Truth is Beautiful

Radiolab posted a podcast called "Black Box" on Friday, December 17, 2013.  In it they had stories about mysterious events where an an unexpected outcome occurs because of a hidden process...as if inside a black box.  It is scientific experimentation that reveals the inner workings of these black boxes.

The full podcast can be found here at http://www.radiolab.org/story/black-box/.

The final story was a tale about a married couple, Sydney and Lesley Piddington from Australia.  They were so-called "mind-readers" in the 1950s with an enormously popular radio series where each episode the wife would read the husband's mind via a series his reading of seemingly random selected texts.  The theatricality of the program was clear, and their presentation was delightful and charming.  She would end each broadcast with the simple, mysterious sign-off:  "You Are The Judge."


The Radiolab podcast explored some thoughts on how the trick was done.  Penn Jillette was consulted, but he described his thoughts on how the trick was done as being an "ugly truth".  Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the hosts, concurred that the truth was ugly.  They even went so far to separate the ugly explanation so as to not ruin the trick.  Great emphasis was placed on the fact that discovery of the truth would somehow diminish the pleasure of the experience of listening to the magic show.

The separate podcast segment can be found here: http://www.radiolab.org/theuglytruthyouwerewarned/

But I took some exception to their treatment of the investigation of the trick. In the pursuit of science, there is no such thing as an "ugly truth".  They were defining an "ugly truth" as a truth might be simpler than the expected complicated explanation.  But I say that it is still the truth.  And the truth is always a thing of beauty.

Here are the comments I posted in response to the piece:
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Science is the pursuit of truth through objective observation and logical deduction based on those observations of the real world.

Magic and the supernatural are not bound by objective observation, but depend on trickery to force a subjective, controlled observation.  It is similar to the concept of a Potemkin village.  If you walk down the street, you see buildings.  But the second you walk through a door and explore deeper, you see that it is only a facade.

The entertainment of performance magic is an unstated agreement between the performer and the audience that a lie, within the proscenium, is not only allowable, but is, in fact, expected...anticipated.

I have been a fan of Penn and Teller since their TV special, "Penn and Teller Go Public" aired on PBS in 1985.  (Wow...nearly 30 years!)  They did a great piece in the show about how to light a cigarette in a completely fake way with a combination of coordinated misdirections.  It involved tricks like dropping props into pockets, planting objects hidden in the palm of the hand, using noises and motion to move the viewers eye and attention from one spot to a selected other.  Each act was real, but they appeared to be different than they really were, not because they weren't happening, but because the performer used other actions to prevent the audience from making an accurate observation. 

One of the other things Penn did on the show was to a fire breathing act.  He talked about side shows, sword swallowing and other carnival attractions.  It still sticks with me to this day...but before he did the trick, he pointed out that these things did not involve the same type of trick as the others.  They did not involve misdirection...just perseverance and skill.  He hauntingly pointed out that sword swallowers gag a little bit and sometimes get nicked, and that fire breathers sometimes singed their lips and got sick from swallowing lighter fluid. 

This is the second segment from the show.  It starts with the end of the cigarette lighting/misdirection piece.  The fire eating segment starts at Time 5:38.  You''l have to scroll to it...blogger won't let me cue to the second. (Or at least I haven't figured out how).

I have learned over the years not to trust, Penn Jillette, (in a good way).  So I know even this claim that the sideshow arts are real may have been part of the act with more hidden secrets and misdirection.  But regardless, the point he ended his introduction with before he finally performed the feat of breathing fire was that it we shouldn't only think about HOW the trick was done...but instead, we, as the audience, should wonder about the far more interesting question: "WHY?".

And that is why there was nothing ugly about Penn's explanation.  Even he indicated that he could not know for certain...but he had a good guess.  A speech that Douglas Adams once gave described the following thought exercise.  If you have one witness who sees someone in London at noon and then another witness who sees that same person in Los Angeles at midnight...you can reasonably say that the person took an airplane, but you would be hard pressed to be certain to identify which flight.  You would not attribute it to magic or mystery...but you would still, not know all the details.

Had the story of Sydney and Lesley Piddington been presented on any other forum, none of this would matter.  But this is Radio Lab.  Shows like yours and Sci Friday are an inspiration to the raw power of observation of the real world we all inhabit and the truths revealeda through the scientific method.  And there is even the power of the mysteries that remain even in the midst of the truths discovered.

So, please...do not think that anything is lost or ugly from discovering that a truth that we cling to depends on a certain point of view.  It is the constant pursuit of truth, beauty, freedom and above all else, love that drives us as we, and everyone that has ever been and ever will be share this pale blue dot. 

I am repeatedly drawn back to and humbled by this quote from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space: “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

So, no truth is ugly.  Truth rises above such concepts. The ugly is only where worth and understanding remains undiscovered.  And it is up to science to never give up the pursuit of truth.  For once the truth is discovered, we receive the gift of beauty, freedom and love.

You are the judge.