Today’s looking at bit more serious than usual.
First is Enemies of Reason – Slaves to Superstition. It’s a documentary hosted by Richard Dawkins. “It’s a multi-million pound industry that impoverishes our culture.” No, sorry, Richard, you’ll have to narrow it down.
He visits a New Age Fair, and samples some of the things offered.
He looks at astrology. I wonder why, when the programme was quite happy to show a picture of Mystic Meg on her column, they have to blur out the name of the Daily Mail’s astrologer? I guess they have to get permission to show these pages, and Jonathan Cainer (who was the Mail’s astrologer at the time) probably didn’t want to be involved in a programme debunking him.
The Observer’s astrologer Neil Spencer can’t really explain how it’s all supposed to work. “This is what you keep coming back to ask me. How could it possibly work? And I’ve told you, I don’t know. It’s a deep dark mystery.” When Dawkins suggests an experiment to see how accurate such predictions are, he’s not keen on the idea. “I’d have thought you’d be eager. The fact that you’re not makes me think you don’t really, in your heart of hearts, believe it. I don’t think you really are prepared to put your reputation on the line.” “I just don’t believe in the experiment, Richard. It’s that simple.” “Well, you’re in a kind of no-lose situation, aren’t you?” “I hope so.”
After the astrologers, Dawkins looks at psychic mediums, like Simon Goodfellow. “Now, I do feel with him as well, he’s telling me about changes that are coming up in your life at the moment. I see total changes in how you’re working to how you will be working in the future.” Sawkin’s voiceover says “The word Simon seems to be fishing for is retirement, the obvious next step for most 60-somethings.”
Dawkins talks to Derren Brown who, although his shows appear to show feats that seem like psychic powers, is always clear that he uses traditional magic techniques. “If you’ve lost somebody dear to you and I’m trampling all over those memories by telling you that they’re here now saying this and that, I mean that’s none of my business and if I’m just doing it because I can earn some money out of it, I’ve known cases of people that have lost somebody, lost a child that’s so dear to them and they cannot get over the fact they’ve lost a child and become addicted to these…”
He talks to a medium and asks him if what he’s doing is just cold reading. “Well, it depends what you call cold reading, this is something that a lot of the rationalists have come up with saying that what you do is you say something and people basically make it fit. I think if you really examine the evidence for what myself and other mediums do, you will find that a large, large proportion could never be explained away by something like cold reading. It’s because there are sometimes such specific details that come through.”
I’m amused at seeing Dawkins politely standing at the spiritualist meeting, while the congregation sing a spiritualist hymn – or rather, it’s a traditional hymn that they’ve given new words. Maybe the words were dictated by a spirit.
The programme does some testing of dowsers who, as they usually do, performed no better than chance when the experiments are properly controlled.
Jim Negus thinks it’s God helping him to dowse. Dawkins asks “Have you done the test yet in the tent?” “Yes, I did.” “And what was the result?” “I was going to get six right, hundred percent.” “And what happened?” “One.” “So what do you make of that, then?” He gestures up. “He’s having his laugh, isn’t he? He loves a joke. You don’t realise.”
Chris French organised the experiment. “What you’ll typically find when you talk to dowsers is they’ll give you lots and lots of anecdotal evidence, stories about how they discovered a leak in their neighbour’s pipes and so on and so forth, but there are always other possible explanations there. What we’re trying to do is set up conditions which would rule out any of those other explanations.”
Dawkins talks about the psychologist B.F. Skinner, who did experiments with pigeons to see if they would learn to peck a button to receive a reward. But then he set the machine to deliver the rewards at random, and the pigeons would develop something like superstitious behavour, repeating the same thing they were doing when the reward appeared.
I recognise this new-age shop. It was a couple of doors down from Comics Showcase in London, so I used to pass it every Saturday when I’d go up to London to see a film, or a play, and spend far too much money on books and comics. I never bought anything from there, though.
Satish Kumar is a new-age guru. He talks a lot about inanimate objects having a spirit.
Steve Fuller thinks it’s a good thing that people can look stuff up on the internet, but also thinks that the random conclusions they might draw are just as worthwhile as those of people who have been studying those subjects intensely.
Dawkins talks about conspiracy theories. He dismisses the moon landing deniers as a bit of a joke, but gets more serious about 9/11 truthers. “It’s one of the nasty lies circulating as truth in the blog community of racists and religious fundamentalists.” Or Reddit, as we usually call it.
Here’s the whole programme.
Media Centre Description: First of a two-part documentary in which evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins explains how organised religion and primitive superstition are blighting our lives. He claims that despite humankind’s scientific knowledge increasing, more and more people are retreating into irrational belief systems such as New Age mysticism, clairvoyance and astrology. Prof Dawkins tackles influential mediums and astrologers in an attempt to debunk their superstitions with logic and reason.
Recorded from Channel 4 on Monday 13th August 2007 20:01
After this, the recording stops after a few minutes of My New Home.
The next recording starts with the end of Supersize Kids.
Then, another documentary, this one very disturbing. It’s True Stories: Capturing the Friedmans. It’s the story of a suburban family more or less destroyed when the father, Arnold Friedman is arrested for receiving and sending child porn through the mail.
There’s some absurd moments early on. The oldest son, David, who was a professional clown for children’s parties, came home for thanksgiving to find the police searching the whole house, and when they wouldn’t let him in, he put a pair of Y-Fronts on his head and complained to the press there about the treatment of his father. “They’re harassing my father for no reason at all.” In a later interview, he says “If I had had some kind of Arabian sand scarf, I would have wrapped that around my face and been Lawrence of Arabia, which maybe that would have been better. But I took out underwear and put it on my head because I didn’t want to be on camera.”
David’s younger brother Jesse was also arrested, because the detectives had been interviewing the children who used to attend computer classes given by Arnold, and had got a lot of testimony that the children were being abused by Arnold and his son during those lessons.
Howard Friedman, Arnold’s brother, found it hard to believe the charges. “They somehow got one kid to… be able to convince the kids, well, all your friends said something happened. Didn’t something happen?”
The documentary speaks to some of the children (now adults). Some of them don’t remember seeing anything. Some of them describe some lurid sex games. Some talked about sexual content in computer games. One even said he was raped as punishment when he took one of the games home.
Adding to the confusion, journalist Debbie Nathan suggested that the testimony might be an example of hysteria, with children being pressured to say what the adults wanted to hear. “First of all, you’d have to believe that blood is coming out of these children’s orifices, that they’re screaming, that they’re crying, that their clothes are soiled from semen and from blood, and yet their parents show up, sometimes they show up unannounced, everything looks fine.” And one of the detectives on the case admitted there was no physical evidence of any kind collected.
But another detective says “I think the most overwhelming thing was the enormous amount of child pornography. You would just have to walk into the living room and it would be piled around the piano. There were literally foot-high stacks of pornography in plain view, all around the house.” But photos taken during the search showed nothing of the kind.
It’s a very disturbing story. The father was undoubtedly a paedophile, but the charges of physical abuse seem shakier, mainly because it seems so unlikely that such massive abuse would not have been noticed by anyone until after Friedman was arrested for ordering child porn from the Netherlands. And the younger son Jesse’s involvement is also unclear. The film seems to give the impression that he might be innocent, but was coerced into pleading guilty. But to me, the most worrying thing about the family is how much all the boys seemed to hate their mother.
Media Centre Description: Award-winning documentary telling the story of a seemingly ordinary, upper-middle class Long Island family whose world was instantly transformed when the father and eldest son were accused of multiple counts of child molestation. Coverage of the trial is used alongside the family’s own exhaustive home footage of their lives to blend together the story, the legal proceedings and the veracity of the charges.
Recorded from More 4 on Monday 13th August 2007 21:58
The recording stops with the start of Without a Trace.
The next recording is a break from real life, with an episode of House – Poison. This is an episode from the first season.
A student collapses during an exam. He’s having seizures and not responding to the normal treatments.
Suspecting drugs or something similar, Cameron and Foreman search his house. I do wonder if this is standard procedure in medical diagnoses, or just something they made up for this series.
Another patient, an 82 year old woman, is experiencing strange euphoria, and even starts coming on to House. Much to the disgust of her son.
The mother of the student is worried that all the treatments that have been tried aren’t helping, and refuses to consent for another new treatment. House tries to bully her by getting her to sign a waiver, including “‘Besides, I enjoy controlling every single aspect of my son’s life, even if it means his death.” Sign here, please. I brought a pen.”
Another student at the same school is admitted with exactly the same symptoms. They suspect something like pesticide poisoning, but the two students don’t know each other, and live ten miles away from each other.
The old lady is diagnosed with syphilis, which she says she caught in 1939. House prescribes antibiotics, but she worries that her heightened senses with go if it’s cured. “I–I like feeling sexy again. And making a fool out of myself with handsome young doctors.” House reassures her. “Do you think that I would’ve given you this if it would stop you from flirting with me?” “Well, but if I’m cured–” “Then all the spirochetes will die off. But the little pieces of your cerebral cortex that have been destroyed won’t grow back. You’re brain-damaged. Doomed to feeling good for the rest of your life.”
And they discover the source of the poison. Both students had bought knock-off designer clothes from a van outside school, which was also used to transport pesticides.
The student’s mother has faxed his case details to the CDC wanting a second opinion. House waits in the room. The call arrives, and they say they can’t help her without examining her son. So she lets House administer the treatment for the poisoning, now they’ve identified the type of pesticide. But we learn the call was actually from Chase.
Media Centre Description: US hospital drama about a maverick, misanthropic New Jersey doctor. House and the team have to pinpoint what has been poisoning two high school students. Could it be a dangerous new recreational drug? Meanwhile, an elderly lady patient takes a fancy to House.
Recorded from Five US on Monday 13th August 2007 21:58
After this there’s a short interview with Carmine Giovinazzo, one of the actors in one of the CSI shows (NY, I think) by (I think) Russell Kane. There’s no captioning or introduction of any kind, so I’m guessing.
The recording stops after a couple of minutes of an episode of CSI: Miami. I still haven’t watched a single episode of any of the CSIs. Which is weird, as I expect they’d be right up my street.
The final recording today is back to the documentaries, but with something a little more positive, with the first episode of Atom – Jim Al-Khalili’s history of the discovery of the atom, and the birth of atomic physics.
It does start off rather downbeat, talking about the suicide of Ludwig Boltzmann, whose depression wasn’t helped by the vilification he received “for believing something that today we take for granted. He believed that matter cannot be infinitely divisible into ever smaller pieces. Instead he argued that ultimately, everything is made of basic building blocks, atoms. It seems incredible now that Boltzmann’s revelation was so controversial. But 100 years ago, arguing atoms were real was considered by most to be a waste of time.” It boggles my mind that atomic physics is so relatively recent. I thought the basics were understood at least in the nineteenth century, but no, Boltzmann hanged himself in 1906.
Boltzmann never knew that a year before he died, Einstein had published a paper on Brownian Motion – the observation that when pollen grains are sprinkled on water, they jiggle around, discovered in 1827. Einstein believed that Brownian motion was evidence for the existence of atoms. “His argument was simple. The pollen will only jiggle if they were being jostled by something else. So Einstein said that the water must be made of tiny atom-like particles which themselves are jiggling and are continually buffeting the pollen. If there were no atoms then the pollen would stay still.”
Einstein’s paper meant that atoms were the new orthodoxy. Manchester University was home to two important physicists, Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr.
Rutherford was the experimentalist, and one of his great discoveries is recreated by Al-Khalili. A small piece of Radium is set up in a device so that it emits its “alpha waves” as Rutherford had called them (they’re more like particles) in a straight line. There’s a very thin sheet of gold leaf, beaten until it’s only a few atoms thick, and a phosphorescent plate on the other side. They had to count the number of particles that pass through the gold leaf and hit the plate. But then Rutherford suggested to the experimenters, that they should see if any of the particles could be detected on the same side as the radium source. After a long period of observation, they did see, very occasionally, the alpha particles bouncing back from the foil. About one in 8,000 was reflected. From this result, Rutherford inferred that the atom’s structure must be composed mostly of empty space.
Neils Bohr came to Manchester in 1911. “Bohr made it his mission to solve the puzzles of why the atom didn’t collapse and why there was so much empty space.”
The idea he came up with – the Quantum Jump – “is one of the most misunderstood and misused concepts in the whole of science. Bohr himself said that if you think you’ve understood it then you haven’t really thought about it enough.” So Al-Khalili attempts to explain it in 30 seconds with the analogy of a multi-story building.
The ground floor’s where the nucleus lives with the electrons occupying the floors above. Mysterious laws mean the electrons can only live on the floors never in between and other mysterious laws mean that sometimes they can instantaneously jump from one floor to another. These are what we call quantum jumps. Now Bohr had absolutely no idea what these laws were but thinking like this allowed him to make a startling prediction. When an electron jumps from a higher floor to lower one it gives off light. More significantly, the color of the light depends on how big or small a quantum jump the electron makes. So an electron jumping from the third floor to the second floor might give off red light, an electron jumping from the tenth floor to the second floor blue light.
To test his new theory, Bohr used it to make a prediction. Could it explain the mysterious signature in the spectrum of hydrogen? After months of calculating furiously, he finally came up with the results and his prediction was surprisingly accurate.
But the physics traditionalists, including Einstein, didn’t like the quantum model. So when Louis de Broglie suggested “a kind of radio wave pushing the electron around the atom. He called it a pilot wave. This pilot wave would also hold the electron tightly in its orbit, stopping the atom from collapsing. There were no strange instant quantum jumps, just intuitive, common sense, familiar waves.”
Jim Al-Khalili worked in Copenhagen at the Niels Bohr institute early in his career.
Bohr himself designed the chalkboards at the institute, which had lots of boards which could be raised into place or lowered away “so that he wouldn’t ever need to rub out any of his equations. It just sort of goes on and on.”
Bohr and his colleagues were still sure that the quantum model was a useful one. Wolfgang Pauli came up with the Exclusion principle.
The question Pauli’s idea tried to answer was this. Every atom is made of the same simple components. So why do they appear to us in so many different guises in such a rich variety of colours, textures, and chemical properties? For instance, gold and mercury. Two very different elements. Gold is solid, mercury is liquid. Gold is inert, mercury is high. And yet they differ by just one electron. Gold is 79 and mercury has 80.
What Pauli said was that there’s another quantum rule which states crudely that each floor can only accommodate a fixed number of electrons. So if we want to add another electron to the atom, it has to check for a vacancy in the top floor. And if that floor is full, another floor or shell is created above it for the electron. In this way, a single electron can radically change the shape of the atom. And this in turn affects how the atom behaves and how it fits together with other atoms.
The next step in the battle between traditional physics and the weird Quantum world would be between Werner Heisenberg on the quantum side, and Erwin Schrodinger.
Schrodinger “took De Broglie’s idea of mysterious pilot waves guiding electrons around an atom one crucial step further. He argued that the electron actually was a wave of energy. Vibrating so fast, it looked like a cloud around the atom, a cloud-like wave of pure energy. And what’s more, he came up with a powerful new equation which completely described this wave and so described the whole atom in terms of traditional physics. The equation he came up with, we now call Schrodinger’s wave equation.”
For the quantum side, Werner Heisenberg, working with his mentor Max Born, came up with a purely mathematical description of the workings of the atom, Matrix Mechanics.
It was at the Solvay Conference, where the greatest physicists in the world attended, and debated the ideas, that Bohr was able to answer all the criticisms of the quantum model that Einstein would bring. Bohr and Heisenberg’s model was known as the Copenhagen interpretation. Other people at the conference included Lorentz, Madame Curie, Louie de Broglie, Wolfgang Pauli, and Schrodinger. “The old guard was replaced by the new. Chance and probability became interwoven into the fabric of nature itself, and we could no longer describe atoms in terms of simple pictures, but only using pure abstract mathematics. The Copenhagen view had been victorious.”
Media Centre Description: The discovery that everything is made from atoms has been referred to as the greatest scientific breakthrough in history. As scientists delved deep into the atom, they unravelled nature’s most shocking secrets and abandoned traditional beliefs, leading to a whole new science which still underpins modern physics, chemistry and biology, and maybe even life itself. Nuclear physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of this discovery and the brilliant minds behind the breakthrough.
Recorded from BBC FOUR on Monday 13th August 2007 23:58
BBC Genome: BBC FOUR Tuesday 14th August 2007 00:00
After this, there’s a trail for Stephen Fry’s Weekend. Then the recording stops with the start of an episode of Proms on Four.
Here’s the ad breaks from Enemies of Reason.
The ad breaks from Capturing the Friedmans.
And the breaks from House.
Adverts:
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