The Meaning of It All (7 page)

Now, that there are unscientific things is not my grief. That's a nice word. I mean, that is not what I am worrying about, that there are unscientific things. That something is unscientific is not bad; there is nothing the matter with it. It is just unscientific. And
scientific
is limited, of course, to those things that we can tell about by trial and error. For example, there is the absurdity of the young these days chanting things about purple people eaters and hound dogs, something that we cannot criticize at all if we belong to the old “flat foot floogie and a floy floy” or “the music goes down and around.” Sons of mothers who sang about “come, Josephine, in my flying machine,” which sounds just about as modern as “I'd
like to get you on a slow boat to China.” So in life, in gaiety, in emotion, in human pleasures and pursuits, and in literature and so on, there is no need to be scientific, there is no reason to be scientific. One must relax and enjoy life. That is not the criticism. That is not the point.

But if you do stop to think about it for a while, you will find that there are numerous, mostly trivial things which are unscientific, unnecessarily. For instance, there are extra seats in the front here, even though there are people [standing in the back].

While I was talking to some of the students in one of the classes, one man asked me a question, which was, “Are there any attitudes or experiences that you have when working in scientific information which you think might be useful in working with other information?”

(By the way, I will at the end say how much of the world today is sensible, rational, and scientific. It's a great deal. So, I am only taking the bad parts first. It's more fun. Then we soften it at the end. And I latched onto that as a nice organizing way to make my discussion of all the things that I think are unscientific in the world.)

I would like, therefore, to discuss some of the little tricks of the trade in trying to judge an idea. We have the advantage that we can ultimately refer the idea to experiment in the sciences, which may not be possible in other fields. But nevertheless, some of the ways of judging things, some of the experiences undoubtedly are useful in other ways. So, I start with a few examples.

The first one has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions—that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions—then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn't know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that. And I think that I can illustrate one unscientific aspect of the world which would be probably very much better if it were more scientific. It has to do with politics. Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, “What are you going to do about the farm question?” And he knows right away—bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. “What are you going to do about the farm problem?” “Well, I don't know. I used to be a general, and I don't know anything about farming. But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way that I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it,
and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can't tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but I can give you some of the principles I'll try to use—not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have to have some way to take care of them,” etc., etc., etc.

Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think. It's never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around. And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer. And the result of
this
is that political promises can never be kept. It is a mechanical fact; it is impossible. The result of
that
is that nobody believes campaign promises. And the result of that is a general disparaging of politics, a general lack of respect for the people who are trying to solve problems, and so forth. It's all generated from the very beginning (maybe—this is a simple analysis). It's all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer.

Now we try another item that comes in the sciences—I give only one or two illustrations of each of the general ideas—and that is how to deal with uncertainty. There have been a lot of jokes made about ideas of uncertainty.
I would like to remind you that you can be pretty sure of things even though you are uncertain, that you don't have to be so in-the-middle, in fact not at all in-the-middle. People say to me, “Well, how can you teach your children what is right and wrong if you don't know?” Because I'm pretty sure of what's right and wrong. I'm not absolutely sure; some experiences may change my mind. But I know what I would expect to teach them. But, of course, a child won't learn what you teach him.

I would like to mention a somewhat technical idea, but it's the way, you see, we have to understand how to handle uncertainty. How does something move from being almost certainly false to being almost certainly true? How does experience change? How do you handle the changes of your certainty with experience? And it's rather complicated, technically, but I'll give a rather simple, idealized example.

You have, we suppose, two theories about the way something is going to happen, which I will call “Theory A” and “Theory B.” Now it gets complicated. Theory A and Theory B. Before you make any observations, for some reason or other, that is, your past experiences and other observations and intuition and so on, suppose that you are very much more certain of Theory A than of Theory B—much more sure. But suppose that the thing that you are going to observe is a test. According to Theory A, nothing should happen. According to Theory B, it should turn blue. Well, you make the observation, and it
turns sort of greenish. Then you look at Theory A, and you say, “It's very unlikely,” and you turn to Theory B, and you say, “Well, it should have turned out sort of blue, but it wasn't impossible that it should turn sort of greenish color.” So the result of this observation, then, is that Theory A is getting weaker, and Theory B is getting stronger. And if you continue to make more tests, then the odds on Theory B increase. Incidentally, it is not right to simply repeat the same test over and over and over and over. No matter how many times you look and it still looks greenish, you haven't made up your mind yet. But if you find a whole lot of other things that distinguish Theory A from Theory B that are different, then by accumulating a large number of these, the odds on Theory B increase.

Example. I'm in Las Vegas, suppose. And I meet a mind reader, or, let's say, a man who claims not to be a mind reader, but more technically speaking to have the ability of telekinesis, which means that he can influence the way things behave by pure thought. This fellow comes to me, and he says, “I will demonstrate this to you. We will stand at the roulette wheel and I will tell you ahead of time whether it is going to be black or red on every shot.”

I believe, say, before I begin, it doesn't make any difference what number you choose for this. I happen to be prejudiced against mind readers from experience in nature, in physics. I don't see, if I believe that man is
made out of atoms and if I know all of the—most of the—ways atoms interact with each other, any direct way in which the machinations in the mind can affect the ball. So from other experience and general knowledge, I have a strong prejudice against mind readers. Million to one.

Now we begin. The mind reader says it's going to be black. It's black. The mind reader says it's going to be red. It's red. Do I believe in mind readers? No. It could happen. The mind reader says it's going to be black. It's black. The mind reader says it's going to be red. It's red. Sweat. I'm about to learn something. This continues, let us suppose, for ten times. Now it's possible by chance that that happened ten times, but the odds are a thousand to one against it. Therefore, I now have to conclude that the odds that a mind reader is really doing it are a thousand to one that he's not a mind reader still, but it was a million to one before. But if I get ten more, you see, he'll convince me. Not quite. One must always allow for alternative theories. There is another theory that I should have mentioned before. As we went up to the roulette table, I must have thought in my mind of the possibility that there is collusion between the so-called mind reader and the people at the table. That's possible. Although this fellow doesn't look like he's got any contact with the Flamingo Club, so I suspect that the odds are a hundred to one against that. However, after he has run ten times favorable, since I was so prejudiced against mind reading, I conclude it's collusion. Ten to one. That it's collusion
rather than accident, I mean, is ten to one, but rather more likely collusion than not is still 10,000 to one. How is he ever going to prove he's a mind reader to me if I still have this terrible prejudice and now I claim it's collusion? Well, we can make another test. We can go to another club.

We can make other tests. I can buy dice. And we can sit in a room and try it. We can keep on going and get rid of all the alternative theories. It will not do any good for that mind reader to stand in front of that particular roulette table ad infinitum. He can predict the result, but I only conclude it is collusion.

But he still has an opportunity to prove he's a mind reader by doing other things. Now suppose that we go to another club, and it works, and another one and it works. I buy dice and it works. I take him home and I build a roulette wheel; it works. What do I conclude? I conclude he is a mind reader. And that's the way, but not certainty, of course. I have certain odds. After all these experiences I conclude he really was a mind reader, with some odds. And now, as new experiences grow, I may discover that there's a way of blowing through the corner of your mouth unseen, and so on. And when I discover that, the odds shift again, and the uncertainties always remain. But for a long time it is possible to conclude, by a number of tests, that mind reading really exists. If it does, I get extremely excited, because I didn't expect it before. I learned something that I did not know, and as a physicist
would love to investigate it as a phenomenon of nature. Does it depend upon how far he is from the ball? What about if you put sheets of glass or paper or other materials in between? That's the way all of these things have been worked out, what magnetism is, what electricity is. And what mind reading is would also be analyzable by doing enough experiments.

Anyway, there is an example of how to deal with uncertainty and how to look at something scientifically. To be prejudiced against mind reading a million to one does not mean that you can never be convinced that a man is a mind reader. The only way that you can never be convinced that a man is a mind reader is one of two things: If you are limited to a finite number of experiments, and he won't let you do any more, or if you are infinitely prejudiced at the beginning that it's absolutely impossible.

Now, another example of a test of truth, so to speak, that works in the sciences that would probably work in other fields to some extent is that if something is true, really so, if you continue observations and improve the effectiveness of the observations, the effects stand out more obviously. Not less obviously. That is, if there is something really there, and you can't see good because the glass is foggy, and you polish the glass and look clearer, then it's more obvious that it's there, not less.

I give an example. A professor, I think somewhere in Virginia, has done a lot of experiments for a number
of years on the subject of mental telepathy, the same kind of stuff as mind reading. In his early experiments the game was to have a set of cards with various designs on them (you probably know all this, because they sold the cards and people used to play this game), and you would guess whether it's a circle or a triangle and so on while someone else was thinking about it. You would sit and not see the card, and he would see the card and think about the card and you'd guess what it was. And in the beginning of these researches, he found very remarkable effects. He found people who would guess ten to fifteen of the cards correctly, when it should be on the average only five. More even than that. There were some who would come very close to a hundred percent in going through all the cards. Excellent mind readers.

A number of people pointed out a set of criticisms. One thing, for example, is that he didn't count all the cases that didn't work. And he just took the few that did, and then you can't do statistics anymore. And then there were a large number of apparent clues by which signals inadvertently, or advertently, were being transmitted from one to the other.

Various criticisms of the techniques and the statistical methods were made by people. The technique was therefore improved. The result was that, although five cards should be the average, it averaged about six and a half cards over a large number of tests. Never did he get anything like ten or fifteen or twenty-five cards. Therefore,
the phenomenon is that the first experiments are wrong. The second experiments proved that the phenomenon observed in the first experiment was nonexistent. The fact that we have six and a half instead of five on the average now brings up a new possibility, that there is such a thing as mental telepathy, but at a much lower level. It's a different idea, because, if the thing was really there before, having improved the methods of experiment, the phenomenon would still be there. It would still be fifteen cards. Why is it down to six and a half? Because the technique improved. Now it still is that the six and a half is a little bit higher than the average of statistics, and various people criticized it more subtly and noticed a couple of other slight effects which might account for the results. It turned out that people would get tired during the tests, according to the professor. The evidence showed that they were getting a little bit lower on the average number of agreements. Well, if you take out the cases that are low, the laws of statistics don't work, and the average is a little higher than the five, and so on. So if the man was tired, the last two or three were thrown away. Things of this nature were improved still further. The results were that mental telepathy still exists, but this time at 5.1 on the average, and therefore all the experiments which indicated 6.5 were false. Now what about the five? . . . Well, we can go on forever, but the point is that there are always errors in experiments that are subtle and unknown. But the reason that I do not believe
that the researchers in mental telepathy have led to a demonstration of its existence is that as the techniques were improved, the phenomenon got weaker. In short, the later experiments in every case disproved all the results of the former experiments. If remembered that way, then you can appreciate the situation.