Chapter 3

Prudence, who was listening to this discussion, interrupted, “But Reg, I never had any of these ‘geometrical patterns’ you mentioned.”

Reg smiled at her. “Quite right, Prudence, for such examples are fairly uncommon. When patients talked to their doctors about them, the patients’ experience was dismissed as fanciful, because there was nothing in the medical literature about it. You see, there was at that time no concept to explain the appearance of such visual disturbances. They probably arose out of quantum effects, and quantum theory did not develop until the 1920s, as did chaos theory which was probably connected as part of the explanation, as it leads to patterns. There was thus no basis for a medical explanation, and so the facts from patients were written off as irrelevant fanciful notions.”

Frances challenged him, “But Reg, surely just being an amateur doesn’t make you right about whatever obsesses you!”

“That is true, Frances. For example, the poet Goethe spent forty years trying to prove that Newton’s ideas about colour were wrong. He failed.” He thought for a moment, “Actually, on the subject of colour, a similar institutional blindness existed regarding the perception of vision. The accepted concept, historically, was that vision was an indivisible whole, so any description that counteracted that assumption must automatically be wrong.

A Swiss neurologist in the late 1880s had a patient who lost her perception of colour in her sight, and he wrote about this. It was another dead parrot: it didn’t fit the accepted explanation of vision, so it was ignored. It took 75 years before the real facts about our perception started to emerge. The brain collects all the different aspects of what we see, and puts them together as a complete picture. This means that someone can see the world only in shades of grey – what is called achromatopsia. It is very rare; only one person in about thirty thousand has it.”

Frances’s brow furrowed. “Reg, I reckon you are a polymath.”

Reg looked at her in surprise, then smiled.

“My darling wife, the word polymath is simply a descriptive term for anyone whose knowledge spans several disciplines. Most of today’s university students study several subjects, so could legitimately be polymaths as a result. The word has collected an aura of great learning, but need not be so. Call me that if you want; it doesn’t bother me.”

Frances acknowledged the difference. “Okay, but to get back to your amateurs: is it only amateurs that get sidelined? I remember that in astronomy there was a great dispute between the ‘Big Bang’ proponents and the ‘Steady State’ theorists. That took many years to resolve.”

“Your memory is accurate about that argument, Frances. The reason it took so long to resolve was that both proponents had high standing in astronomy, and could put forward cogent arguments supporting their individual theory. It had to wait for physical discoveries to disprove one or the other.

However, similar disputes can lead to good science being delayed by an individual scientist’s own pet theories. A case in point occurred in the 1930s when a 19-year-old genius named Chandrasekhar proposed a theory of stellar degeneration for stars too large to become white dwarfs. His patron and protector, A.S. Eddington, instead of taking this further for better understanding to either prove or disprove the theory, ridiculed Chandra with virulence and prevented its publication at the time.

The young man’ s ideas were important first steps towards black hole theory, and the dispute delayed that area of astronomy for thirty years. That was all because Eddington had his own cosmological views, and he did now want Chandrasekhar’s theory to succeed, as it would destroy his own concept. One man had delayed an important theory, to his own personal advantage; a not unusual occurrence in science.”

Prudence came back into the discussion. “You seem to be of the opinion that a lot of ideas could have arisen much earlier, had they not either been ridiculed, ignored, or did not fit prevailing accepted knowledge.”

Reg made waves of his hands, to indicate ambivalence. “I would say both yes and no to that statement, Prudence dear. My delving into the university library was an experience I thoroughly enjoyed. I was astounded at how few times some of the books had been accessed. There is a tendency to ignore old publications as being ‘out of date’. Many of the older books, seemingly dismissed this way, contained fascinating detail of past ideas and concepts. For example, I learned that Renaissance humanism embodied the tenet that humans have a limitless capacity for development. That concept only applies to people with the innate ability to learn. One has to be intellectually gifted to start with. It is not applicable to all men, as was proposed back then. This was a case of extending a limited set to be the set of all men, and it didn’t apply.

History is full of ‘what-ifs’, where we today can say, “Why did no-one comment on this back then? For example, why did Newton or Galileo not come up with chaos theory? They were perfectly aware of waves, eddies in the currents of water in streams, storms in the sky; typical chaotic behaviour that did not match prevailing understanding of the time. Existing ideas of the laws of nature presumed on simplicity. Stormy fluctuations of air and water offer no simplicity of solution. Today we need supercomputers to give a generalised idea of what is happening with the weather.

Even the great Leonardo da Vinci made many studies of the flow of water, and was fascinated by the way eddies formed around obstacles. Why didn’t he come up with chaos theory? The answer is probably that despite his brilliant mind, there was no prevailing concept that he could bring to bear on the subject. Most scientists further develop existing facts and theories using new observations to advance current thinking.”

“So what makes the genius of a Newton, Da Vinci, or Galileo? What do they have that others don’t?” Prudence wanted to know.

“No-one really knows that answer. It is put down to intellectual insight, to seeing things that others don’t see, but how that comes about is unclear. That spark of genius has to be there, but as I mentioned, not every genius gets to take their true place in human society. They have to have some luck in who is around them or supporting them.

Galileo, for example, was constrained by church dogma. If his ideas conflicted with what was the position of the papal authorities, he had to be very careful in how he couched his ideas. He gambled with contact between himself, and his sponsors, and papal investigators. At one point, things got so bad that he was kept under house arrest for years after his work was ruled as heretical. His heresy was to say that the Earth revolved around the Sun. He had tried to use a form of words that did not specifically state that as a fact, but the Holy Office ruled against him, and sentenced him to life imprisonment, to be served in the form of house arrest. The papal belief at the time was that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Any work he produced while under house arrest had to conform to Papal authority, so religious belief superseded factual, observable, knowledge.”

“I remember being told about Galileo’s troubles,” said Prudence. “His main problem was in being in Italy, where the Papal rules were sacrosanct at the time. Perhaps if he had moved to England, out of papal control, he would have been free to publish his work without fear of retribution?”

“A valid point, Prudence. He toyed with leaving Italy, but left it too late to come to that decision. In the 1930s, many German scientists, especially those who had Jewish connections, viewed the rise of the Nazis with concern, and began moving, mostly to the USA, but some to the UK. It is surprising how much scientific work Germany still continued to produce afterwards, for there is a factor called critical mass that applies to humans as much as to uranium.

If you gather together a large number of scientists, they begin to produce more results than they did separately. As with uranium and its neutrons, ideas seem to spark between scientists under such conditions, leading swiftly to solutions that might otherwise take years to come about.

Of course, a similar effect happens with crowds, but there it seems always to be bad ideas that are stimulated, transforming the crowd into a mob. All it takes is a spark – a shouted demand, or a fist thrown at an outsider, and the move between crowd and mob occurs with some rapidity. It is wise to move away the minute such a spark is noticed, or you will get swept up in the mob rule that follows. Anyone who offers a view counter to the mob decision gets attacked as an outsider.”

Freda had been listening for a while, and now asked, “If there is a critical mass situation, what causes rational human beings to become irrational, Reg.? Do we know? I haven’t heard of an underlying cause.”

“That is one of many so far unresolved enigmas of human behaviour, Freda. Proposed explanations abound, but none has a scientific, provable, basis for the rationale put forward. They are all simply ideas that have arisen since about 1900, and many reflect the rise of city conurbations.

Curiously, if a crowd is structured: everyone knowing what to do, be it sitting in seats at a concert, or obeying a leader, following his instructions, or similar requirement, the crowd behaves itself, having a recognised aim. The unstructured crowd is the one that can turn into a mob, and can become a riot. You seldom have that in the concert hall!

There is a believable concept that the ideal size of a human grouping is about 150. It is known as Dunbar’s number, from anthropologist Robin Dunbar. It shows up well in the Domesday Book. Historically, once a village population grows larger than that, there is a tendency for some of the group to split off and found another village. That works only if there is the available space and resources for another village to be viable. If most of the resources are concentrated in the one general location, the tendency switches to increased size of the community, to make maximum use of these resources.

The resources may be a river mouth where a port is an asset, and the river water is also. A deposit of coal, or iron, or copper, or any other metal, draws people to mine it. A forest, grassy plains or simply good alluvial soil is an attractor for growth. It also leads to the equivalent of a police force, to enforce rules.”

“So the growth of cities is a matter of crowd psychology, is it?” Frances questioned.

Reg was ambivalent again. “Yes and no. There is a purely physical rationale for people to gather near the resources, but the argument for crowd psychology is a viable add-on. The structural requirements imposed by resources, for example roads, bridges, and other patterns in a conurbation, normally prevent mobs forming.

There are a few occasions, such as a time of shortages locally, when for instance farmers try to ship food to a better-paying market, rather than sell it locally to the people who are hungry. Now THAT is a very good excuse for a mob forming to prevent the shipping of the foodstuffs.”

“Oh, yes. You are thinking of the Irish potato famine, aren’t you?”

“Actually, no. There was a case in 1847 in Wick, Caithness, where the potato crop failed, from the same blight, and grain was being shipped abroad. An organised well-structured mob formed at the harbour, intent on preventing the grain from being shipped. This specific target was a demonstrably moral object, and so the mob was not violent, just persistent.

For a day or two they succeeded, but then a troop of soldiers was brought in, to allow the shipping to operate as normal. What happened next was that a group of people stood at the top of a steep brae – a hill - and threw stones down at the soldiers. At this point overkill took over in the response. The local Sheriff ordered the troops to fire on the crowd, but the only two actually hit by the firing were innocent bystanders; probably the soldiers were trying to avoid killing the local perpetrators. One was a woman whose arm was grazed, but the other was a cooper on his way to work and his hand was shattered by a musket ball. He ended up having to seek assistance from the parochial board, as he could no longer do his work. Today he would have received compensation and probably have his hand saved by modern medicine, but in 1847 there was nothing that could be done about his hand, and so he was penniless; destitute.”

“Oh, the poor man!” exclaimed Frances.

“Yes, innocent people all over the world suffered in the past, including local people when an army passed by. The army would help themselves to anything they needed – it was euphemistically called ‘living off the land’ - usually without any recompense from the country or group fielding the army.

It was a technique that was used in ancient times, but gradually superseded by a baggage train which carried the food supplies. Then in the late 1700s the French Revolutionary forces reverted to foraging, with each division foraging in a different area, so that they stripped a wider trail and allowed the army to move forward at a fast pace. Baggage trains meant bulky and slow wagons that held up the army’s speed of advance in an age of poor roads.”

Frances gestured, “See! A polymath: Military tactics; technology; social psychology; history; geography, astronomy; you name it. You have them all at your fingertips, Reg.”

Reg grinned back at her, “But not personal interactions, Frances. You had to teach me that subject from scratch.”

“Yes, dammit, but you have learned that as well. You are nearly caught up with the rest of us, darling.”

“I can put it down to my darling wives, can’t I, Frances?”

She nodded, but added, “So, as you are so clever, I will get you to fill up my claim form on Daddy’s building insurance. I told him we would do that, to save him the bother. You should be competent at that, my man, and avoid the obvious pitfalls; but you still have difficulty at times, such as when you have to face strangers.”

Reg frowned, “But everyone at the university was a stranger when I arrived.”

Frances told him, “That was different. You could be in classes and around other students without having to perform much interaction, except answering the lecturer when asked a direct question. In fact, apart from speaking to the lecturers, you hardly said a word to anyone to begin with; remember?”

Reg acknowledged that what she said was true. “That seems so long ago, Frances my love.”

She gave him a look of disgust. “Reginald Robertson, it was only a few months ago! You should pay attention to the passing of time, my dear husband. You have four wives that need you to pay loving attention to them on a regular basis. Remember?”

He nodded gleefully. “That is a chore I will gladly attend to, Frances.” In response, Frances grabbed his face and gave him a long passionate kiss.

The evening meal included a long discussion about things that Reg had said earlier, and they kicked it around until everyone was cognizent of the salient points.

Erika laughed at Reg’s erudition. “My love, I am sure you don’t know everything! When for example, did currency start up?”

Reg appeared crestfallen. “Erika, you have me there, for no-one really knows. All I can talk about is the first known examples of currency, which is cowrie shells, recorded by the Chinese as being used as symbols of generosity between rulers. That goes back to about 2000 BC.

The first real manufactured transaction symbols for buying and selling, was again Chinese, when around 700 BC they began using symbols of metal agricultural implements. They were known as spade money and knife money, for those were the shapes depicted, rather than the round coins we find later, in around 200 BC.