Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Antiscience
appreciate humour in so serious a matter. But the most they were
able to pin on Condon, as I recall, was that in high school he had a
job delivering a socialist newspaper door-to-door on his bicycle.
Imagine you seriously want to understand what quantum mechanics
is about. There is a mathematical underpinning that you must
first acquire, mastery of each mathematical subdiscipline leading
you to the threshold of the next. In turn you must learn arithmetic,
Euclidian geometry, high school algebra, differential and
integral calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations,
vector calculus, certain special functions of mathematical physics,
matrix algebra, and group theory. For most physics students, this
might occupy them from, say, third grade to early graduate school
- roughly fifteen years. Such a course of study does not actually
involve learning any quantum mechanics, but merely establishing
the mathematical framework required to approach it deeply.
The job of the popularizer of science, trying to get across some
idea of quantum mechanics to a general audience that has not
gone through these initiation rites, is daunting. Indeed, there are
no successful popularizations of quantum mechanics in my opinion,
partly for this reason. These mathematical complexities are
compounded by the fact that quantum theory is so resolutely
counterintuitive. Common sense is almost useless in approaching
it. It's no good, Richard Feynman once said, asking why it is that
way. No one knows why it is that way. That's just the way it is.
Now suppose we were to approach some obscure religion or
New Age doctrine or shamanistic belief system sceptically. We
have an open mind; we understand there's something interesting
here; we introduce ourselves to the practitioner and ask for an
intelligible summary. Instead we are told that it's intrinsically too
difficult to be explained simply, that it's replete with 'mysteries',
but if we're willing to become acolytes for fifteen years, at the end
of that time we might begin to be prepared to consider the subject
seriously. Most of us, I think, would say that we simply don't have
the time; and many would suspect that the business about fifteen
years just to get to the threshold of understanding is evidence that
the whole subject is a bamboozle: if it's too hard for us to
understand, doesn't it follow that it's too hard for us to criticize