The Meaning of It All Read online

  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.

  There has been, of course, some considerable prejudice against mental telepathy and things of this kind, because of its arising in the mystic business of spiritualism and all kinds of hocus-pocus in the nineteenth century. Prejudices have a tendency to make it harder to prove something, but when something exists, it can nevertheless often lift itself out.

  One of the interesting examples is the phenomenon of hypnotism. It took an awful lot to convince people that hypnotism really existed. It started with Mr. Mesmer who was curing people of hysteria by letting them sit around bathtubs with pipes that they would hold onto and all kinds of things. But part of the phenomenon was a hypnotic phenomenon, which had not been recognized as existing before. And you can imagine from this beginning how hard it was to get anybody to pay enough attention to do enough experiments. Fortunately for us, the phenomenon of hypnotism has been extracted and demonstrated beyond a doubt even though it had weird beginnings. So it’s not the weird beginnings which make the thing that people are prejudiced against. They start prejudiced against it, but after the investigation, then you could change your mind.

  Another principle of the same general idea is that the effect we are describing has to have a certain permanence or constancy of some kind, that if a phenomenon is difficult to experiment with, if seen from many sides, it has to have some aspects which are more or less the same.

  If we come to the case of flying saucers, for example, we have the difficulty that almost everybody who observes flying saucers sees something different, unless they were previously informed of what they were supposed to see. So the history of flying saucers consists of orange balls of light, blue spheres which bounce on the floor, gray fogs which disappear, gossamer-like streams which evaporate into the air, tin, round flat things out of which objects come with funny shapes that are something like a human being.

  If you have any appreciation for the complexities of nature and for the evolution of life on earth, you can understand the tremendous variety of possible forms that life would have. People say life can’t exist without air, but it does under water; in fact it started in the sea. You have to be able to move around and have nerves. Plants have no nerves. Just think a few minutes of the variety of life that there is. And then you see that the thing that comes out of the saucer isn’t going to be anything like what anybody describes. Very unlikely. It’s very unlikely that flying saucers would arrive here, in this particular era, without having caused something of a stir earlier. Why didn’t they come earlier? Just when we’re getting scientific enough to appreciate the possibility of traveling from one place to another, here come the flying saucers.

  There are various arguments of a not complete nature that indicate some doubt that the flying saucers are coming from Venus—in fact, considerable doubt. So much doubt that it is going to take a lot of very accurate experiments, and the lack of consistency and permanency of the characteristics of the observed phenomenon means that it isn’t there. Most likely. It’s not worth paying much more attention to, unless it begins to sharpen up.

  I have argued flying saucers with lots of people. (Incidentally, I must explain that because I am a scientist does not mean that I have not had contact with human beings. Ordinary human beings. I know what they are like. I like to go to Las Vegas and talk to the show girls and the gamblers and so on. I have banged around a lot in my life, so I know about ordinary people.) Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that’s true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it’s possible or not but whether it’s going on or not. Whether it’s probably occurring or not, not whether it could occur.

  That brings me to the fourth kind of attitude toward ideas, and that is that the problem is not what is possible. That’s not the problem. The problem is what is probable, what is happening. It does no good to demonstrate again and again that you can’t disprove that this could be a flying saucer. We have to guess ahead of time whether we have to worry about the Martian invasion. We have to make a judgment about whether it is a flying saucer, whether it’s reasonable, whether it’s likely. And we do that on the basis of a lot more experience than whether it’s just possible, because the number of things that are possible is not fully appreci
ated by the average individual. And it is also not clear, then, to them how many things that are possible must not be happening. That it’s impossible that everything that is possible is happening. And there is too much variety, so most likely anything that you think of that is possible isn’t true. In fact that’s a general principle in physics theories: no matter what a guy thinks of, it’s almost always false. So there have been five or ten theories that have been right in the history of physics, and those are the ones we want. But that doesn’t mean that everything’s false.We’ll find out.

  To give an example of a case in which trying to find out what is possible is mistaken for what is probable, I could consider the beatification of Mother Seaton. There was a saintly woman who did very many good works for many people. There is no doubt about that—excuse me, there’s very little doubt about that. And it has already been announced that she has demonstrated heroicity of virtues. At that stage in the Catholic system for determining saints, the next question is to consider miracles. So the next problem we have is to decide whether she performed miracles.

  There was a girl who had acute leukemia, and the doctors don’t know how to cure her. In the duress and troubles of the family in the last minutes, many things are tried—different medicines, all kinds of things. Among other things is the possibility of pinning a ribbon which has touched a bone of Mother Seaton to the sheet of the girl and also arranging that several hundred people pray for her health. And the result is that she—no, not the result—then she gets better from leukemia.

  A special tribunal is arranged to investigate this. Very formal, very careful, very scientific. Everything has to be just so. Every question has to be asked very carefully Everything that is asked is written down in a book very carefully. There are a thousand pages of writing, translated into Italian when it got to the Vatican. Wrapped in special strings, and so on. And the tribunal asks the doctors in the case what this was like. And they all agreed that there was no other case, that this was completely unusual, that at no time before had somebody with this kind of leukemia had the disease stopped for such a long period of time. Done. True, we don’t know what happened. Nobody knows what happened. It was possible it was a miracle. The question is not whether it was possible it was a miracle. It is only a question of whether it is probable it was a miracle. And the problem for the tribunal is to determine whether it is probable that it is a miracle. It’s a question to determine whether Mother Seaton had anything to do with it. Oh, that they did. In Rome. I didn’t find out how they did it, but that’s the crux of the matter.

  The question is whether the cure had anything to do with the process associated with the praying of Mother Seaton. In order to answer a question like that, one would have to gather all cases in which prayers had been given in the favor of Mother Seaton for the cures of various people, in various states of disease. They would then have to compare the success of the cure of these people with the average cure of people for whom such prayers were not made, and so forth. It’s an honest, straightforward way to do it, and there is nothing dishonest and nothing sacriligious about it, because if it’s a miracle, it will hold up. And if it’s not a miracle, the scientific method will destroy it.

  The people who study medicine and try to cure people are interested in every method that they can find. And they have developed clinical techniques in which (all these problems are very difficult) they are trying all kinds of medicines too, and the woman got better. She also had chicken pox just before she got better. Has that got anything to do with it? So there is a definite clinical way to test what it is that might have something to do with it—by making comparisons and so forth. The problem is not to determine that something surprising happens. The problem is to make really good use of that to determine what to do next, because if it does turn out that it has something to do with the prayers of Mother Seaton, then it is worthwhile exhuming the body, which has been done, collecting the bones, touching many ribbons to the bones, so as to get secondary things to tie on other beds.

  I now turn to another kind of principle or idea, and that is that there is no sense in calculating the probability or the chance that something happens after it happens. A lot of scientists don’t even appreciate this. In fact, the first time I got into an argument over this was when I was a graduate student at Princeton, and there was a guy in the psychology department who was running rat races. I mean, he has a T-shaped thing, and the rats go, and they go to the right, and the left, and so on. And it’s a general principle of psychologists that in these tests they arrange so that the odds that the things that happen happen by chance is small, in fact, less than one in twenty. That means that one in twenty of their laws is probably wrong. But the statistical ways of calculating the odds, like coin flipping if the rats were to go randomly right and left, are easy to work out. This man had designed an experiment which would show something which I do not remember, if the rats always went to the right, let’s say. I can’t remember exactly. He had to do a great number of tests, because, of course, they could go to the right accidentally, so to get it down to one in twenty by odds, he had to do a number of them. And its hard to do, and he did his number. Then he found that it didn’t work. They went to the right, and they went to the left, and so on. And then he noticed, most remarkably, that they alternated, first right, then left, then right, then left. And then he ran to me, and he said, “Calculate the probability for me that they should alternate, so that I can see if it is less than one in twenty.” I said, “It probably is less than one in twenty, but it doesn’t count.” He said, “Why?” I said, “Because it doesn’t make any sense to calculate after the event. You see, you found the peculiarity, and so you selected the peculiar case.”

  For example, I had the most remarkable experience this evening. While coming in here, I saw license plate ANZ 912. Calculate for me, please, the odds that of all the license plates in the state of Washington I should happen to see ANZ 912. Well, it’s a ridiculous thing. And, in the same way, what he must do is this: The fact that the rat directions alternate suggests the possibility that rats alternate. If he wants to test this hypothesis, one in twenty, he cannot do it from the same data that gave him the clue. He must do another experiment all over again and then see if they alternate. He did, and it didn’t work.

  Many people believe things from anecdotes in which there is only one case instead of a large number of cases. There are stories of different kinds of influences. Things that happened to people, and they all remember, and how do you explain that, they say. I can remember things in my life, too. And I give two examples of most remarkable experiences.

  The first was when I was in a fraternity at M.I.T. I was upstairs typewriting a theme on something about philosophy. And I was completely engrossed, not thinking of anything but the theme, when all of a sudden in a most mysterious fashion, there swept through my mind the idea: my grandmother has died. Now, of course, I exaggerate slightly, as you should in all such stories. I just sort of half got the idea for a minute. It wasn’t something strong, but I exaggerate slightly. That’s important. Immediately after that the telephone rang downstairs. I remember this distinctly for the reason you will now hear. The man answered the telephone, and he called, “Hey, Pete!” My name isn’t Peter. It was for somebody else. My grandmother was perfectly healthy, and there’s nothing to it. Now what we have to do is to accumulate a large number of these in order to fight the few cases when it could happen. It could happen. It might have occurred. Its not impossible, and from then on am I supposed to believe in the miracle that I can tell when my grandmother is dying from something in my head? Another thing about these anecdotes is that all the conditions are not described. And for that reason I describe another, less happy, circumstance.

  I met a girl at about thirteen or fourteen whom I loved very much, and we took about thirteen years to get married. It’s not my present wife, as you will see. And she got tuberculosis and had it, actually, for several years. And when she got tuberculosis I gave her a
clock which had nice big numbers that turned over rather than ones with a dial, and she liked it. The day she got sick I gave it to her, and she kept it by the side of her bed for four, five, six years while she got sicker and sicker. And ultimately she died. She died at 9:22 in the evening. And the clock stopped at 9:22 in the evening and never went again. Fortunately, I noticed some part of the anecdote I have to tell you. After five years the clock gets kind of weak in the knees. Every once in a while I had to fix it, so the wheels were loose. And secondly, the nurse who had to write on the death certificate the time of death, because the light was low in the room, took the clock and turned it up a little bit to see the numbers a little bit better and put it down. If I hadn’t noticed that, again I would be in some trouble. So one must be very careful in such anecdotes to remember all the conditions, and even the ones that you don’t notice may be the explanation of the mystery.

  So, in short, you can’t prove anything by one occurrence, or two occurrences, and so on. Everything has to be checked out very carefully. Otherwise you become one of these people who believe all kinds of crazy stuff and doesn’t understand the world they’re in. Nobody understands the world they’re in, but some people are better off at it than others.

  The next kind of technique that’s involved is statistical sampling. I referred to that idea when I said they tried to arrange things so that they had one in twenty odds. The whole subject of statistical sampling is somewhat mathematical, and I won’t go into the details. The general idea is kind of obvious. If you want to know how many people are taller than six feet tall, then you just pick people out at random, and you see that maybe forty of them are more than six feet so you guess that maybe everybody is. Sounds stupid. Well, it is and it isn’t. If you pick the hundred out by seeing which ones come through a low door, you’re going to get it wrong. If you pick the hundred out by looking at your friends you’ll get it wrong because they’re all in one place in the country. But if you pick out a way that as far as anybody can figure out has no connection with their height at all, then if you find forty out of a hundred, then, in a hundred million there will be more or less forty million. How much more or how much less can be worked out quite accurately. In fact, it turns out that to be more or less correct to 1 percent, you have to have 10,000 samples. People don’t realize how difficult it is to get the accuracy high. For only 1 or 2 percent you need 10,000 tries.