I've said this before
.
And I'll say it again.
.
Synchronicity is a marvellous thing.
.
Last night I started to collate my thoughts on the subject of anomalous scientific observations with a particular end point in mind. I blogged some of my thoughts then went to bed.
.
I got up this morning and the BBC news page had just published a science story that connected perfectly with what I intended to cover in my follow-up blog entry.
.
The story was about homing pigeons.
.
A team of scientists in New Zealand has just published a paper in Nature that proves homing pigeons navigate by means of magnetic particles in their beaks. Nature is THE journal for natural sciences. If it's not in Nature it doesn’t count. Apparently, the scientists carried out a series of experiments that involved tying bar magnets to pigeons beaks, anaesthetising pigeons beaks, then hacking away at various nerves in pigeons beaks. W*nkers.
.
The only thing these guys proved is that modern science still gets a hard on from mutilating small animals in the course of pointless experiments.
.
'Yes, after I removed all of his legs, Benjy the Lovable Spaniel, refused to respond to calls from his 6 year old owner. The inescapable conclusion is that Benjy is now deaf. Can I have a Phd and nice research grant now please'
.
.
It would be awfully tempting to dump some of those Kiwi scientists in the middle of a featureless desert, strap bar magnets to their noses and tell them to walk straight towards Auckland. They might learn a thing or two; useful snippets of information, such as simply knowing the location of Magnetic North just doesn’t cut it.
.
Anybody who has tried practical navigation knows that a compass, on its own, is a totally useless navigational tool. To get any real benefit out of it you have to already know where you are and where you are going. Even when the Royal Navy was fully equipped with maps, compasses, sextants and astronomical charts in the 18th century it still couldn't navigate properly because it had no accurate timepieces. Without clocks it couldn't use the sextants and charts to compute the locations of individual ships. Navigation continued to be a hit and miss art right up to the recent creation of the GPS network. Pigeons apparently manage to get by without clocks, maps, astronomical readings or handheld Garmin GPS units. They also manage in overcast skies when they can’t see the sun or stars.
.
To all intents and purposes, and by any popular definition, what homing pigeons do is magic. The reason why science doesn’t blow the whole subject off is that pigeon navigation is an undeniable fact. Somehow pigeons can sense where they are on a specific point on the globe and relate that to a sense of where they should be, at another specific point on the globe. This is no trivial feat and is a clue to something rather large. Something as yet unknown.
.
It's not just pigeons either; salmon, eels, migrating birds, wildebeest, the cute puppies in Disney's Fantastic Journey, all of them can apparently tap into accurate navigational data. Eels are particularly weird. Eel babies return to the same locations their parents left years before, without ever having been there themselves.
.
As well as knowing where they should be located, living things also apparently have an, as yet unaccounted for, sense of what shape they should be. Sponges can, famously, be liquidised in a blender and the surviving cells will reincorporate themselves back into their original sponge shape. Separate the blended mush into two tanks and you get two, half-sized sponges. Amputees still feel their limbs long after they're been removed. Apparently this is due to 'some sort of neurological map' we all have, but that's not been proved and if such a map existed why do phantom limbs itch and ache?
.
I could carry on for ages; aura photographs that show the complete outline of leaves even after they've been cut in two, unanswered questions as how to how stem cells know what to turn into, more unanswered questions as to how individual seeds 'know' how to arrange themselves to form into a plant. It's another very long list of anomalous observations.
.
And I won’t even need to stray onto disputed 'paranormal' observations that suggest living things are somehow interconnected and can communicate with each other.
.
There are other unexplained quirks of life that niggle me. How is it that every human being has a unique face, fingerprints, and ear lobes? What purpose is served by that? More to the point, who's keeping tabs of fingerprint and ear lobe designs that have already been spoken for? And don't give me that 'god of large numbers' nonsense. You know what? I don't believe an infinite army of monkeys could eventually recreate the works of Shakespeare. That's just science's way of saying any old bollocks is possible.
Even being equipped with a naturally sceptical, numerical mind, how is it I encounter meaningful, synchronous coincidences on a regular basis? I'm not talking about trivial, expectable coincidences like getting on a 59 bus to visit someone at house No.59. I'm talking about going to bed thinking about homing pigeons and getting up to see a news story about homing pigeons the first thing next morning. This kind of stuff happens too frequently to me to be the product of simple coincidence. I suspect that the World around us is wired in a way we don't yet understand; we're looking at the television set but we don't have the circuit diagram.
.
However, dealing with these questions is no easy task. A UK academic, Rupert Sheldrake, stepped up to the challenge a few years ago and hypothesised the concept of Morphic Fields (Google will help). He lost his job as a consequence and now spends his days talking to himself and giggling randomly.
.
If I can crack this baby and come up with a testable theory of interconnectivity I'd be onto a winner. Noble prizes, cult guru status and a lifetime of wealthy, self-righteous smugness beckons.
.
But surely this is all nonsense? Belief in the possibility of such things is not rational.
.
Actually, it's no less rational than, say, pretending we know what medium radio waves propagate through or that we understand how electricity works or human memory.
.
I'm sitting here typing on my PC, perched on a blob of molten rock covered by the thinnest of crusts, that's rotating in a sub zero, gamma ray-ridden vacuum at 1,000mph, pressed down by the weight of one ton per square foot of air above my head …
.
… and yet, somehow, I live in a society that tells me there's nothing particularly remarkable going on and, fundamentally, we pretty much understand why we all came to be here and why we're not boiled, frozen, irradiated, crushed or decompressed to smithereens. Where's the wonder? Where's the awe? More importantly, where's the humility?
.
Over the course of my life I've met many people who believe that they are educated, rational and, above all, not confined by any silly notions like religion or any superstitious mumbo jumbo like that. Their world is 'rational' and explained away by Big Bang, evolution and a few equations that barely a handful of people on Earth are insane enough to believe they understand. Humanity is the predictable result of forces that are now almost fully identified by science. We're all just a quirk of physics.
.
Yet, for some reason, these very same people will show me pictures of their babies and expect me to give a shit.
.
How rational is that?
.
Me, I'm going to sit down with a list of anomalous observations, a bottle of Cynar I'll pick up in Sardinia this weekend and some josh sticks. There is a mass of anomalous data out there that suggests an external field of some sort helps living things know where they are and what shape they should be. The annoying thing is that, like all good explanations and ideas, a description of what is going on probably could be written down on three or four lines, say forty words. This should be a piece of cake for a team of infinite monkeys; 26 to the power of 200 possible letter combinations. How long would that take to type?
.
Make no mistake, this is the Big One and our World would change beyond recognition if anyone can crack it. Sadly, the chances of it being me are about 6,000,000,000 to 1. Neverthless, I'm game. I've got some brooding to do and maybe even some breeding. I wonder if I could fit any pigeons in my back yard.
.
Anybody who has tried practical navigation knows that a compass, on its own, is a totally useless navigational tool. To get any real benefit out of it you have to already know where you are and where you are going. Even when the Royal Navy was fully equipped with maps, compasses, sextants and astronomical charts in the 18th century it still couldn't navigate properly because it had no accurate timepieces. Without clocks it couldn't use the sextants and charts to compute the locations of individual ships. Navigation continued to be a hit and miss art right up to the recent creation of the GPS network. Pigeons apparently manage to get by without clocks, maps, astronomical readings or handheld Garmin GPS units. They also manage in overcast skies when they can’t see the sun or stars.
.
To all intents and purposes, and by any popular definition, what homing pigeons do is magic. The reason why science doesn’t blow the whole subject off is that pigeon navigation is an undeniable fact. Somehow pigeons can sense where they are on a specific point on the globe and relate that to a sense of where they should be, at another specific point on the globe. This is no trivial feat and is a clue to something rather large. Something as yet unknown.
.
It's not just pigeons either; salmon, eels, migrating birds, wildebeest, the cute puppies in Disney's Fantastic Journey, all of them can apparently tap into accurate navigational data. Eels are particularly weird. Eel babies return to the same locations their parents left years before, without ever having been there themselves.
.
As well as knowing where they should be located, living things also apparently have an, as yet unaccounted for, sense of what shape they should be. Sponges can, famously, be liquidised in a blender and the surviving cells will reincorporate themselves back into their original sponge shape. Separate the blended mush into two tanks and you get two, half-sized sponges. Amputees still feel their limbs long after they're been removed. Apparently this is due to 'some sort of neurological map' we all have, but that's not been proved and if such a map existed why do phantom limbs itch and ache?
.
I could carry on for ages; aura photographs that show the complete outline of leaves even after they've been cut in two, unanswered questions as how to how stem cells know what to turn into, more unanswered questions as to how individual seeds 'know' how to arrange themselves to form into a plant. It's another very long list of anomalous observations.
.
And I won’t even need to stray onto disputed 'paranormal' observations that suggest living things are somehow interconnected and can communicate with each other.
.
There are other unexplained quirks of life that niggle me. How is it that every human being has a unique face, fingerprints, and ear lobes? What purpose is served by that? More to the point, who's keeping tabs of fingerprint and ear lobe designs that have already been spoken for? And don't give me that 'god of large numbers' nonsense. You know what? I don't believe an infinite army of monkeys could eventually recreate the works of Shakespeare. That's just science's way of saying any old bollocks is possible.
Even being equipped with a naturally sceptical, numerical mind, how is it I encounter meaningful, synchronous coincidences on a regular basis? I'm not talking about trivial, expectable coincidences like getting on a 59 bus to visit someone at house No.59. I'm talking about going to bed thinking about homing pigeons and getting up to see a news story about homing pigeons the first thing next morning. This kind of stuff happens too frequently to me to be the product of simple coincidence. I suspect that the World around us is wired in a way we don't yet understand; we're looking at the television set but we don't have the circuit diagram.
.
However, dealing with these questions is no easy task. A UK academic, Rupert Sheldrake, stepped up to the challenge a few years ago and hypothesised the concept of Morphic Fields (Google will help). He lost his job as a consequence and now spends his days talking to himself and giggling randomly.
.
If I can crack this baby and come up with a testable theory of interconnectivity I'd be onto a winner. Noble prizes, cult guru status and a lifetime of wealthy, self-righteous smugness beckons.
.
But surely this is all nonsense? Belief in the possibility of such things is not rational.
.
Actually, it's no less rational than, say, pretending we know what medium radio waves propagate through or that we understand how electricity works or human memory.
.
I'm sitting here typing on my PC, perched on a blob of molten rock covered by the thinnest of crusts, that's rotating in a sub zero, gamma ray-ridden vacuum at 1,000mph, pressed down by the weight of one ton per square foot of air above my head …
.
… and yet, somehow, I live in a society that tells me there's nothing particularly remarkable going on and, fundamentally, we pretty much understand why we all came to be here and why we're not boiled, frozen, irradiated, crushed or decompressed to smithereens. Where's the wonder? Where's the awe? More importantly, where's the humility?
.
Over the course of my life I've met many people who believe that they are educated, rational and, above all, not confined by any silly notions like religion or any superstitious mumbo jumbo like that. Their world is 'rational' and explained away by Big Bang, evolution and a few equations that barely a handful of people on Earth are insane enough to believe they understand. Humanity is the predictable result of forces that are now almost fully identified by science. We're all just a quirk of physics.
.
Yet, for some reason, these very same people will show me pictures of their babies and expect me to give a shit.
.
How rational is that?
.
Me, I'm going to sit down with a list of anomalous observations, a bottle of Cynar I'll pick up in Sardinia this weekend and some josh sticks. There is a mass of anomalous data out there that suggests an external field of some sort helps living things know where they are and what shape they should be. The annoying thing is that, like all good explanations and ideas, a description of what is going on probably could be written down on three or four lines, say forty words. This should be a piece of cake for a team of infinite monkeys; 26 to the power of 200 possible letter combinations. How long would that take to type?
.
Make no mistake, this is the Big One and our World would change beyond recognition if anyone can crack it. Sadly, the chances of it being me are about 6,000,000,000 to 1. Neverthless, I'm game. I've got some brooding to do and maybe even some breeding. I wonder if I could fit any pigeons in my back yard.
No comments:
Post a Comment