a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and every film ever shot could be viewed instantly in your home via an information superhighway, a high-capacity digital communication network… it sounds pretty grand, but in fact this is already happening on something called the internet’
Kate Bellingham told us in 1994.
1994!
Imagine a world without something called the internet. Imagine how hard it would be to shop, watch or destabilise democracy and seed disinformation.
William Wollard, former presenter on Tomorrow’s World, seen strolling up the roof of St Pancras Station in London in 1970, made possible through the cunning invention of Herbert Stokes’ ‘Roof Shoes’.
B: As children, the divide between science, pseudoscience and plain nonsense was not as marked in our minds as it is now, but perhaps paradoxically the lines were more clearly drawn in public discourse. In his book The Demon-Haunted World, published in 1995, Carl Sagan wrote: ‘I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.’
Sagan would have been horrified if his editor had said, ‘Carl, perhaps remove the grandchildren line…’
R: Having said that, to an inquisitive child in the 1970s, science was not only NASA and Einstein, but also Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle. When not leafing through David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, I might be reading The Unexplained magazine or Chariots of the Gods?, a book that didn’t ask if Neil Armstrong was an astronaut, but went further and asked if God was one.
The mind of a curious child was as open to questions of Bigfoot as it was of black holes; at that time, after all, the physical evidence for both was nil.
Made in 1967, the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film was the Blair Witch Project of its time, the juddering graininess giving it a disconcerting authenticity. Why juddering graininess makes evidence more persuasive, I have no idea. It looks very like a biggish man in a gorilla costume wandering through a partially cleared woodland, but could it really be so simple?
According to the TV documentary, Chinese scientists had examined the footage and decided a man could not walk in such a lumbering manner. I myself have tried to walk in that way, both in and out of my gorilla costume, and I’ve found it surprisingly easy, but then, that might be evidence of a recessive Bigfoot gene revealing my family’s shameful Sasquatch dating past. Eventually, evidence-based investigation by author Greg Long revealed the truth of the Bigfoot film.
Retired labourer Bob Heironimus saw a documentary about the ‘Bigfoot hoax’ in 1998 and decided now was the time to own up that he was the human in the costume, bulked out by American-football shoulder pads and encased in a very smelly and claustrophobic mask that he had not enjoyed wearing at all. Those sceptical of scepticism may consider that this is a typical attempt by the National Parks Service to cover up their family of Bigfoots, but the next stage of investigation reveals the reason why you must avoid using anyone with a prosthetic eye when attempting to pull the wool over other people’s functioning eyes. The Bigfoot’s right eye reflects sunlight when looking at the camera because Bob had a glass eye. The sceptic sceptic may still declare, ‘but how do we know the Bigfoot has not developed glass-eye technology?’ and the mystery can continue if they’d like it to.
Still from the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film made in North Carolina in October 1967.
Wilderness explorer C. Thomas Biscardi claimed to have captured Bigfoot on camera in northern California in 1981. He had been searching for the legendary ape-like creature for nearly a decade.
Another supposed ‘sighting’ of Bigfoot.
B: We recount this story for two reasons. One is to provide a glimpse into the confused and dusty book repository of Robin’s mind, where the windmills cannot turn freely because their mechanisms are clogged with VHS tape.
But it also illustrates what we hope The Infinite Monkey Cage is about; seeking evidence for working out why you believe what you believe and being open to changing your mind if the body of evidence leads to a different conclusion.
R: We currently live in a world where the quantity of information doubles with increasing speed. We can be overloaded by the extraneous. We can be misled by many groups and individuals who project the illusion of authority. For the open-minded and sceptical, the entire day can be lost just trying to work out if the front page of a newspaper is accurate. Dogma can be alluring when open-mindedness is so bewildering. It is troublesome to realise that nothing is 100 per cent right, but there are things which are the least-wrong version of events or ideas. Over the almost 100 episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage we have recorded so far, we have tried as often as possible – whether dealing with race, climate change or cosmology – to demonstrate that the elasticity of an idea is determined by the evidence available. Where there is no evidence, you can stretch an idea as much as you want, but in this case the idea may be of little practical use and not one to inform your decisions.
Of the two of us, I am probably more sceptical when it comes to the views of scientists, though Brian may say that’s because I don’t understand the equations. We’ll explore some of our more incendiary stand-up rows later in the book.
B: I hope that Monkey Cage also goes a long way to erasing the myth that science is a cold endeavour, where humans with an emotional range that barely goes from A to B sit and count things and make graphs from the results and then state their discoveries with error bars in a monotone drone. As Albert Einstein wrote, ‘with logic we can go from A to B, with imagination we can go wherever we want.’ As many of our guests have demonstrated in their work, imagination and passion are vital to understanding. We need to maintain our childhood desire to keep pulling at the threads of our understanding: ‘But why? But why? But why?’
‘I want a liquid mirror on the dark side of the Moon please. Get one of the really massive craters, and have a really really massive telescope on the dark side of the Moon. Just think what you could do with that!’
Professor Catherine Heymans
Series 16, Episode 1 (3 July 2017)
R: In the radio series we hope to ignite or reignite people’s passions. We hope that people
