from Theodore Schick Jr and Lewis Vaughn,
How to Think About Weird Things:
Critical Thinking for a New Age
(Mountain View, CA:
Mayfield Publishing Company, 1995)
If the established framework of science is plausibly in error (or arbitrary, or irrelevant, or unpatriotic, or impious, or mainly serving the interests of the powerful), then perhaps we can save ourselves the trouble of understanding what so many people think of as a complex, difficult, highly mathematical, and counterintuitive body of knowledge. Then all the scientists would have their comeuppance. Science envy could be transcended. Those who have pursued other paths to knowledge, those who have secretly harboured beliefs that science has scorned, could now have their place in the Sun.
The rate of change in science is responsible for some of the fire it draws. Just when we’ve finally understood something the scientists are talking about, they tell us it isn’t any longer true. And even if it is, there’s a slew of new things – things we never heard of, things difficult to believe, things with disquieting implications – that they claim to have discovered recently. Scientists can be perceived as toying with us, as wanting to overturn everything, as socially dangerous.
Edward U. Condon was a distinguished American physicist, a pioneer in quantum mechanics, a participant in the development of radar and nuclear weapons in World War II, research director of Corning Glass, director of the National Bureau of Standards, and president of the American Physical Society (as well as, late in his life, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, where he directed a controversial Air Force-funded scientific study of UFOs). He was one of the physicists whose loyalty to the United States was challenged by members of Congress – including Congressman Richard M. Nixon, who called for the revocation of his security clearance – in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The superpatriotic chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, would call the physicist ‘Dr Condom’, the ‘weakest link’ in American security, and – at one point – the ‘missing link’. His view on Constitutional guarantees can be gleaned from the following response to a witness’s lawyer: The rights you have are the rights given you by this Committee. We will determine what rights you have and what rights you have not got before the Committee.’
Albert Einstein publicly called on all those summoned before HCUA to refuse to cooperate. In 1948, President Harry Truman at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and with Condon sitting beside him, denounced Rep. Thomas and HCUA on the grounds that vital scientific research ‘may be made impossible by the creation of an atmosphere in which no man feels safe against the public airing of unfounded rumors, gossip and vilification’. He called HCUA’s activities ‘the most un-American thing we have to contend with today. It is the climate of a totalitarian country.*
[* But Truman’s responsibility for the witch-hunt atmosphere of the late 1940s and early 1950s is considerable. His 1947 Executive Order 9835 authorized inquiries into the opinions and associates of all federal employees, without the right to confront the accuser or even, in most cases, to know what the accusation was. Those found wanting were fired. His Attorney General, Tom Clark, established a list of ‘subversive’ organizations so wide that at one time it included Consumer’s Union.]
The playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, about the Salem Witch Trials, in this period. When the drama opened in Europe, Miller was denied a passport by the State Department on the grounds that it was not in the best interests of the United States for him to travel abroad. On opening night in Brussels the play was greeted with tumultuous applause, whereupon the US Ambassador stood up and took a bow. Brought before HCUA, Miller was chastised for the suggestion that Congressional investigations might have something in common with witch trials; he replied, ‘The comparison is inevitable, sir.’ Thomas was shortly afterwards thrown in jail for fraud.
One summer in graduate school I was a student of Condon’s. I remember vividly his account of being brought up before some loyalty review board:
‘Dr Condon, it says here that you have been at the forefront of a revolutionary movement in physics called’ – and here the inquisitor read the words slowly and carefully – ‘quantum mechanics. It strikes this hearing that if you could be at the forefront of one revolutionary movement. . . you could be at the forefront of another.’
Condon, quick on his feet, replied that the accusation was untrue. He was not a revolutionary in physics. He raised his right hand: ‘I believe in Archimedes’ Principle, formulated in the third century BC. I believe in Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton’s laws . . .’ And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampere, Boltzmann and Maxwell. This physicist’s catechism did not gain him much. The tribunal did not appreciate humour in so serious a matter. But the most they were able to pin on Condon, as I recall, was that in high school he had a job delivering a socialist newspaper door-to-door on his bicycle.
Imagine you seriously want to understand what quantum mechanics is about. There is a mathematical underpinning that you musl first acquire, mastery of each mathematical subdiscipline leading you to the threshold of the next. In turn you must learn arithmetic, Euclidian geometry, high school algebra, differential and integral calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations, vector calculus, certain special functions of mathematical physics. matrix algebra, and group theory. For most physics students, this might occupy them from, say, third grade to early graduate school – roughly fifteen years. Such a course of study does not actually involve learning any quantum mechanics, but merely establishing the mathematical framework required to approach it deeply.
The job of the popularizer of science, trying to get across some idea of quantum mechanics to a general audience that has nol gone through these initiation rites, is daunting. Indeed, there are no successful popularizations of quantum mechanics in my opin ion, partly for this reason. These mathematical complexities are compounded by the fact that quantum theory is so resolutel) counterintuitive. Common sense is almost useless in approaching it. It’s no good, Richard Feynman once said, asking why it is thai way. No one knows why it is that way. That’s just the way it is.
Now suppose we were to approach some obscure religion 01 New Age doctrine or shamanistic belief system sceptically. We have an open mind; we understand there’s something interesting here; we introduce ourselves to the practitioner and ask for ar intelligible summary. Instead we are told that it’s intrinsically toe difficult to be explained simply, that it’s replete with ‘mysteries’ but if we’re willing to become acolytes for fifteen years, at the ene of that time we might begin to be prepared to consider the subjec seriously. Most of us, I think, would say that we simply don’t hav< the time; and many would suspect that the business about fifteei years just to get to the threshold of understanding is evidence tha the whole subject is a bamboozle: if it's too hard for us t< understand, doesn't it follow that it's too hard for us to criticize knowledgeably? Then the bamboozle has free rein. So how is shamanistic or theological or New Age doctrine different from quantum mechanics? The answer is that even if we cannot understand it, we can verify that quantum mechanics works. We can compare the quantitative predictions of quantum theory with the measured wavelengths of spectral lines of the chemical elements, the behaviour of semiconductors and liquid helium, microprocessors, which kinds of molecules form from their constituent atoms, the existence and properties of white dwarf stars, what happens in masers and lasers, and which materials are susceptible to which kinds of magnetism. We don't have to understand the theory to see what it predicts. We don't have to be accomplished physicists to read what the experiments reveal. In every one of these instances, as in many others, the predictions of quantum mechanics are strikingly, and to high accuracy, confirmed. But the shaman tells us that his doctrine is true because it too works - not on arcane matters of mathematical physics but on what really counts: he can cure people. Very well, then, let's accumulate the statistics on shamanistic cures, and see if they work better than placebos. If they do, let's willingly grant that there's something here - even if it's only that some illnesses are psychogenic, and can be cured or mitigated by the right attitudes and mental states. We can also compare the efficacy of alternative shamanistic systems. Whether the shaman grasps why his cures work is another story. In quantum mechanics we have a purported understanding of Nature on the basis of which, step by step and quantitatively, we make predictions about what will happen if a certain experiment, never before attempted, is carried out. If the experiment bears out the prediction - especially if it does so numerically and precisely -we have confidence that we knew what we were doing. There are at best few examples with this character among shamans, priests and New Age gurus.