911 and 77 (21)
One of the things I used to like doing as a five year old was to go up to my bedroom, move a wooden chair across the room into a convenient position where I could climb up, stand on it and proceed with my "research" into aspects of The Great Unknown.
The object of my attention and my very youthful curiosity, the idea that made me move the chair and stand on it, was the electric light switch, normally not a particularly fascinating device for most people for most of their lives but for me it was a very interesting object and so I would, using both hands and all my strength, cup the circular bowl shaped cover and turn it so that I could unscrew it and remove it.
Now, I must advise you not to try this at home as it is a dangerous thing to do and I'm not kidding. I didn't consider the danger, as a five year old curious and intelligent boy I was more occupied with discovering how it worked. That is the key word in all of this, How Did It WORK?
You might think that having taken the cover off so that I could see the insides that I would have been satisfied, screwed the cover back on, climbed off the chair, put it back where I got it from and made my way back downstairs to re-join my mother with an appropriate look of total innocence on my little face.
But, you probably guessed it, that would be premature. I didn't stop at just looking at the contents of the switch but decided it was necessary to touch each part of the switch in turn.
The feeling of electricity of the normal everyday household kind hasn't really changed much in half a century - it's frequency, voltage and currrent, the three main players in it's makeup, is pretty much of a similar quality not withstanding the many decades older that the generating stations will be now, or for that matter even if they have been completely replaced, the electricity is pretty much the same. It doesn't actually wear out over time and use!
The electron is the object at the heart of this amazing phenomenon we call electricity. Some people call it a particle, still others would say 'maybe particle maybe not, maybe that and more'. So we don't know much even after more than a century of knowledge about electricity. That hasn't stopped us trying and it hasn't stopped us from getting to grips with it in a manner of speaking - though hopefully not a literal manner of speaking. If I had asked anyone, when I was five, what it was, this electricity, they would not have been able to tell me, not really tell me. But I didn't have anyone to ask except my mother and I think I may have broached the subject, very tentatively of course, and got a fairly uninformative reply. But I learned from my own 'research' what I needed to know.
In fact even today, what is known about the electron itself is not a great deal. Just to show you what I mean, some people, experts, say it is a particle but other, equally expert people say that it is not a particle. Only one, at most, of these beliefs. They are beliefs. Only one of them can be true. We just don't really know - from the point of view of modern advanced knowledge but we give an impression of knowing.
If you have never felt electricity then it is an experience I would recommend in the smallest of doses and only apply it after deciding that your heart is in the right place and fit for the experiment - you could stop it for good.
I conducted this experiment several times before I was satisfied that I had determined all that could be discovered and decided that it didn't serve any useful purpose to continue with it.
It is a rather strange thing for any five year old boy to want to do and part of my reason for wanting to share this very short story with you is to help you to understand some things about me because some of these things are truely fascinating. Electricity, just to state the obvious, is normally an invisible and powerful force which can and does kill people. In some countries it is the preferred means of execution when a death penalty is declared.
I wanted to learn about it, to know about it, to understand this virtually unknown powerful force. I wasn't afraid of it. Many adult people are afraid of it and similar phenomena. So I was intent even at that age upon discovering the secrets behind one of the most powerful and hidden forces that are acknowledged as being real by just about every sensible adult in the modern world. And I made good progress, on my own. I was a solitary investigator.
No one would argue that it does not exist or that it is the work of the devil. Not any longer. They used to. Of course they did. Few people would not have joined in that denouncement and fear. Everyone nowadays takes it for granted and we all, just about, make use of it every day.
So, no contentiousness there then.
Other forces, normally invisible and very powerful, have also fascinated me. Electricity was and is just one of several aspects of reality that we have in our lives and which we are either aware of and somewhat knowledgeable about or at least not too fearful of. Other strange and powerful forces are yet to be acknowledged as real and I would say, by the way people talk about the subjects they belong to, that they are fearful of them in the same primitive way that ancient man was and are being regularly denied in much the same way as many people would have feared electricity in the early days of it's implementation.
Modern man is not much different, if at all, from very ancient man. Current technology makes him more confident and gives him a sense of certainty. But these two, confidence and certainty, about reality, are falsely heightened. They don't really deserve to be present.
The nature and value of confidence and certainty about reality do not really deserve to be exaggerated more so that ancient man's.
This is not something that is easy to grasp. I would say that our advanced cultures give a false sense of what reality is more so than before we developed them. The most deserving of confidence and certainty are the people who have insight into life and it's greater meaning. I do not mean religious people.
But, in grasping some aspect of this, for example, understanding that the most terrifying flash of lightning is not necessarily a deliberate act of some godlike being, maybe it is, maybe it is not, and while we can somewhat explain it's origins, to a large extent we still, frankly, don't really know much about it at all.
You may say that is stupid. You may say that we know all there is to know other than the fine details, about electricity. You may say that of course there is no godlike being that throws it about. But I am not so sure. I don't have good reason to be so sure. I have reason to be not sure at all.
Do you know that there are people, for no explicable reason, who have been repeatedly struck by lightning? Each of the reasons or explanations that you might list or put forward to explain such and similar strange events simply don't. They don't explain it. That means it is a "Reality Riddle" or "Reality Puzzle". There are lots of such Reality Riddles but we, even in the modern world, tend to create a lock-down of information so that it seems as if there is nothing in existence outside the self-enclosing box that this fear-attitude creates.
The final argument you would put to me after I would demolish each of the others in turn, is that of probability. And you would cite a mathematical rule about probability that makes it entirely reasonable to believe that lightning can strike the same person at precisely midday, each day, everyday, for ten years. And you can add an infinite number of absurd "coincidental" requirements to that list and with probability rules the liklihood of it happening is always reasoned without any unknown element having to be introduced to account for it.
So it's like this. The arguist (my new word for the imaginary person arguing with me here, for want of the right word) will always be able to say "Nothing unexplainable there" to any, ANY, situation where one simply asks "What is the probability of it happening, this very strange event?". Imagine a very large number and just keep making it bigger until you are happy it's a very big number and then you say the probability of X happening is one in that big number. The fact that it happens, in terms of explaining it using mathematical probability, is always greater than zero! Sometimes when a thing happens three times you know that it is odd. What is also very odd, and sad if not mad to, is the failure to face the fact when such phenomena recur repeatedly!
The best we tend to get in terms of honest answers, when, for instance lightning strikes a person more times than can be explained, is that it is unexplainable. That should mean that we accept as an intellectual case, that there are things that happen that have an explanation but that we have no clue to provide that explanation. But fear of the unknown, things that happen that we cannot explain, causes us to deny the event and to change it's real meaning into a mundane one.
So the probability argument is a red herring and there is no real negative argument. Those negative arguments are, I believe, disingenuously put forward rather than be more honest about reality. All that is actually happening when such a strange coincidence happens as for example lightning striking the same person more than once, is that there is almost certainly some connecting causative influence that we, as advanced societies, are not only unable to account for but that we always reason away so as to make it seem as if it were not a phenomenal event.
That exhibits excessive and unwarranted confidence and certainty about reality. It is the ostrich head in the sand, well except that the ostrich is not being dishonest about it.
As a five year old I was simply making my own solitary investigations into the unknown and I can tell you that I have come a long long way since then.
By Paul E. Coughlin
7th and 17th April 2007
![[Valid RSS]](valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
