And again and again.
Not so much about the immortality of the soul or that Holbein was a better painter than Francis Bacon, but about what might loosely be called scientific matters. And even those which we mostly accept at the moment may
soon turn out to be wrong.
It's pretty obvious that the earth is flat, obvious if you have never had a chance of sailing round it or, or of seeing those photographs from space. But the ancient Greeks never had either of those
advantages and nevertheless accepted that it was round. These obvious ideas do have a way of hanging on: the British Flat Earth Society persisted well into this century. The Muslim world finds it necessary to believe every word of
the Koran (whichever way you spell it) and in 1993 Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, who is the top man in religion in Saudi Arabia, issued a fatwa
proclaiming that the Earth is still flat. If you are a Saudi subject and think the Earth is round then you are an atheist and need to be severely punished.
Everybody knew that the sun went round the earth, though nobody was
quite sure what it was doing all night and who might have been enjoying the heat. It's also obvious that the Earth is the most important thing and the biggest thing in the universe, so how could it possibly be moving around the
sun? The Catholic Church was absolutely sure about that point until the early seventeenth century when Galileo
turned up with his absurd ideas which needed to be shot down immediately for the sake of Truth and Religion. Only in 1992 did the current Pope bravely acknowledge that the Earth orbits the Sun.
Then there was the slightly
indelicate matter of asking the Earth how old she was. Earth did not provide an instant answer. There was the Bible, of course, absolutely infallible because it was written (though a trifle indirectly) by the Creator himself, who
kindly provided some figures in all those begats by gentlemen who lived for several hundred years. Shakespeare, in As You Like It (Act IV Scene 1) makes Rosalind say that the poor world is almost six thousand years
old. No doubt he was using the Creator's information.
A little later, in 1650, Archbishop Ussher
of Dublin used the same sacred arithmetic to conclude that the Earth had been created in the evening of Saturday, 22nd. October 4004 B.C. Such marvellous accuracy!
Newton
calculated 50 000 years, but because of the Bible's opinion thought he must be wrong. Lord Kelvin, who was an expert on temperatures and cooling, including the cooling of the Earth, decided in 1897 that it must be between
10 and 20 million years old. But then radioactivity was discovered and that ruined Kelvin's calculations. Nowadays scientists agree that Earth is about 4.5 thousand million years old and the Moon a similar age. Life, in the form of
single-celled organisms, turned up around a thousand million years later. .
It was obvious that continents stayed in the same place and that the similarity in shape (and geological strata) between eastern South America
and western Africa was just a coincidence. In 1928 at a geological meting Alfed Wegener
was booed down when he suggested they had drifted apart. But from the 1960's we have been sure that the continents drifted, sometimes drifted apart and sometimes collided, travelling at the same slow pace as your thumbnail grows.
It was obvious that time always passed at the same rate, that a meter rule was always the same length, that a gram always weighed a gram and that light travelled in straight lines. But since Einstein
published his theories of relativity we know that all those statements are untrue, and can be shown to be untrue. .
When I was a medical student and a young doctor we had to read a book called Rest and Pain. Its message
was that whatever might be wrong with you the best chance of recovery lay in lying in bed for a long time. In the last forty years we have realised that bed is a dangerous place and the sooner you can get out of it the better. As a
schoolboy, recovering from what was then called double pneumonia, I suffered from that old dogma and had to stay in bed for weeks. Kind relatives brought me a book called Fun in Bed. It was a book of puzzles and games and
model-making, but it soon became clear that the title had another meaning. So I learned to display the book for my visitors while adopting a cynical and knowing expression. Modern children would not need that lesson. But neither
would they be condemned to stay in bed for ages.
Years ago patients used to ask me how to lose weight so I would give them a diet sheet emphasising small meals, protein and fibre. When they came back, bigger than ever, I learnt
it was useful to ask what they were doing about their normal diet and, not infrequently got the reply that they were enjoying that as well. Get Thin By Eating More was their expectation and, I would guess, their pleasure. That has
not yet changed for I see in the newspapers diets for health emphasising the importance of eating More fruit and More veggies, not less of anything.
What will be the changes in the next half-century? If I knew that I could make a
few quick millions.But let's have a guess or two.
According to the Big Bang theory this universe began as a tiny singularity, around 15 thousand million years ago and has been expanding ever since. At the beginning of the century
astronomers didn't recognise anything outside our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Now the Hubble telescope can see galaxies 11 thousand million light years away, by light which started its long journey (at 300 000 kilometres a second)
long before our solar system was formed. In another half-century we should be able to see another 4 thousand million years back, close to the edge of the beginning of time. What will we see? Presumably just one object, one huge
explosion. Will we see the same thing whichever way we look?
So staying in bed is no longer the best way of regaining your health. What other medical idiocies do we now believe? One of them, I think, is the idea that the human
body resembles a lavatory cistern: the more water you put in the tank the better it flushes away the nastiness. Supposing you drink ten pints in a day and retain just one teaspoonful per day.That adds up to 365 teaspoonfuls
retained in a year.Not enough to fill a swimming-pool, but quite enough to add a few pounds (around 4) to a body which is 72 per cent water. In ten years 40 pounds.
Why do doctors give diuretics to hypertensives? To get rid
of excess water from the body. Will we soon realise that even the purest water can be a dangerous medicine, so the dose should be regulated with care?
