit as far-fetched as spectral visitation. To us, a mobile telephone may be no more than an antisocial nuisance on trains. But to our ancestors from the nineteenth century, when trains were new, a mobile telephone would have seemed pure magic. As Arthur C. Clarke, the distinguished science fiction writer and evangelist for the limitless power of science and technology, has said, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' This has been called Clarke's Third Law, and I shall return to it. William Thomson, first Lord Kelvin, was one of the most distinguished and influential of nineteenth-century British physicists. He was a thorn in Darwin's side because he 'proved', with massive authority but, as we now know, even more massive error, that the earth was too young for evolution to have occurred. He is also credited with the following three confident predictions: 'Radio has no future'; 'Heavier than air flying machines are impossible'; 'X-rays will prove to be a hoax. ' Here was a man who took scepticism to the point where he courted - and earned - the ridicule of future generations. Arthur C. Clarke himself, in his visionary book Profiles of the Future (1982), tells similar cautionary tales and awful warnings of the dangers of dogmatic scepticism. When Edison announced that he was working on electric light in 1878, a British parliamentary commission was set up to investigate whether there was anything in it. The committee of experts
reported that his fantastic idea (what we now know as the light bulb) was 'good enough for our transatlantic friends . . . but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men'.
Lest this sound like an anti-British series of stories, Clarke also quotes two distinguished American scientists on the subject of aeroplanes. The astronomer Simon Newcomb was unlucky enough to make the following remark only just before the Wright brothers' famous exploit in 1903:
The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which men shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.
Another noted American astronomer, William Henry Pickering, categorically stated that, although heavier than air flying machines were possible (he had to say that because the Wright brothers had by then already flown) they could never be a serious practical proposition:
The popular mind often pictures gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic: and carrying innumerable passengers in a way analogous to our modern steamships . . . It seems safe to say that such ideas must be wholly visionary, and even if a machine could get across with one or two passengers the expense would be prohibitive . . . Another popular fallacy is to expect enormous speed to be obtained.
Pickering goes on to 'prove' by means of authoritative calculations on the effects of air resistance that an aeroplane could never travel faster than the express trains of his day. On the face of it, the 1945 remark of Thomas J. Watson, head of IBM, 'I think there is a world market for maybe five computers' sounds similar. But this is unfair. Watson was surely forecasting that computers would become ever larger, and in this he was wrong; however, he was not downgrading the importance of the computer in the future, the way Kelvin and the others were downgrading air travel.
Those banana skin stories are, indeed, awful warnings of the dangers of an over-zealous scepticism. Dogmatic disbelief of anything that seems unfamiliar or unexplained is not a virtue. What, then, is the difference between this and my avowed scepticism of astrology, reincarnation and the resurrection of Elvis Presley? How are we to know when scepticism is justified, and when it is dogmatic, intolerant short-sightedness?
Let's think about a spectrum of stories that people might tell us and meditate on how sceptical we ought to be of them. At the lowest level are stories that might be true, and might not be true, but that we have no
particular reason to doubt. In Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms (1952), the comic character Apthorpe frequently speaks to the narrator, Guy Crouchback, of his two aunts, one who lives in Peterborough, the other in Tunbridge Wells. On his deathbed, Apthorpe finally confesses that in fact he has only one aunt. Which one did he invent, Guy Crouchback asks. 'The one at Peterborough, of course. ' 'You certainly took me in thoroughly. ' 'Yes, it was a good joke, wasn't it? '
No, Apthorpe's was not a good joke, and it is precisely this that makes Evelyn Waugh's joke at Apthorpe's expense funny. There are, no doubt, many elderly ladies residing in Peterborough, and if a man tells you he has an aunt there you have no particular reason to disbelieve him. Unless he has some specific motive for lying to you, you might as well believe him, though if a great deal hangs on it you'd be wise to check the evidence. But now suppose somebody tells you that his aunt can levitate herself by meditation and will-power. She sits cross-legged, you are told, and by thinking beautiful thoughts and intoning a mantra she raises herself above the ground and stays there, hovering. Why be any more sceptical than you would be if a man simply told you that his aunt exists in Peterborough, for in both cases you have the word of a claimed eye- witness?
The obvious reply is that levitation by will-power is not explicable by science. But that just means present day science. It brings us straight back to Clarke's Third Law, and the important point that any era's science doesn't have all the answers and will be superseded. Maybe, some day in the future, physicists will fully understand gravity and build an anti-gravity machine. It is conceivable that levitating aunts will become as commonplace to our descendants as jet planes are to us. Does Clarke's Third Law then entitle us to believe any and every yarn that folk may spin about apparent miracles? If a man claims to have witnessed his aunt in cross-legged levitation, or a Turk zooming over the minarets on a magic carpet, should we swallow his story on the grounds that those of our ancestors who doubted the possibility of radio turned out to be wrong? No, of course these are not sufficient grounds for believing in levitation or magic carpets. But why not?
Clarke's Third Law does not work in reverse. Given that 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', it does not follow that any magical claim that anybody may make at any time is indistinguishable from a technological advance that will come in the future. ' Yes, there have been occasions when authoritative sceptics have come away with egg on their pontificating faces. But a far greater number of magical claims have been made and never vindicated. A few things that would surprise us today will come true in the future. But far more things that would surprise us today will not come true in the future. The
trick is to sort out the minority from the rubbish - from claims that will forever remain in the realm of fiction and magic.
If faced with an amazing or miraculous story, we can begin by asking ourselves whether our informant has a motive to lie. Or we can assess his credentials in other ways. I recall an entertaining dinner with a philosopher who told me the following story: One day in church he noticed that a priest, in a kneeling position, was hovering nine inches above the church floor. My natural scepticism of my dinner companion was increased when he went on to relate two further eye-witness experiences. He said that, among his many careers, he had once been warden of a home for delinquent boys, and he discovered that all the boys had 'I love my mummy' tattooed on their penises. An improbable story in itself, but not impossible. Unlike the case of the levitating priest, no great scientific principles would be called in question if it were true. Nevertheless, it seemed to provide a useful perspective on my neighbour's credibility. On another occasion, said this prolific raconteur, he had observed a crow strike a match while raising one wing to shield it from the wind. I forget whether the crow actually took a drag on a cigarette, but in any case the three stories, taken together, seemed to establish my companion as an unreliable, though diverting, witness. To put it mildly, the hypothesis that he was a liar (or a lunatic, or a hallucinating fantasist, or that he was researching the credulity of Oxford dons) seemed more probable than the alternative hypothesis that all three of his far-fetched stories were true.
As a philosopher, he would have known the logical test set out by the great eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, which seems to me unassailable:
. . . no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish. 'Of Miracles' (1748)
I'll follow through Hume's meaning with respect to one of the best attested miracles of all time, one that, it is claimed, was witnessed by 70,000 people, and within living memory. This is the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima. I quote from an account in a Roman Catholic website which notes that, of the many claimed Marian sightings, this one is unusual in being officially recognized by the Vatican.
On October 13th, 1917, there were more than 7o,ooo people gathered in the Cava da Iria in Fatima, Portugal. They had come to observe a miracle which had been foretold by the Blessed Virgin to three young visionaries: Lucia dos Santos, and her two cousins, Jacinta and Francisco Marto . . . Shortly after noon, Our Lady appeared to the three visionaries. As the
Lady was about to leave, she pointed to the sun. Lucy excitedly repeated the gesture, and the people looked into the sky . . . Then a gasp of terror rose from the crowd, for the sun seemed to tear itself from the heavens and come crashing down upon the horrified multitude . . . Just when it seemed that the ball of fire would fall upon and destroy them, the miracle ceased, and the sun resumed its normal place in the sky, shining forth as peacefully as ever.
If the miracle of the moving sun had been seen only by Lucia, the young woman responsible for the cult of Fatima in the first place, not many would take it seriously. It could so easily be a private hallucination, or an obviously motivated lie. It is the 70,000 witnesses that impress. Could 70,000 people simultaneously be the victims of the same hallucination? Could 70,000 people collude in the same lie? Or if there never were 70,000 witnesses, could the reporter of the event get away with inventing so many?
Let's apply Hume's criterion. On the one hand, we are asked to believe in a mass hallucination, a trick of the light, or mass lie involving 70,000 people. This is admittedly improbable. But it is less improbable than the alternative: that the sun really did move. The sun hanging over Fatima was not, after all, a private sun; it was the same sun that warmed all the other millions of people on the daylight side of the planet. If the sun had moved in truth, but the event was seen only by the people of Fatima, an even greater miracle would have to have been perpetrated: an illusion of wow-movement had to be staged for all the millions of witnesses not in Fatima. And that's ignoring the fact that, if the sun had really moved at the speed reported, the solar system would have broken up. We have no alternative but to follow Hume, choose the less miraculous of the available alternatives and conclude, contrary to official Vatican doctrine, that the miracle of Fatima never happened. Moreover, it is not at all clear that the onus is on us to explain how those 70,000 witnesses were misled.
Hume's is still an argument about the balance of probabilities. Moving to the far end of our spectrum of putative miracles, are there any speculations or allegations that we can utterly, and for all time, rule out? Physicists agree that if an inventor applies for a patent for a perpetual motion machine you can safely turn down his patent without even looking at his design. This is because any perpetual motion machine would violate the laws of thermodynamics. Sir Arthur Eddington wrote:
If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is
found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
The Nature of the Physical World (1928)
Eddington is cleverly bending over backwards to make overwhelming concessions in the first part of the passage, so that his confidence in the second part has the more impact, But if you still find it too cocksure; if you think it is asking for trouble at the hands of some as yet unimaginable future technology, so be it. I won't press the point, but will take my weaker stand, with Hume, on relative probabilities. Fraud, illusion, trickery, hallucination, honest mistake or outright lies - the combination adds up to such a probable alternative that I shall always doubt casual observations or secondhand stories that seem to suggest the catastrophic overthrow of existing science. Existing science will undoubtedly be overthrown; not, however, by casual anecdotes or performances on television, but by rigorous research, repeated, dissected and repeated again.
Returning to our spectrum of improbabilities, fairies would fall somewhere between Apthorpe's aunt and a perpetual motion machine. If tiny, butterfly-sized humans, wearing wings and fashionable but miniature clothes, were authentically discovered tomorrow, no great principles of physics would have been violated. It wouldn't be nearly as revolutionary as a perpetual motion machine. On the other hand biologists would have a hard time fitting fairies into their existing classificatory scheme. Where did they spring from in evolution? Neither the fossil record nor existing zoology shows us any primates equipped with flapping wings, and it would be surprising indeed if they suddenly and uniquely evolved in a species sufficiently close to our own to have co- opted - as some famous fake photographs which excited the notoriously gullible Sir Arthur Conan Doyle clearly showed - 1920s-style clothes a la mode.
Alleged creatures such as the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti or 'Abominable Snowman' of the Himalayas, and the dinosaur of the Congo, lie in the spectrum somewhere on the more probable side of Conan Doyle's fairies. There really is no particular reason why a relict population of plesiosaurs should not survive in Loch Ness. I can't tell you how delighted I, and all zoologists, would be if they did; or if an authentic dinosaur were found up the Congo. No biological and certainly no physical principles would be violated by such a discovery. The only reason it seems unlikely is that the last known dinosaur lived 65 million years ago, and 65 million years is a long time for a breeding population to remain concealed and unfossilized. As for the Yeti, the prospect of a surviving population of Homo erectus, or Gigantopithecus, would fill me with elation, if only I could believe it. I dearly wish I thought the idea more probable than the
Humean alternatives - hallucinations, lying travellers' tales or honest misreadings of sun-enlarged animal footprints.
On 50 August 1938, Orson Welles's still famous radio dramatization of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds provoked widespread panic and even some rumoured suicides among listeners who thought its opening scene was - as it purported to be - an authentic news bulletin announcing a Martian invasion. This story is often held up as evidence of the laughable gullibility of the American nation; rather unfairly, I have always thought, for an invasion from outer space is not impossible and, were it to happen, a sudden newsflash on the radio is exactly how we'd probably first hear
of it.
Flying saucer stories are perennially popular, but they tend to be disbelieved by the scientific community. Why? Not because a visitation from outer space is impossible or even wildly improbable. It is because, once again, the alternative explanations of fraud or illusion are more probable. As a matter of fact, numerous flying saucer stories have been painstakingly investigated, in wearisome detail, by teams of conscientious amateur and professional scientists.