MOTION MOUNTAIN

concepts, lies and patterns of nature 283
Vol. IV, page 103
Ref. 257
subjective, so that statements about them are easily checked. Therefore, good lies avoid
mathematics.*
Thirdly, a ‘good’ lie should avoid statements about observations and use interpretations
instead. For example, some people like to talk about other universes, which implies
talking about fantasies, not about observations. However, a really good lie has to avoid
to make statements which are meaningless; the most destructive comment that can be
made about a statement is the one used by the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli:
‘That is not even wrong.’
Fourthly, a good lie avoids talking about observations, but focuses on imagination.
Only truth needs to be empirical;speculative statements differ from truth by not caring
about observations. If you want to lie ‘well’ even with empirical statements, you need to
pay attention. There are two types of empirical statements: specific statements and universal
statements. For example, ‘On the 2nd of June 1960 I saw a green swan swimming
on the northern shore of the lake of Varese’ is specific, whereas ‘All ravens are black’
is universal, since it contains the term ‘all’. There is a well-known difference between
the two, which is important for lying well: specific statements cannot be falsified, they
areonly verifiable, and universal statements cannot be verified, they are only falsifiable.
Why is this so?
Universal statements, such as ‘the speed of light is constant’, cannot be tested for all
possible cases. (Note that if they could, they would not be universal statements, but just
a list of specific ones.) However, they can be reversed by a counter-example. Another
exampleoftheuniversal type is: ‘Apples fall upwards.’ Since it is falsified by an observation
conducted by Newton several centuries ago, or by everyday experience, it qualifies
as an (easily detectable) lie. In general therefore, lying by stating the opposite of a theory
is usually unsuccessful. If somebody insists on doing so, the lie becomes a superstition,
a belief, a prejudice or a doctrine. These are the low points in the art of lying. A famous
case of insistence on a lie is that of the colleagues of Galileo, who are said to have refused
to look through his telescope to be convinced that Jupiter has moons, an observation
that would have shaken their belief that everything turns around the Earth. Obviously
these astronomers were amateurs in the art of lying. A good universal lie is one whose
counter-exampleisnotsoeasilyspotted.
Thereshouldbenoinsistenceonliesinphysics.Unfortunately,classicalphysicsisfull
oflies.Wewill dispelthemduringtherestofourwalk.
Lying by giving specific instead of universal statements is much easier. (‘I can’t remember.’)
Even a specific statement such as ‘yesterday the Moon was green, cubic and
smelled of cheese’ can never be completely falsified: there is no way to show with absolute
certainty that this is wrong. The only thing that we can do is to check whetherthe
statementiscompatiblewithotherobservations, such as whether the different shape affectedthetidesasexpected,whetherthesmellcanbefoundinaircollectedthatday,etc.
Agoodspecificlieisthusnotinevident contrast with other observations.**
* Inmathematics, ‘true’ is usuallyspecified as ‘deducible’ or ‘provable’; this isin factaspecial caseof the
usual definition of truth, namely ‘correspondence with facts’,if one remembers that mathematics studies
theproperties ofclassifications.
** It is often difficult or tedious to verify statements concerning the past, and the difficulty increases with
the distance in time. That is why people can insist on the occurrence of events which are supposed to be
Motion Mountain – The Adventure of Physics copyright © Christoph Schiller June 1990–November 2015 free pdf file available at www.motionmountain.net