Some years ago I attended a talk by Patrick Moore, given to a general audience. At the end of the talk he invited questions. Somebody asked the difference between a planet and a moon. PM mumbled some kind of technical something-or-other when all the questioner wanted was a simple explanation. 'Planats go round suns; moons go round planets' would have done perfectly.
Those boffins, eh? But I've been caught out exactly the same way on numerous occasions. What Patrick couldn't grasp was that there could be anybody in the world who didn't already know the relationship between suns, planets and moons. Had the questioner been ten years old, Patrick would still not have been sure - could any child of ten possibly not know that? - but when the question came from an adult... He thought the questioner must be asking something far deeper and answered accordingly.
I had a similar experience myself recently when somebody asked about the LPG tank that supplies my house with heating gas. He commented that the tank seemed so small he'd expect it to run out of gas in a few hours. A joke? I explained that the tank contained a liquid and that if it contained gas it would have to be huge. He asked if the gas was burned. Of course it was: I pointed to the gas fire. No, no, no, he said, was it burned in the tank? It was one of those Alice Through the Looking Glass moments when you wonder whether this conversation can really be happening. I said it wasn't and we left it at that.
I realised afterwards that he thought that if the tank contained a liquid it would have to be boiled by heating to turn it into a gas, like water being turned into steam in a kettle.
Most people live in a world where everything happens by magic. I am well aware that almost nobody knows how their mobile phone works. That's somebody else's job, somebody who's 'done' mobiles and 'texing' at college. All you have to do is pay your money and complain if it doesn't work. How messages get 'texed' to become texed messages is a mystery. (Sorry, I've just loved the idea of 'texing' ever since hearing a teen talk about it on TV.)
On the other hand I have always assumed a basic knowledge of the trivial and commonplace amongst people I meet. No matter how much my experience tells me otherwise, I still can't believe how basic, childish and often wildly inaccurate are most people's models of how the natural world works. The only reason I didn't discover it long ago was that it doesn't come up in conversation. If nobody mentions it, you assume they know all about it because - well, surely everyone does?
Does it matter? Yes, I think it does. When you have idiots like Jeanette Winterson campaigning to cure the African AIDS problem with homeopathy (little bottles of water) it's very serious indeed. But when you live in a world where everything appears to work by magic, one bit of magic must seem as good as the next. How are the Wintersons of this world to know any better?
Surely, in the 21st century, we can do better than this? Or maybe what we really need, instead of education, is compulsory school sports so we can do better in the next Olympics?
FTSE100 | August 19, 2012 - 06:11
I might dress this in its Sunday best and post it as a rant. There's so much more to be said.
School doesn't always help much. At school I didn't believe anything. I certainly didn't believe in Romans or kings and queens or the Wars of the Roses. Who in their right mind would have done those things? As for beheading your wives whenever you took a fancy to it, surely there were laws against it?
I didn't believe in Geography either. It all sounded made-up to me. If life was so weird in other places, why didn't they just come to Salisbury? We did things properly in Salisbury. The only answer was that all those other places were just invented by teachers to ask exam questions about.
As for knowledge, in chemistry we were told that everything was made up of tiny little things called atoms and in biology they said that plants and animals were made up of tiny little things called cells. Make up your minds. Are we atoms or cells? A plague on both your houses, I thought, or would have done if I'd believed in Shakespeare.
Anybody recognise that or am I the only one?
Stan | August 19, 2012 - 08:03
Everyone knows that a planet is a big round thing that orbits a sun, whereas a moon is what Elton John does to Michael Caine...
(caution - this image may cause some distress)
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?num=10&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=625&tbm=isch&tb...
Actually, thinking about it, Elton's arse could qualify as a planet, too.
When I was at school, 4 big questions vexed me:
1) If the universe is expanding... what is it expanding into? (I used to experiment by trying to blow up a balloon inside a cocoa tin, but I always used too much gunpowder)
2) If my mother had married another man and my father had married an other woman - would I ever have existed, or partially-existed? Even more... if my father had married my mother's sister, would I have been half of my cousin?
3) If God is everywhere, and knows everything, why doesn't he slap my fingers when I pick my nose?
4) Why does everyone else seem to be understanding everything they're taught, whereas I can understand none of it?
Jeanette Winterson is clearly just another barmy middle-class do-gooder, but I've always kind of fancied her since I saw that nude photo of her.
I can't say the same for Sir Elt, really.
Terrence Oblong | August 19, 2012 - 13:20
The other area of ignorance is history. I've mostly worked for medical charities and the charlatans are out in force as you can imagine, conning the sick with magic cures. There was a purveyor of magic twigs who suddenly claimed he'd got Parkinson's Disease and equally suddenly claimed he'd cured his Parkinson's with his magic twigs - what are the chances. It may sound stupid, but I know people who refused to get 'poisonous western medical treatment' and preferred to buy twigs.
One of the things the magic twig purveyors rely on is the total, 100% ignorance of what life was like before modern medicine. It's astonishing how many people repeat the line that modern medicine kills more people than it saves. they all seem to believe in a fairy tale golden age where everyone lived happy healthy lives well into their 80s and never had a days sickness. It helps them that many conditions went undiagnosed until relatively recently (autism is a great example) so they can just be blamed on 'imbalances' in the modern world. Or vaccines obviously
FTSE100 | August 19, 2012 - 14:29
Almost unbelievable that evidence-based medicine (medicine judged on whether or not it actually works) is so recent. Not so long ago, the paradigm was that you had a theory (not a body of knowledge, but in the everyday sense of an idea, a notion, a fantasy) about how diseases worked, and you behaved as if your idea were true. Presumably it worked on the Peter Pan principle that if you believe in fairies hard enough they'll come true. It wasn't enough, in fact barely counted at all, to show that such-and-such (sterilisation, vaccination, or whatever) was effective if you didn't have a narrative about why it worked. The narrative alone, in the complete absence of anything to back it up, would buy you professional respect. The evidence alone would get you nowhere.
In 2007, five British universities were offering degree courses in homeopathy. Hahnemann made it up (note: made it up, not discovered it) at a time when that's what everybody else was doing. It's horrifying to think that at the beginning of the 21st century universities were still teaching that diseases are caused by miasma (nasty smells). Not medical universities, of course, but those for which money was the main concern. Westminster University closed their course in 2009 citing poor recruitment and saying it was a purely financial decision. What does that tell you about university management?