Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ of science, so we rely on scientists and the media to report truthfully on important events in science. Our trust is often abused. Some scientists will lie about their results because they cannot bear to admit that their favourite hypothesis is wrong, or because they want to enjoy a moment of media fame, or because there is a financial incentive of being paid to lie by those who profit from their results. How the pharmaceutical industry suppresses results that do not favour a particular drug, or the energy industry supports biddable scientists who deny the evidence of global warming, is well documented. Many journalists lack any understanding of scientific method, and so cannot evaluate any piece of research. They do not understand that, if your subjects are people, it is relatively easy to carry out the kind of research that yields the results that you want. It is much more difficult to achieve this when your subject matter is inanimate and therefore indifferent to your desires. Frequently, when a journalist phones me for a comment on a press release about some psychological research or a news story about people, I spend some time explaining to the journalist how inadequate, even fraudulent, this particular research is, or how the journalist, in his ignorance about human behaviour, has misinterpreted some recent news. Sometimes the journalist decides that the press release has no news value, or that he has to reassess the significance of this piece of news, but sometimes the journalist, perhaps at the behest of his editor, continues his search for a psychologist who will give the comment that the journalist wants. I regret to say that I have experienced this with an editor of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 who did, eventually, find the kind of psychologist he wanted. This was a psychologist who would agree with him that a parent killing his children and then himself is a rare event. Alas, it is not. In the UK, approximately one hundred children die each year at the hands of a parent or step-parent.⁸ Some of these adults then go on to kill themselves. The harsh realities of life can be too difficult for some news men and women to bear, and thus we are deprived of the truth.

      We would be foolish indeed to decide, as some people do, that science and the media always lie. In doing so, we would be closing our minds to those people working in science or the media who care about truth. However, we need to read reports about science very critically. Reading Ben Goldacre, in his ‘Bad Science’ column in the Guardian and Guardian Online, and in his book by the same name, is an excellent way of learning how to use scientific method.⁹ A good question to ask of research results is, ‘Who benefits from these results?’ If the answer is, ‘The people who funded the research’, be very sceptical of the results.

      The popular press makes money out of stories that pander to its readers’ prejudices and vanity. In the reporting of scientific research that has to do with people, the popular press invariably reports research that purports to show all children and young people are in great danger (obesity, alcohol, drugs) and/or the current generation of children and young people are ill-disciplined, lazy, greedy, selfish, ungrateful and are growing up too quickly, unlike the generation of readers who, as children, were obedient, well-behaved, and innocent of all aspects of adult life, and, as teenagers, were well-behaved, hard-working and respectful of their elders. These stories are all versions of the ‘I don’t know what the youth of today are coming to’ complaint.

      The generation of readers are unique in a great many ways. The world they live in bears no similarity at all to the world that earlier generations lived in. History never repeats itself. Moreover, the readers’ generation suffers more than all earlier generations. These stories are versions of the myth of the Golden Age.

      We derive such prejudices from our vanity that tells us that we are superior to other people. We are blinded to the truth more often by our vanity than we are by the lies that other people tell us.

      Physicists and cosmologists, being human, are as truthful or not in their dealings with other people, but their subject matter is very difficult to manipulate to produce results that they can turn to their advantage. If their results are wrong, sooner or later further research will show that this is so. Physicists and cosmo logists are unlikely to lie to you about their research, but, if you want to see your world as controllable and predictable, they have naught for your comfort.

      Did you know that on New Year’s Eve, 2009, time stopped? It stopped very briefly, so that the guardians of the atomic clocks around the world could synchronize their clocks with the rotation of the planet.¹⁰ It was not the clock running fast but the planet running slow.

      Anthropologists tell us that our ancestors 30,000 years ago kept calendars. This was 25,000 years before the emergence of writing. The calendar is one of our earliest purely intellectual creations.¹¹ Daily time was measured by the rising and setting of the sun. Sundials, hour glasses, and water clocks were not particu larly accurate, but this did not matter until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when factory owners wanted their workers to arrive on time. The workers did not have clocks and watches because they were expensive, and remained so until well into the twentieth century. When I was a child in the 1930s a still-popular saying was, ‘If you want to know the time, ask a policeman.’ Now we look at our mobile phones, or we say to one another, ‘Do you know what time it is?’

      This is the title of a BBC4 programme presented by the physicist Brian Cox.¹² He described how time as we know it ‘is an illusion’. However, it does seem that time exists as a dimension in the universe much in the way that space exists as a dimension. The question that some of the best physicists in the world are asking is, ‘What is time?’ There is no definite answer to this question.

      Our television news programmes often end with weather forecasters predicting at what time the sun will rise and set the next day. We say that the length of the day is twenty-four hours because the Earth takes twenty-four hours to rotate on its axis, but the actual time it takes the Earth to spin on its axis changes because the Earth’s speed is affected by the pull of the Moon on the Earth and by the power of the wind. World time is now determined by atomic clocks which are very accurate because they use the precise microwave signal that electrons in atoms emit when they change energy levels. However, these clocks need to be adjusted occasionally to the spin of the planet. Our time-keeping methods do not measure a time difference with some fixed point in time. They simply impose a pattern on events that has a regularity with which we can organize ourselves.

      We experience time as a continuous present. The past is contained in our memory, and our future in our imagination. However, we are dependent on the light from the Sun, and that takes eight minutes to reach us. When we look up into the heavens, we see the past. When we look deeper and deeper into the heavens, we go further back into the past. Physicists have calculated that the universe began with a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago. The orthodox view amongst cosmologists is that time began with the universe, but unorthodox cosmologists like Neil Turack use string theory to propose that time may have begun before the Big Bang. There could be, he says, additional parallel worlds.

      Different cultures have different images of space and time. When American children draw maps, they usually use a bird’s-eye view in the way Google maps look down on the Earth, whereas Sherpa children in Nepal create an image of vertical distances so that they can show how much time it takes to go up and down from one place to another. Trekkers in Nepal use the same method measuring distance in time, not in linear units.¹³ Seconds, minutes and hours have been accepted as units of time, although there are cultural differences in how time and dates are written. The hour after noon can be written as 1 p.m. or 13.00. The Twin Towers collapse is dated as 9/11 in the USA, 11/9 in the UK.

      Seconds, minutes and hours relate to how we experience the passing of the day, but now there are video cameras that record in units of time different from the units of time in which we see events. If a high-speed camera captures images, say, of a glass of water СКАЧАТЬ