The Last Word On Nothing

One of the campuses where I teach is haunted. Everybody says so. They hear noises in the night. They encounter cold spots. They come to work in the morning and find a seemingly immovable file cabinet in the middle of a hallway. My role, you might not be surprised to hear, is that of resident skeptic.

The role isn’t one I cultivated, but it’s one I easily acquired. The faculty member who reported seeing lights in the windows of a room that, when she entered the building, she found to be dark? I walked her back outside, asked her where she was when she saw the lights, and offered an explanation. The path was icy; she would have been walking with her head down. When she did look up to see where she was going, she would have no more than glanced in the direction of the building. The windows of the room in question would have caught the reflection from the streetlamps along the path, and the windows of the next room over were in fact lit up. At a glance, the combination of lights could easily give the illusion of emanating from a room that was dark.

She said she now understood that what she’d seen could easily have been an optical illusion, and she thanked me, and then she went back inside and told the rest of the faculty that she’d seen a ghost.

To avoid seeming like a scold or a killjoy, I’ve stopped offering rational explanations. But I do regret my role as resident skeptic. I feel it doesn’t do me—or, more to the point, the scientific method that I’ve come to represent—justice. The purpose of science isn’t just to explain away mysteries. It’s to discover mysteries. Most scientists, as well as those of us who write or read about science, want to be surprised. Yes, part of the fun and satisfaction of science is finding a rational explanation for the seemingly irrational. But another part of the fun and satisfaction—the part that the role of resident skeptic doesn’t encompass—is encountering the seemingly irrational. We want our world to be rocked. I want to see a ghost.

Now, whenever I have to suppress my skepticism, I think of a conversation I once witnessed. An astronomer and a theoretical physicist—a professional observer and a professional explainer—were having a drink in the café of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. They were talking about “belief” in the scientific sense—about our confidence in how the universe works—and the astronomer was saying he didn’t believe in it. “There are only predictions,” he said.

The theorist said he had to disagree. To make his point, he picked up his water glass. “If I drop it,” he said, “it will fall to the table.”

The observer shook his head. Yes, he said, every glass throughout history, when released, has fallen. “But once it might not. You can only predict that it will—to a high degree of confidence,” he conceded.

The theorist shrugged. “I believe it will.”

The astronomer shrugged, too. He picked up his glass of wine, sipped, gingerly returned it to the table.

“I hope it won’t.”

That’s the spirit.

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Image credits: upper, Will Murray (Willscrlt); lower, blogspot.com.