Science and Nature

In 1972, the meteorologist Edward Lorenz gave a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington D.C, entitled “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”. The audience expected a learned exposition of Chaos Theory and were dismayed that he should choose to use the entirety of his allotted 1hr speaking time to rage at and hector his audience, calling them “fucking dummies”, and telling them “It’s a goddamned butterfly, goddammit! It couldn’t blow the dandruff of my goddamned shoulder. A tornado?! Are you out of your tiny minds?! Jeez!”

The truth, of course, is that he had indeed intended to speak at length about Chaos Theory, and was set to do so until, only seven minutes before he was due at the lectern, a fat man sat down hard in Brighton, England, and complained that the cricket had been rained off. This apparently unconnected incident led to a dizzying and intricately linked chain of events that – for reasons beyond the scope of contemporary physics – led to Mr Lorenz embarking on the bizarre, spittle-flecked tirade against his fellow professionals in Washington. The irony of this episode was not lost on Mr Lorenz, who devoted the remainder of his career to tracing back the chain of events that led to his downfall, eventually tracking the fat man down to a public house in Anglesey, where they laughed about the incident and combined their intellects to win £4 from the ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ quiz machine.

The point of this story is that certain truisms may seem absurd to the enquiring mind. But the even more enquiring mind will look again and find that they are indeed true, which is why they are called ‘truisms’ you fool.

For instance, it is often claimed that, if you put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand typewriters then, eventually, one of them will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. The only empirical testing of this hypothesis took place in a laboratory in Tahiti in 1985. The experiment was abandoned after 2 days, and the results published in the renowned monkey literary journal ‘REEEEEHHHHHH, oooohh-oooohhh!!!! Tolstoy’. The investigators concluded that “in reality, a thousand monkeys left in a warehouse with a thousand typewriters will…fling their shit around…eat their own shit…smash the typewriters to pieces…begin to kill each other”.

Unfortunately, what the researchers failed to realise was that the monkey who would eventually have produced the complete works of Shakespeare – an introspective, bookish marmoset named Warren – found that being surrounded by other, less educated monkeys completely disrupted his creative flow, and made it impossible to concentrate. At the very least, the research team should have reported Warren’s impressive efforts in writing the first 4 acts of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus under such difficult conditions.