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COMMENTARY
September 24, 2011
Spontaneous combustion
The inquest into the death of Michael Faherty, age 76, of Balybane, Galway, Ireland, has ruled out foul play. It has ruled out, too, every other possible cause of poor Mr. Faherty's demise. His body was found charred, in the middle of his sitting room, with fire damage only to the ceiling above, and the floor immediately beneath, his remains. Yes, there was a fire in the hearth, but it was fully contained, and there was no indication whatever of an "accelerant."A classic case of spontaneous combustion. This is what the Irish coroner ruled, timidly, after consulting the forensic experts, and reading available literature on the subject. For as Sherlock Holmes said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." The post-modern mind cannot cope with ideas like "impossible." Either everything is impossible, or nothing is. But the modern mind, which lies just below it, wants a natural explanation for everything. Wants, moreover, a plausible explanation. "Spontaneous combustion" is an irritant. Mr. Faherty spontaneously combusted, why? Sounds like action at a distance. But modern physics gives us action at a distance. Or more precisely, quantum mechanics provides a number of irritants to the plausible view. Particles "separated at birth," and moving apart, each around the speed of light, may continue to act as if conjoined, even after they have been separated by an unbridgeable gulf in space-time. Analogous phenomena have often been reported of human twins. Poor Albert Einstein (who had no twin) was driven nearly crazy by developments in physics after he had apparently settled the speed limit of the universe. A creature of the plausible, he continued to reject the implications of such irritants, and look instead for "hidden" physical explanations. Even his belief in God was plausible, not faith-based. He was a true modern. I'm one, too; I cannot shake it off. When physicists hit me with multiple-world hypotheses, which seem to follow naturally from the observed irritants, my mind recoils. The universe was plenty large already; I don't want finitude expanded any more. We learned this week, from the CERN scientists in Italy, that the speed of light has now been exceeded. They are testing their instruments again and again, but the result appears like spontaneous combustion. Neutrinos have been measured, arriving at destination a little ahead of light. Over vast distances, they would arrive a lot ahead. (This hurts my brain.) Neutrinos were already an irritant in themselves. They pass through solid rock and whole planets as if they weren't there. (Surely that is rude.) In other science news, we find the Darwinists still at it. They have again found a few old bones in Africa - the hand of an adult female "Australopithecus sediba." And, yet again, they have announced it is a "game changer." That would be a changer in the same old game in which a single fossil, preserved by chance in the strata of 100,000 simian generations (literally), is nonchalantly plugged into an evolutionary chart, and then shown to the kids as "settled science." Darwin, Marx, and Freud - the fathers of post-modernism. I prefer physics, because its hypotheses are actually disprovable. (The scientists at CERN know a game-changer when they see one.) And I'll take action at a distance over a very long row of imaginary missing links, any day. (Except Mondays.) Not that I'm comfortable with action at a distance. No rational human can be. But the flip side of reason, the tail attached ontologically to the head of that coin, is candid ignorance. There are many things we just don't know; and can't find out. We only know enough to get us through the day to evening, and sometimes not even that much. This week, in addition to breaking science news, my mind has been trying to follow events leading to a head at the United Nations, and at a distance, in the Middle East. Among other things, I have been fielding queries from a column I wrote, Sept. 14, on Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan, who is fishing provocatively in the troubled waters around Israel. I may have been too flattering, in repeating the commonly-held view that he has put Turkey's economic house in order. Better sources now suggest his country may be as near to bankruptcy as Greece. This would provide an additional explanation for Erdogan's recent spirit of adventure. He needs foreign policy distractions to retain his demagogic popularity. That is the usual formula for war. But I don't know, and we can't know, what the game is, with many intersecting Middle Eastern agendas. We can only know that events in the region have, by neglect, spun out of American and allied control. And that we must prepare for what an inquest may later call "spontaneous combustion." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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