Over a period of about 3 years I have put together a book on various aspects of Life and the Universe. These are subjects that have interested me, as a scientist, for many years. How did everything start? Where did it all come from? How did life begin, and does it exist anywhere else? UFOs, travel to other planets and galaxies, time travel, the end of the World, is there a divine Creator, what happens when we die?…the potential questions are almost endless.
Questions can be categorised in many ways – by subject matter, by degree of difficulty, and by whether they can be answered at all. Subject matter is straightforward: science, literature, history, general knowledge etc. Degree of difficulty is more subjective, since what is perceived as hard by one person may be very easy for someone else if they happen to know the answer. But answerability is the most intriguing. Consider, for example, the question ‘Does alien life exist?’ There are only two possibilities – either it does or it doesn’t. We have no evidence one way or the other so at the present time all we can do is to make a Best Guess based on what we do know. Or, ‘How did the Universe begin?’ It’s here so it had to come from somewhere. But how did this work? Again, we don’t know – yet. The tantalising aspect of such questions is that they do have answers but we don’t know what they are.
The genre of Popular Science has had a real surge of interest recently so I think that this is a timely topic. There’s been a lot of science in the media and this is a good thing. By and large, science works. The remote control turns on the TV; antibiotics kill bacteria; eclipses happen as predicted, etc. But there’s lots of pseudoscience as well, which is a bad thing. Why do so many people still believe in things for which there is clearly no good evidence that they work. You wouldn’t convict a suspect because he looked like a villain – you would expect to see some evidence that he actually committed the crime.
It’s certainly not my intention to upset anyone, and we’re all entitled to our own beliefs and opinions. It is my belief however, that people should weigh up evidence before accepting fantastic ideas, and the more fantastic the idea, the better the evidence needs to be. For example, if someone told me that they could foretell the future, I would certainly ask for some good evidence before accepting their claim.
Some older readers may remember football pools and a man called Horace Batchelor. The ‘pools’ were the forerunner of the National Lottery where punters could win thousands of pounds by predicting the results of football matches. Horace Batchelor developed his infra-draw method and advertised it widely on Radio Luxembourg
So how did he do it? Could he predict the match results? No. It was a simple mathematical system. He received so much stake money that he could afford to cover very many, and in some cases all, of the possible outcomes. This meant that he often had winning lines but as far as his punters were concerned, their individual chances of winning were no better than if they had placed he bets themselves. He took his commission from the winners and sent them the balance. He invested no money himself.
The modern day equivalent would be to advertise a lottery-winning scheme and place the money sent in to cover every one of the approximately 14 million combinations. You’d be guaranteed a win every week.
Science is everywhere, and it works. It’s best that we adopt a cautious approach before believing that all sorts of amazing things that appear to defy science are actually possible. Everything isn’t always what it seems.
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