Mad scientists and Dad
I am a This American Life junkie as anyone who’s been following this blog knows. For those who are just joining us, TAL is a wonderful radio show on NPR in which they tell a number of stories, most often true. Old-school storytelling at its best. A few days ago, I was listening to an episode about an electrician who thought he could disprove Einstein’s theories. I was laughing hysterically when slowly, insidiously, my life changed.
This episode is about a guy named Bob, an electrician who starts studying physics in his spare time. He studied Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2 and concluded that Einstein had got it all wrong (It’s E=mc, you see). Bob began telling people that he could prove, with a few simple diagrams, how Einstein had erred.
This type of thing isn’t unusual. There are lots of nuts who think they can disprove modern physics - so much so that there’s even a test for it. Bob took the test. It said he was a nut. Bob wasn’t convinced. So, the devilish folks at TAL sat him down with a physics professor. After hours of arguing, Bob & the doctor of physics almost came to blows. In the end, Bob decided that the professor didn’t know what he was talking about. The good doctor had been studying it too long to see the obvious.
The thing is, Bob doesn’t sound nuts. He sounds intelligent and rational. He actually sounds like my old high-school physics teacher. He’s just very, very wrong.
As I listened and laughed, I realized that Bob sounded a whole lot like my father - coincidentally also named Bob. Their conversational and debate styles were identical. Calm and didactic, each opinion is stated as an unquestionable truth. Offer a counter-argument, and he’ll try to convince you that you don’t understand, or that the argument is irrelevant, or he’ll shift to undisputed ground where he can still be right.
I gave up arguing with my dad when I was very young. There was no point to it. Later in adolescence and even adulthood, I’d cringe watching him declaim his opinion - an opinion gleaned from watching TV and reading the news - to some poor soul who couldn’t muster the courage to rebut or run. Once he deduced something there was no convincing him of anything else. Bob, the electrician, sounded exactly like this.
Near the end of the episode, they interview Bob’s wife asking her a simple yet brilliant question: “What if Bob’s wrong?” Naturally, she says that she’d still love him; it doesn’t matter to her whether he’s right; etc. She does offer some insight into his character: Bob’s a self-taught man. Absolutely everything he knows, he taught himself through experience. To him, therefore, the entire world can be understood by simply observing and thinking about it for a bit. Maybe draw a few sketches. Bob lives emperically.
I suddenly understood my father. He too is self-taught. Of course any random conclusion he comes to is fact - that’s the way the world works. Truth by deduction. All my frustration and embarrassment vaporized. I forgave my father. In fact, I began to take pride in him. He’s always watching, thinking, figuring things out. He has clear opinions and is not afraid to act on them. Sure, he’s wrong sometimes (he voted for Bush) - but he’s right even more frequently. More than that, he has some really good ideas.
Come to think of it, my dad’s pretty cool.
And, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I seem to have a habit of thinking a lot about the world, having strong opinions based on scraps of information. This blog is all the evidence you need.
