A Wiseman Once Said....

"We are twelve billion light years from the edge, That's a guess. No one can ever say it's true. But I know that I will always be with you" - Nine Million Bicycles, Katie Melua

 

Professor Richard Wiseman and celebrated science author Simon Singh were listening to Katie Melua's 2005 top ten hit Nine Million Bicycles but something didn't sit right with Singh. We're not twelve billion light years from the edge (we're 13.7 million light years from the edge of the observable universe), it's not a guess (it's a good estimate with well defined error bars), it's not that nobody can ever say it's true (scientists do say it's true whilst acknowledging later refinement may be needed), and Katie doesn't know for certain that she will always love 'you' (she's only working on the present available information, people change, people fall out of love).

Brilliantly, when Wiseman and Singh approached Melua about her 'bad science' she got very angry. Not with them. They're nice people. Angry with herself. Melua loves science and is very very keen on astrology particularly. So she rerecorded a version with the lyrics to changed reflect Singh and Wiseman's suggested amendments.

Last night at The Duke of Greenwich, with Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, a little bit of the amended version was played and everybody in the place, I have no doubt, came away from the experience with a more positive opinion of Katie Melua than they did before. Many would have had no opinion on her beforehand. I was ambivalent at best. But now I know that the Georgian born pop singer is a good sport.

I'd also wager that everybody who attended last night's talk, How To Turn A Tea Towel Into A Chicken And Other Stories, would have come away with a very positive view of Professor Richard Wiseman too. It being a Skeptics audience most of them would already have had one but Wiseman's talk was interesting, funny (I LOL'd quite a few times) and didn't pander to the audience. Yes, he's a skeptic. But he's not cynical and he believes that those who have faith in the paranormal have a lot to tell us. What that is may not be about ghosts, telepathy, or levitation but is more likely about how the human brain works and how we make sense of the world.

Don't call believers stupid, basically. Calling people stupid doesn't tend to change their minds (I see people on social media who still believe that constantly telling people off gets results or that appealing to evidence will change the political position of people who didn't arrive at that position due to evidence in the first place) and is, quite simply, very rude. Not something you could accuse the cheerful and avuncular Wiseman of. When he makes a joke (as he does often) it's usually at his own expense.

That's because he's confident in himself. Those who pick on others usually aren't. It's a good job that Wiseman is confident in himself because last night's talk was, more or less - give or take a magic trick or two here and a bit of audience participation there, an autobiography of his life and career and what a life and career it's been. As a child, Wiseman's hero was the Hungarian-American escapologist and illusionist Harry Houdini (1874-1926). Inspired by Houdini, Wiseman began doing magic (for which read magic tricks) but at the same time he also became interested in psychology and read Dale Carnegie's influential 1936 self-help book How To Win Friends And Influence People. To be a successful magician, he reasoned, one needed to be likeable.

Soon he'd be combining his interests and magic and psychology and there were certain things that piqued his interest further. One of which was an upside down photo of Margaret Thatcher that, upside down, looks very real but turned round soon becomes apparent isn't. We see what we expect to see and not what's actually there (see also the rabbit/duck illusion - below) and that's not a fault of ours, but actually one of our great plus points. There is a lot in our field of vision most of the time. We have become very adept at filtering out what we don't need to process, what we already know is there. It's a time saving exercise essentially and it's one that can cleverly be exploited by illusionists.

Wiseman attened University College London and joined the Magic Circle (happily and all too conveniently very near each other) before moving on to Edinburgh and then taking up his current position at the University of Hertfordshire where he looks into paranormal/skeptical stuff. Something he seems to be having a great deal more success with than the time he toured as the Captain Fearless Magic Show.

He's looked into, and lightly debunked, telepathy, deja vu, precognition, ghosts, and deja vu all over again! A photo of 'ghostly energy' on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh was proved to be a just the photographer's spectacles blurred in the image and other 'ghost' photos were even worse. Amongst the ghosts were a television set, a man smoking, and a bottle of Mr Muscle. Pareidolia is a common event where people see faces in things that aren't faces and Wiseman ran through a few of these stretching from bathroom taps and holdalls to slippers and roofs and, of course, that evergreen favourite:- the face of Jesus on a slice of toast.

Another investigation that Wiseman got involved in was that of people who believed they could use the power of their minds, meditation, to walk barefoot over hot coals. These firewalkers would walk over ten to fifteen feet of hot coals as evidence but it turned out it's quite easy to walk that distance over hot coals as long as you do it fast - and there are very good reasons why you would do it fast.

Wiseman and his colleagues challenged the firewalkers to walk over sixty feet of hot coals barefoot and, spoiler alert, none of them succeeded. Their meditation, the power they believed they could exercise over their own bodies, didn't work for them. One person who had signed up for the challenge dropped out at the last moment saying that her guardian angel, the one that would protect her during the firewalking challenge, had deserted her. Bastard timing, guardian angel, bastard timing.

Then there was the supposedly telepathic dog who it was said could tell when his owner was returning home. Camera film showed the dog running to the window to look out of it just at the same time as his owner announced she was returning home from a restaurant. Sounds good but further investigation showed the dog running to the window to look out of it on so many occasions that it would have been surprising if the dog hadn't been looking out of the window at just the moment it was required to do so to 'prove' telepathy.

Another subject that Wiseman took on was that of 'financial astronomy'. That's when people use the 'birth' dates of companies and their horoscopes to make decisions regarding investing in them. Wiseman got a random five year old to choose for investors and not only was his success rate far far batter than that of the supposed financial astronomers, it was better than mainstream investment advisors too.

All of the work that Wiseman has carried out has been done with both a passion for science but also a keen enthusiasm to entertain as well as inform. He doesn't look down at people who see the world differently as him. He looks across at them. Sees what they believe and tries to interpret it in a way that makes sense, scientifically, to him. At the same time he recognises that emotion plays a huge part in the decisions that we as human beings make and that we are not always the rational animals we like to sometimes think we are.

He's written quite a few books (Jesus Christ Explained sounds a good one and even better for the complaint he got that in the book he failed to explain anything about Jesus Christ) and perhaps I should read some of them. For now, I'm glad I attended one of his talks (the second I've been to - there was one at The Monarch in Camden some years ago). Thanks to Jade, Paula, Tim, David, and Michael for joining me, thanks to Goddard's Pie & Mash for tasty food beforehand, thanks to The Duke of Greenwich, thanks to Professor Chris French for hosting, and thanks to Professor Richard Wiseman for a great evening and, of course, a great career. Long may it continue.