SGU Episode 360
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Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, June 6th 2012, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,
B: Hey, everybody.
S: Rebecca Watson,
R: Hello, everyone.
S: Jay Novella,
J: Hey, guys.
S: And Evan Bernstein.
E: Buona sera, everyone.
S: Buona sera. How are you doing, Evan?
E: Just fine. Relaxed, back from vacation and ready to go.
R: That's right!
S: You'd rather be in Italy, though, right?
R: How was it?
E: Well... Exotic. It was wonderful. Great time, saw a lot of stuff: Vatican City, Pompeii, Isle of Capri. It was really great; great time.
This Day in Skepticism (00:47)
R: Well, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news after that nice vacation, but today's This Day in Science is kind of a downer, because today, the day that we're recording this, June 6, Ray Bradbury died at the age of--
B: That sucks!
J: How old was he?
R: He was 91 years old.
B: Whoa.
E: 91 years young.
J: Can't complain.
R: At least, you know, at least he had a good long life. We can be thankful for that. He turned out a lot of great works in that time. He got a lot of kudos. Our listeners are probably most familiar with his works like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. Oddly, he says Fahrenheit 451 was his only science fiction book. He had an interesting definition of science fiction, so he always maintained that he was not a science fiction writer, even though they put that on all of his books, "greatest science fiction writer ever".
B: Wow, didn't know that
E: Helped sell a lot of those books, yeah.
S: Yeah, The Martian Chronicles, that's not science fiction? Come on.
R: He says that's it's fantasy, because it couldn't actually happen, and he thinks that science fiction should just be about what could possibly happen.
S: Oh, I see.
R: You know, that said, I think everyone will continue to remember him as one of the greatest science fiction writers ever.
E: And prolific. What, 50 full books, 600 short stories and essays, and that's all he did. Wrote and wrote and wrote some more.
R: Yeah, and his short stories are my favorite; I prefer his short stories to his longer works, personally.
B: Yeah, me too.
E: He's a descendant of Mary Bradbury, who was a-- well, she was found to be a witch during the Salem Witch Trial years. And she was actually persecuted, arrested but never-- sentence was never carried out; they kept delaying it and delaying it until she escaped; she made a getaway, until the whole brouhaha with witches went away. She was able to expire on her own terms. So, I thought that was interesting. Never knew that before about him.
B: Wow.
R: Another interesting Ray Bradbury fact: On letters of note today they included a letter from Bradbury in which he discussed how he originally came to write Fahrenheit 451. He was trying to find office space and was unable to find it anywhere, and so he happened to go past a university library and he heard the tick-tack of typewriters coming from down below. And he realized that in the basement of the library, they rented out typewriters for 10 cents an hour, so he gathered up all of his dimes, which amounted to less than $10 and he went down to the library basement and he sat down and he ended up writing Fahrenheit 451 in a couple of days, basically.
B: Whoa.
E & J: Wow.
R: He wrote 25,000 words in just a few days. Nine days is how many days he says it took him, and it was the UCLA library, I should mention. And here's what he wrote in this letter:
How could I have written so many words so quickly? It was because of the library. All of my friends, all of my loved ones were on the shelves above and shouted, yelled and shrieked at me to be creative. So I ran up and down the stairs, finding books and quotes to put in my "fireman novella". You can imagine how exciting it was to do a book about book-burning in the very presence of the hundreds of my beloveds on the shelves. It was the perfect way to be creative. That's what the library does.
J: Wow.
S: Yeah, it's definitely a classic; I really enjoyed that book. I could also see how he wrote it in nine days.
E: (laughs) What are you saying?
J: I get that; it makes sense.
S: You know, it's-- There's one big idea in that book, you know? It's cool; it's great, but you could just see that it was written that way.
R: Yeah, I don't think it's his best work; like I say, I much prefer his short stories and I think that Fahrenheit 451-- you know, it's like, it's a polemical novel, which is not necessarily going to be-- it's good for being the most well-read amongst junior high school students, and for good reason, but isn't necessarily the best read for adults.
B: Should we explain what typewriters are to people?
(laughing)
B: I guess most people know.
E: A good point!
B: Most people should know.
E: They can Google it.
J: When he wrote that, there was no such thing as a print button.
R: (chuckles) Right.
S: Yeah.
E: He was kind of anti-technology, especially at the end; he felt that there was "too much Internet", as he said, too much cell phone use, and he was-- he felt it was kind of taking away from our ability to really have meaningful conversations with each other. He was definitely an analog man, you know, and as the years went on, got stuck in the digital times, but-- you know, he's a classic, no doubt about it, you had to admire him.
R: I think he said-- didn't he say that there are "too many Internets", isn't that his quote?
E: Yeah, I think he did say that.
J: Well, that's pretty much the only way you could say that.
R: (chuckles) That's true. He was a bit dystopian, I think, in his outlook on technology, because he would-- he saw technology as a way of distancing ourselves and of limiting human communication, when in fact, I think we would all agree that it actually does the opposite in a lot of ways. But he would see-- you know, he mentioned once-- I read a bit about him seeing a man and a woman walking along the street and the woman had a-- she was carrying a little radio and she had a-- like an earbud in her ear and he was marveling at how the guy next to her might not have even existed. It didn't even matter because she was listening to far-off voices from a distant land. And to him that signaled something really terrible, this lack of connection with other people in the real world, but I think that he was a little short-sighted in that regard, a little too pessimistic.
E: He was 91 in the end, you know, so we're talking several generations.
S: That's a hard transition to make for people who lived most of their life in the pre-digital age.
R: Yeah.
J: I think part of it is true. You know, we've all been in a situation where you've been with a family member or friends or whatever and everyone's sitting there on their iPhone. It's OK to admit that, you know, any big technological advancement doesn't necessarily mean it's an improvement on all-- all over the board, it's--
R: Right, but also, I think you need to be not so quick to say that a change is automatically bad; maybe it's not the end of the human race if we spend more time talking to people around the world instead of the people right in front of us; I don't know. It does annoy the shit out of me when people open up their cell phones at dinner, but...
S: Right.
E: Well, like Professor Farnsworth said, he said, "technology isn't inherently evil; it's how it's used, like the death ray."
(laughing)
B: The death ray...
News Items
Show #360: SGU Comes full circle ( )
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Transit of Venus ( )
Legislating Science ( )
Neurologica: Legislating Science in North Carolina
Science Education ( )
ClassroomScience.org: Second Year Science Graduation Requirement Elimination: Governor Stands Firm
OC Register: Calif. students rank 47th in science
NCSE: Creationist success in South Korea?
Quickie with Bob: Vapor Storage ( )
Discovery news: Movie Frames Saved to Atomic Vapor
Who's That Noisy? ( )
Answer to last week: holosystolic murmur
Questions and Emails ( )
Peer Review
Steve, I know that you know what peer review is, but I think you sometimes mislead your audience when you mention that some new idea has not yet gone through "peer review" as a way to validate the claims of the idea. Peer review is just the initial step in the validation process. It is a series of experts who review a paper to make sure that there is no blatant error or mistake in what has been written. Once a paper has gone through peer review and then is published, the real validation then begins as other scientists try to duplicate the results. Only after repeated cases of duplicating the results or of failed attempts to invalidate it, does the claim start to have validity. Peer review does not help against collecting faulty data or downright fraud. And it is sometimes possible that the claim is not true even though it seems to have been validated. This last case is what pseudoscientists count on - that their claim is the one out of thousands that will overturn established scientific principles, something that rarely happens. A discussion of this might make an interesting segment on the SGU. Marv Zelkowitz Columbia, MD
Science or Fiction ( )
{jingle)
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:14:36)
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
Ray Bradbury
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