Carrying the Fire

I am probably as skeptical as anyone: unless there is good evidence for something, I won't believe it, even if it's something I would like to believe. And when it comes to things like astrology and similar fortune telling schemes, I'm inclined to use adjectives that do not uniformly please those who are so idiotic as to take them seriously, so I read with some interest "Is this evidence that we can see the future?", which has just been published in New Scientist (2010).

Peter Aldhous writes that the respected  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA), the same people whose Publication Manual we follow when we cite sources in AEP (2001), is about to publish a paper which appears to show that random future events can influence the present. Aldhous notes that although there is considerable skepticism about the results, the journal's peer reviewers, and others such as Joachim Krueger have found that "everything seemed to be in good order" (Aldhous, 2010, ¶ 3) with the methodology and design of the experiments that Daryl Bem has conducted over the past eight years to collect his evidence that we appear to influenced by events that have not yet happened. Bem's experiments appealed to psychologists because they are all already well known in the field, and Bem's innovation was that he "simply reversed the sequence, so that the event generally interpreted as the cause happened after the tested behaviour rather than before it" (¶ 5). For example, rather than testing for how typing a word effects recall, he had his subjects recall words from a list, and subsequently type randomly chosen words from that list: the very weird result was that students recalled more words that they would later be asked to type.

Not surprisingly, Aldhous also reports that there is considerable incredulity towards Bem's findings, with the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology itself proposing to "publish a sceptical editorial commentary alongside the paper" (Respect for a Maverick sect, ¶ 3); they are, however, going to publish it, if only because they expect the results to be proved wrong by further research.

Apart from the results, which I find very hard to believe, when I read Aldhous's article it seemed an excellent example of how academic work is and should be done, and the standards that apply. Bem is a well respected psychologist at Cornell University, and although he is pursuing an area of research that many think is nonsense, it is nonetheless important, if only to counter the looney claims of astrology, mind reading, fortune telling, magical amulets, and the numerous other false and nonsensical superstitions that many people continue to believe in even today. It is possible that some such beliefs really could be true, and the only way to decide either way is to test them, which is exactly what Bem has done, and which is exactly what physicists and others do all the time: the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887, designed to prove the existence of the aether through which physicists believed light was transmitted, was shocking for its null result, which subsequently led Albert Einstein to propose his theory of special relativity, which was in many ways even weirder and more shocking. And both the results and theoretical underpinning of modern quantum mechanics are weird by any standard, yet the ever increasing experimental evidence provides rock solid support for the weirdness.

Whilst I will be absolutely stunned if Bem's results are verified, that is a possibility, and the only way to know one way or the other is to do the experiments, and publication in a highly regarded peer reviewed journal is sure to lead to that. In fact, as Aldhous also reports, other researchers are already at work seeking to prove Bem wrong in the best scientific and academic tradition.

It took me a few minutes think of a title for this post; "Carrying the Fire" only came to me after I wrote the bit about Einstein via Michelson and Morley's experiment to measure light from the fiery sun. "Carrying the fire" is a phrase from Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, which you might have seen in the film adaptation a couple of years ago. It's about the only ray of light in that dark novel, but is strong enough to keep leading the heroes (?) onwards. Earlier this year I was considering The Road as a novel for level 6, but on rereading it, I decided it might be more appropriate for a higher level. Like Saroyan (Hartmann & Blass, 2007, pp. 195 - 6), McCarthy eschews needless punctuation such as quotation marks, but unlike Saroyan, his language is not quite so easy.

__________

References

Aldhous, P. (2010, November 11). Is this evidence that we can see the future? New Scientist. Retrieved November 12, 2010 from http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19712-is-this-evidence-that-we-can-see-the-future.html

American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, (5th. ed.). Washington: Author. (A revised 6th edition was published last year, but I'm still using the 5th ed. Most of the revisions relevant to us concern the citing and referencing of online sources.)

Hartmann, P. & Blass, L. (2007). Quest 3 Reading and Writing, (2nd. ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.