|
JUST
over five hundred years ago, Christopher Columbus asked the King
and Queen of Spain to fund his proposed voyage westwards round the
world to reach India.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella asked a panel of experts to give
their advice.
Unfortunately the report which the panel submitted to their
majesties was quite bizarre.
It
was impossible to sail round the world, they said, because one
would be reaching lands where people could only walk about upside
down, and such lands could therefore not exist. ``Is there anyone
so foolish as to believe that there is a part of the world in
which all things are topsy-turvy, where the trees grow with their
branches downwards and where it rains, hails and snows upwards?''
And as for the Western ocean, they concluded it was infinitely
large and therefore unnavigable.
To
us today, this may sound quite lunatic. But at the time these
people were considered authoritative and certain to be right, and
Columbus was lucky that someone in the government overruled them
and gave him his money. These experts were, in the words of
Columbus's biographer Washington Irving, "men of consummate
erudition who were the greatest luminaries of what has been called
the golden age of ecclesiastical learning.'' They were what we
would call today the representatives of ``mainstream scientific
opinion''
But how many times in history has "mainstream scientific opinion''
turned out to be wrong? And why are technical experts usually the
last people who should be consulted about the future of
technology?
I
will return to this question in a moment, but let me give a few
more examples of the propensity of supposed experts to talk
nonsense. If their judgement had been accurate, then the Earth
would be flat, the Sun would go round the Earth (instead of the
other way about), the stars would be equidistant from us, and
radio communication, photography, nuclear energy, motor cars,
aviation and space travel would all be impossible.
These misguided scientific beliefs, born of arrogance and lack of
imagination, should not of course be confused with actual
discoveries. We know, for instance, that the universe is
expanding, that hydrogen is the lightest element, that perpetual
motion is impossible, and that the quantity of prime numbers is
infinite. These are facts that only an idiot would deny.
But when it comes to beliefs as opposed to knowledge, scientists
are just as likely to be talking nonsense as the rest of us. Few
people now remember a notorious book of the 1920s, 100
Scientists against Einstein. If only one of these essayists
had been right, the theory of relativity would have collapsed.
One case in which scientists persistently talked rubbish was that
of Alfred Wegener. In 1912 Wegener had proposed his theory of
continental drift, now generally known and accepted as plate
tectonics–in which the continents are continuously moving, and
without which human beings would not have evolved. Far back in
geologic time, there was one giant continent that he called
Pangaea, meaning "all lands'' in Greek, and a single ocean known
as Thalassa, or "sea.''
Not only did the eastern bulge of South America seem to Wegener as
if it had once fitted into the western bulge of Africa; the two
regions were found to have many animal fossils in common.
The geologists would have none of it. Until long after Wegener's
death in 1930, his theory was vilified. "Preposterous'',
"antiquated'', "a serious error'', "footloose'', and "dangerous''
were typical responses from academic experts who had not bothered
to read his work. One critic, Philip Lake, declared typically:
``Wegener is not seeking truth; he is advocating a cause, and is
blind to every fact and argument that tells against him.''
I
think that behind this abuse was professional jealousy and the
fear of loss of prestige. Wegener had no formal training as a
geologist, yet he dared to put forward a geological theory! What
an outrageous invasion of other peoples' back yards!
Yet he was right and they were wrong. Beware of trusting experts,
even when they claim to represent "mainstream scientific
opinion.'' Main streams can too frequently lead to treacherous
cataracts. We ask our experts for knowledge, and too often they
respond with dogmatic ignorance uttered with an air of spurious
authority. Even Einstein talked nonsense about the quantum theory.
To
give a few more examples. Soon after the electric light had been
invented in 1879 by Thomas Edison, the chief engineer at Britain's
Post Office, Sir William Preece called it a fatuous idea that
would never happen. This same Sir William had something to say
about the invention of telephones. "The Americans may have need of
them he told a House of Commons committee, "but we do not. We have
plenty of messenger boys.''
In
1956 the Astronomer Royal Sir Richard Woolley, when asked about
the prospects for space travel, declared it was "utter bilge.'' A
year later Sputnik 1, the world's first spaceship, roared into
orbit.
Well let's get away from space travel and down to ordinary life.
Suppose we want to use a computer to plan a holiday. We fly
somewhere, take some photographs, and send a few postcards home.
I'm afraid you can't do any of those things. Experts in the
past–distinguished experts–have at different times declared them
all impossible.
Computers first. In 1942, Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM, said
he believed there was a world market for just five computers. Just
five!! In fact we now have an estimated total number of computers
on the planet of about 1,000 million.
And you just can't fly anywhere. Very soon after the Wright
brothers flew the first powered aircraft in 1903, a professor of
astronomy, Simon Newcomb, told a scientific journal what he
thought about the future of aviation.
(After all, astronomers are supposed to know about everything that
can happen above the surface of the Earth, so it's worth listening
to his learned words):
"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 through long
distances through the air seems to this writer as complete as it
is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.''
A
for taking pictures, impossible! There can be no such things. When
the Frenchman Louis Daguerre invented photography in 1839 (which
explains why photographs used to be called "daguerreotypes) a
Leipzig newspaper denounced him in words making it plain that the
writer had consulted a technical expert, albeit an ignorant one:
"The wish to capture evanescent reflections is not only
impossible, as has been shown by thorough German investigation,
but the will to do so is blasphemy. God created man in his own
image, and no man‑made machine may fix the image of God. One may
straightaway call the Frenchman Daguerre, who boasts of such
things, the fool of fools.''
(Maybe there's some German-French rivalry here–Napoleon had only
been dead for 18 years–but still, it's a good quote.)
Finally, those postcards. Impossible. There are no letters and no
post cards. In 1837, Mr. William Maberley, secretary of what was
then the General Post Office, flew into an angry passion about a
pamphlet which had been laid before him. Its proposals he said,
were "fallacious, preposterous, utterly unsupported by facts, and
resting entirely on assumption.''
The proposal that so enraged him was for the introduction of
universal postage, and its author was Rowland Hill.
And since we are now in the middle of an economic crisis, it might
be useful to point out that economists are just as much to blame
as the deniers of physical achievements. You might imagine that
they might have been the first to predict the mess that we are now
in. But no. Few economists have any idea how to explain current
events. It is simply not in their nature. This at least is the
view of Paul Ormerod, formerly director of economics at the Henley
Centre and a forecaster at the National Institute of Economic and
Social Research.
Too many of his colleagues, he says, are obsessed with economic
theories and pay little attention to what is happening in the real
world. The actual achievements–and this is the view, remember, of
an eminent fellow‑economist–are still at the level of physics in
the 16th century, when the laws of gravity had not even been
discovered.
Ormerod compares these people to the chief character in Shadwell's
Restoration comedy The Virtuoso, who thought himself an
expert on everything and the world's best swimmer. "But he never
swims in water. He simply lies on a table and follows the
movements of a frog dangled on a string in front of him."
Perhaps, like other misguided experts, they pay too much attention
to theory and not enough to observation. They prefer sitting at
their computers to going out and getting their boots muddy. This
may be nothing else but laziness. One thinks of the remark by
Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four: "How many times
must I remind you, Watson, that it is a capital mistake to
speculate without data.''
But why? We often want expert knowledge about our future, but it
turns out that experts are the people least qualified to give it.
Maybe this is the explanation, to which I am indebted to the
science fiction writer Ben Bova: An expert cannot be expected to
make an accurate prophecy because he is required by his sponsors,
usually the government, to stick to the known facts. Whereas a
science fiction writer is free to imagine, and as a result he is
much more likely to imagine what is truly going to happen.
It
is not generally realized that computers, atomic bombs, aeroplanes,
spaceships, mobile phones, and many other marvels were all
forecast by science‑fiction writers long before they were dreamed
of by serious experts. Remember the wrist-watch communicator of
Dick Tracy in the 1930s? Therefore, I suggest, that anyone who
wants to prophesy the future accurately must be either a writer or
at least a reader of science fiction.
I'll give one example of that before I finish. Back in the 1950s a
science‑fiction story predicted the coming of pocket computers.
Imagine it. Pocket computers, as opposed to the giant machines
that once filled a room of the size we're sitting in! An expert
would have dismissed it as part of the fantastic nonsense so
typical of science fiction writers. But in fact he would have been
wrong and the science‑fiction writer would have been right I know
because I have a pocket computer right here in my pocket.
At
this point I produced my Blackberry and waved it at the audience.
|
