From: Jasper
Date: 6/4/03
Time: 12:48:41 PM
Remote User:
Charlie,
You took the words right out of my head. Nothing paranormal here, just two people (you and I) seeing the same Carl Sagan documentaries and interviews, reading the same books and articles and picking up the same “professional debunker” patterns in Sagan and Randi. If you want an expert scientific explanation for anything paranormal you can find something by Carl Sagan. If you’re looking for ways to “prove” how a paranormal event “was faked,” the go-to guy is The Great Randy (or is it Randi?)
Sagan was very big on coincidence. I sometimes got the impression that his first love was mathematic, rather than astronomy or astrophysics. Given his belief in the power of large numbers to do amazing things, Contact should not have been a surprise. It is consistent with his “thousand monkey” explanation for life on earth (If you gave a thousand money’s a pen and paper and enough time they would eventually compose the Declaration of Independence purely by chance). If it could happen once by chance, the same numbers say that it could happen thousands of times. Thus, life on other planets. The problem for Sagan was to find a scientific way to traverse the distances involved. He got a buddy named Kip Thorne to show him how it could be done and Contact was born.
The biggest downside to the movie Contact was the definition that Jodie Foster’s character gave for Occam’s Razor. Many people picked up on it and ran with it. She said something like, All things considered, the simplest explanation tends to be correct. That’s not Occam’s Razor; it’s Sagan’s Razor and our resident curmudgeon John Junot’s….
Occam’s Razor (Iago, page 667) does give preference to simple explanations over complicated ones but only to the extent that the simplest explanation answers the question and competing explanations don’t. Sometimes the “simplest” explanation is extremely complicated. The test is in what adjustments you have to make in light of new information. If your theory is sound the adjustments to valid new evidence are simple and they strengthen the overall theory. If it isn’t sound, they get more and more complicated. You have to keep adding stuff, like 16th century “music of the spheres,” to make circular planetary orbits work or the overall theory falls apart.
Carl Sagan did more than anyone I know of to popularize science in general with his books and PBS specials in the ’80s. If there was a way of explaining ANYTHING “scientifically” he always managed to find it no mater how convoluted his explanation had to get. He was also prone to oversimplification and colorful but false analogies.
Hmmm, that sounds just like… Nah; must be a coincidence. –Jasper