THE STORY OF 52. The number not the band.

The story of 52. (the number NOT the band)                                                                                          Or how a private joke went public by Graham52Sinclair                                                                            Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 6:31pm Once upon a time in 1960's Auckland two young men by the names of Rusty and Barney lived next door to each other in Pt.Chevalier. With not much around town to amuse young men in those days Rusty and Barney and their friends used to find things to amuse themselves. One day on the bus to the city, they seemed to be taking a very long time to get away from one of the stops. Their progress was being hindered by a very slow passenger. What we now call an intellectually disabled person but in those more robust times our protagonists would probably have called a loony or a spastic was holding up the bus. The driver's voice was beginning to rise above the murmer. 'Where do you want to get off?' The bus went silent and everyone heard the reply. "Fifty-Two". Rusty and Barney shared a look and a snicker. They had no way of knowing that this was one of those seminal moments that would change the lives of thousands of people.                                                                                                                       52 quickly became a private joke between our two heroes. Despite living in adjacent houses they were in the habit of writing and posting letters to one another. Not long after the incident on the Point Chev bus they started to sign these letters........52.                                                                                                                       Time passed. Soon Rusty and Barney met Graeme "Mad Feet" McGechie. Graeme was a walking amusement and he had gathered a small retinue that became known as The McGechie Family. Yes. friends, I'm afraid it's true. In no small way this new meaning of the number 52 was let loose upon the world by the McGechie Family. I can assure you that as a lifelong member of the Auckland Eight this rankles painfully. However, in the interests of truth I must put aside my feelings of shame and present only the facts.                                                                                                                                                    
     Jump forward now to winter 1970. I had just returned from a year in Sydney. I was starting to wonder what I'd done. Auckland was dead dead dead. One night I was passing "The Fat Landlady" in Upper Symonds St and I noticed some interesting looking people spilling out onto the footpath. I went in and ordered a coffee from the girl behind the counter. I can't remember what it was I said that prompted the unexpectedly numerical remark but whatever it was  it prompted the girl at the counter to say "Well, you're a bit of a fifty-two, aren't you!?"  "A what?" I asked. "A 52. You know, a loopy. Someone who's a bit mad in a good way."   I was most impressed! Sydney might have been a groovy place to be in 1970 but nobody I knew of was using their own unique slang. As it turned out there weren't many other examples of a local argot, but that didn't matter I'd found my number.  More time passed. I made many new friends and increasingly 52 became a defining feature of those friendships. These were different times. People used to visit one another without making an appointment first. They took an interest in eachother. This appears to be a peculiarly NZ phenomenon. One that appears to continue to some extent to the present day.  Sure, at times it could feel a little gossipy and close but I've come to believe that it stems more from a genuine interest than from a prurient one.                                                                                                                  
Let me give you an idea of what it was like in those days. I'm not going to say it was all rosy and without pain but the kids from better backgrounds mixed happily with those who, like me were pretty much street kids. I remember we used to go to the movies on Sundays. Sometimes twenty or thirty of us would all troop in together. Afterwards we'd all go up to Albert Park and re-enact the whole thing. Sort of. Or I'd be walking up a busy Queen St and noticing McGechie coming towards me in the opposite direction. We'd both go into our ritual gunfight act and, because he did it so spectacularly McGechie would usually be the one to "die". He'd drop to the dusty, dirty footpath without flinching and roll a couple of times clasping his chest. Shoppers would look on with alarm quickly followed by open disgust. That's what we loved. It was so easy in those days to shock people. So rewarding. One Friday night in Vulcan Lane we were so preoccupied with pretending to make a cowboy movie that we failed to notice the "Town and Around" team filming us.                                                                                            
It was in this same spirit of fun (the Wizard was a Sydney resident at this time, I think, but we'd heard of and endorsed his "Fun Revolution") that a group of us decided to form a "gang". There were eight of us and we were all Auckland resident so, borrowing from a great Australian tradiition, we called ourselves "The Auckland Eight". I suppose it was also echoing the Chicago Seven whose farcical trial was contemporary amusement.  We were very much a boy's club with our tongue firmly in our cheeks. we used to boast of having three leather jackets, five denim jackets with the sleeves torn off, two Triumph motorbikes and Kevin's mum's hot Ford Anglia with blue metallic paint and "the fat tyres eh!". The Eight were: myself, Kevin Humphries, Derek Ward, Richard Fisher, Ric Christie, Lank, Butch and Doug Wilson. Dave Tainton a long time McGechie family member wanted to come over to our side but to my shame I vetoed it. Mainly on numerical grounds, you can't have nine people in a gang of eight, but also due to his McGechie association. We were supposed to be rivals after all. The fact that this rivalry extended only about as far as "smoke 'til you drop" competetions didn't come into it. Dave had 52 tattoos as well. He looked like Captain Hook without the hook. Black curly hair to his waist, thin as a rake and always immaculately dressed in leather and corduroy or velvet. Knee high leather boots. On acid he used to look like Loius the 14th or someone like him from the eighteenth century. He worked for Avery Labels and used to have little stick on labels made saying things like "Hang a Hippie for 52". What a guy!                                                                                                          
I suppose, being a boys club, (which is actually kind of childish for a group of twenty somethiings),  someone would end up taking it too far.  Looking at the group dynamic it was bound to be me. For one thing, I was the one with the most invested in the Eight, emotionally. That's how it felt at the time, anyway. The others mostly had fairly normal loving families while for me The Eight WERE my family. I guess it started with Derek's ear piercing or lack of it. He was the only one without his left ear pierced. Butch was our club piercer and he did mine in Vulcan Lane one day. I bought the sleeper and Butch used a cigarette filter held behind my ear to press the sleeper through. Derek might have been the the only one without one but we'd all overlooked the fact that he didn't really want his ear pierced. I thought we were all joking around when we started up chanting  "come on Derek", with the occasional "What are you, mate a fuckin' pooftah?"and I had no idea that he was really upset by our behaviour or that this was the beginning of the end for the Eight.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
    The end of the end was The Watipu Bummer.                                                                                         It happened on one of our weekend trips away. We were well stocked up for a good trip. Something happens when a group of people repeatedly share a higher state of conscious. I wonder if anthropologists are aware of the way people's sub-conscious experiences begin to become synchronised when they live together under the one roof doing regular trips. Just like women living together beginning to synch up their reproductive cycles. People living together often started to share a similar "death trip" experience. This can be alarming and intriguing at the same time. The death you experience seems real enough while your so-called friends make light of your imminent demise, laughing and saying "No-o-o-o, you won't die". You feel as though you're in a tank that's slowly filling with water and that when the water level reaches your eyes there's nothing for it but to submit. When you do you enter your sub-conscious mind. Alice has entered Wonderland.  During the Watipu Bummer the visual halucination was so strong it didn't matter which way I looked for a while. Whatever I looked at was a seething confusion of what was there in front of me and what I'd been looking at moments earlier. I looked at Derek and then for a few moments everything I saw was made from Dereks. The sandstone cliffs were made of hundreds of stone heads of Derek of all sizes and from all angles. Like my brain had uploaded fractalising software. Being at the beach, when I looked at the horizon it would be there wherever I faced. I kept thinking I was on a little round island of sand, it was very confusing, I was always in the middle of it wherever I went. I'd started to come down again and I was beginning to be aware of the profundity of my experience. Everything seemed to be insinuting some deeper meaning that I didn't understand.  When I came back to myself I was saying over and over to Kevin Humphries, something like...."Everything's part of this big thing but when I try to explain it to you I can't because I'm part of it, do you know what I mean?  I'm trying to explain it but I can't because that's part of it too, do you know what I mean?"                                                                                                                              
Kevin was screaming at me, "Yes, I know what you fucking mean I heard you the first time." The big thing I could see was like a huge molecular structure that ran through everything. It would start to appear and I would start to go into ego death but then it would abate again. The next trip I had after Watipu I thought I'd halve the dose but it made no difference.  As soon as it came on I was right back there at the same point I'd reached a week before. "I'm dying" I said. I was in a sleeping bag on the lounge floor between two heaters and I was still shivering. Amidst all the laughter I heard Gibby say not to worry, it had happened to people he knew and they were fine. That was enough to tip me off that I was just going to have to go through it and hope for the best. It's funny but the basis of so much of our anxiety is our mistaken belief that things aren't right. Things are always right.                                                                                                                                      
The truth is that The Watipu Bummer was no bummer at all really, it just wasn't something I could laugh off in my usual way. It gave me pause for thought. It was this departure from my usual pattern of behaviour that broke the mould. I realised what Derek had been trying to tell us after the piercing incident. There are times when joking around isn't appropriate and that it was really a way of masking our feelings of inadequacy. Derek grew up in a fantastic family. He had very bright very aware sisters. it was no wonder he spotted all that Lord of the Flies bullshit going on before the rest of us.                                                                   It wasn't long after that when Kevin came around one night and said he was joining the Hare Krishnas. He was going to sell all his stuff and give the money to the Krishna commune. He came around once more after that for a farewell session. We put on The Who Live at Leeds but it wasn't the same and it was too sad. Drugs are okay to enhance a good time with but they don't make a good time on their own. It was also an indication we were being moved by deeper currents in our lives than those that were visible on the surface. Something more profound than our witty but hollow banter.  No more sneaking up behind furtive young hippies in the Anglia, our collective hair falling out the windows almost as far as the street, and shouting "Ged a fuggin' 'air cut!!!!" then laughing raucously. We wouldn't be Eight.                                                                                                                                                                                     Then I heard that Doug and Isobel had been found in shallow graves in scrub near Melbourne and that it was suspected they were victims of the Mr.Asia syndicate.  I was surprised but not shocked. I was surprised that Doug had allowed himself to wind up in such a desperate situation. He always struck me as a pretty responsible person. He always had a job. Still lived with his parents in Mt Roskill and drove well kept street legal cars and bikes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
        I've always felt a bit creepy about Terry Clarke changing his name to Sinclair.                                                                                                                                   In New Zealand everything felt like it was under a black cloud. There were arrests and shootings. People were all disappearing into obscurity. I hated it . I never saw why we had to keep throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I hated seeing people I knew and whom I thought knew better involved in the thuggery that develops around the moral vacuum prohibition engenders. You're supposed to accept it as part of outlaw behaviour but I don't. I guess I'm lucky to have seen early on that if I ever got seriously involved in the supply side of recreational substances I'd be bound to stuff it up and get myself into trouble somehow. All drugs should be legal and controlled. Just like alcohol and tobacco. The amount of money and greed involved raise the stakes in peoples' minds and that's when they get violent.  Governments have created the situation that fosters it and then they turn around and say "See, we told you, drugs breed violence".                                                                                                                                                                                                                           There are probably hundreds of stories I could tell about 52. About the way it sticks in people's heads and causes a little pang of recognition whenever you see one.  About how it seems to crop up all the time in comedy. 52 sounds funny when you say it so I guess it isn't surprising that it seems to be chosen by people reaching for a random number to use in comedy.  People all over have their own anecdotes I'm sure. I'd love to hear some of them. Keep those cards and letters coming in. I'm sure there will be friends of mine saying "what about this and what about that?" We could make a big list of all the most important 52's in the world. Weeks in a year. Cards in a pack. Marge Simpson uses blue no.52.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

A scientific approach to the existence or otherwise of god

          A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO THE EXISTENCE OR OTHERWISE OF GOD                                                                                                                                                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                                  I've lately found myself thinking about some of the things people seem to believe about god. Just to get it out of the way my own understanding of things has god as the dreamer or thinker of reality. The universe itself is conscious and within it life is scalar and universal.                                                                                                                                                                                                                     (By the way, I don't think any one of the pronouns we have really work well in reference to god. "It" is the most appropriate in one sense but "he" "she" and "they" all work, although not completely, as well.  "He" is the one I find myself using unconsciously but to my way of thinking about it god is male, female and plural while also being one.   A singularity that contains the plural).                                                                                                                                                                                                                   In our age it is said that god is dead. This is supposed to be because the speed of light is fixed at about 300,000 km per second, which is really very slow, and not even god is allowed to go faster.  As god wouldn't be all powerful in such a cosmos he couldn't possibly exist. Surely by most definitions god already is anywhere god might conceivably want to go. Being ubiquitous is a well known divine attribute, I'm not just making this up as I go along. Already being anywhere god might want to go neatly sidesteps the fixed speed of light problem.                                                                                                                              
         Another of my thoughts followed on from the discussion that has been around recently over whether or not god is an interventionist. I don't know what Nick the Stripper has to say about it but I don't believe god has any need to intervene in the natural world. It would indicate fallibility. God is not meant to be fallible. Intervention in the natural world would be tantamount second guessing and god could never do that.  As men and women have free will an ethical god would need their permission to intervene in their lives.  This might explain the huge number of miraculous escapes people seem have. They go all their lives without trying to make contact and then when they want something......                                                                                                            Why should the existence of a consciousness in the universe be any more difficult to accept than a consciousness within the human body.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         When it comes to religion I've begun to think that, in a way. one is as good or bad as another. They are all just conventions, ways of encoding a set of ideas into a narrative, a ritual or both.  Look at mormonism. The narrative contains something that talks to americans and it has an element of the impossible about it. This seems to be an important ingredient.  Mainly, though, it's a way of talking about something that's beyond words. Each system has its own emphasis but all religion is flawed in the same way that speech is. To me, the fact that the early christians built christianity from the ground up with all the most popular types of miracles in place makes it more and not less authentic. The use of impossibilities seems to talk to something in us that wants to believe in more than a mundane world.  It asks us to actively accept that more really exists.   Barbara Thiering has found very strong evidence that Jesus didn't actually turn water into wine or raise Lazarus from the dead but that these were metaphors containing episodes from Jesus' life deliberately encoded in to them using an established system called the "pesher".   I try to keep an open mind about what's possible and what isn't. There are christians for whom the resurrection is an essential article of faith. They have to believe it or else, so they think, the whole edifice of their faith will collapse. It's their belief that is crucial though, not whether or not Jesus actually died. These days we know that death is not a point. It's a process. People are regularly turned off for 45 minutes for very delicate surgery. They are clinically dead for that time. Brain dead is as dead it gets and that's what they are.                                                                                                                                   While doubting the validity of a few of the emblems that people hold up as evidence of something like a god at work in the world, I endorse the faith, inspiration, belief or anything remotely positive that might come out of it. We're all supposed to be terribly grown up and be able to stare down our pain or its cause but it's a bit spartan when you consider the flabby lives we all lead these days.  Recently I heard about a guy who miraculously survived a serious shark attack in Sydney harbour. He knew that the shock could kill him if it hit before they got safely to the nearest hospital. He had the presence of mind to pretend that the whole thing just wasn't happening and he kept his head turned firmly in the other direction. I've come to think of belief as having the potential to be positive and active rather than passive and negative. Of course, we must always keep a close watch on our spectacular capacity for self-deception.                                                                                                                                                                   At the same time I can't help the feeling that if god exists we ought to be able to prove it somehow. We seem to have a science that's just as hard pressed to prove anything certain or absolute as religion is. You can see from the climate change debate that proof, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Are they worried about doing all the physics and having none left? Lately scientists seem to spend a lot of time trumpeting how greatly magnificent we are to be so very clever.  It doesn't matter if we don't find any answers because our theories are so beautiful. WHAT?!! Only a year ago physics  was in disarray because of the snowballing of expansion. There were heartening admissions of confusion. What was happening with gravity?  What could be causing the expansion to accelerate?  At the same time we were all poised to find the Higgs boson and gravity waves. It would be like hitting TWO holes in one......with one ball.  A double holy grail of science.  It would be proof positive of the existence of STUFF in the universe and of an attraction due to and towards it called gravity. (I'm sure plenty of people would be shocked to discover that science has not yet been able to state with any certainty that matter exists.)  They won't find the Higg's boson and they won't find gravity waves and it's as though they know this somehow. We quite conveniently have a new thing to chase after: Dark Matter and its evil twin Dark Energy. It's the worst kind of speculative assumption and so lazy minded. If you haven't yet figured out what gravity is, why not add these new observations to the data you have that a Gravity theory must satisfy. No, instead they just throw up their hands, toss gravity into the too hard basket and start looking for an easier answer somewhere else. Until something comes along these provisional Dark thoughts will be counted as "facts" by the majority of people.  Just as quantum mechanics, solar fusion, gravity theory and the so called laws of thermodynamics are proven facts for millions of people and not provisional ideas until better ones come along. Too much of the communication science has with the public amounts to a kind of confident belief in its own theories and ideas.  The public picks up on this confidence and it becomes a kind of beliief system.  I'm worried that a similar intellectual dishonesty will result in the absence of any attempt to "find a job for god".  There are those scientists for whom dialogue with the rabid right has permanently coloured the way they look at anything that isn't rigidly mechanistic. This neurosis has plagued science for centuries. It's my contention that much of science is motivated by this human need for certainty. We've been running away from a universe without mass or gravity for decades but it can't go on. For one thing a massless universe solves the problem of the big bang getting something from nothing. The cosmos is constructed of deformed space. Space that has been warped by an induced electromagnetic charge. Not spacetime being warped by gravity. Time has no existence beyond our minds and mortality. Time would mean nothing if we didn't die.
  Perhaps a good place to start would be to apply some rigor to the examination of some of the more common inexplicable things that happen to us all. We need to curb specialisation a bit and also to encourage people to have interests in things outside  of their own usual fields of study.  Astronomers should study electromagnetic radiation and anyone looking at cosmology needs to also look at consciousness.                                                                                                                                                                               
         It might serve a dual purpose if we were to enact a proper study of our ability to sense people staring at us. I'd like to know how it works but it would also be a step towards science applying its rigour to a fuzzier realm. I don't know how you'd do it but I would love to apply some scrutiny to the age-old practice of touching wood. Moslems say God willing. Christians say something similar and everyone else says touch wood. I say "thank god" or "please god" and I do it from bitter experience. I couldn't count the number of times I've proudly taken the credit for a prolonged avoidance of sickness or misfortune only to have that good fortune turn around and bite me due to a failure of "touching wood".  I'm sure the same has happened to all of you.                                                                                                        
          I wonder about anecdotal evidence and its complete disqualification from mainstream science. There are many experiences we all share and it is this experience that is the true engine of change in human beings. I've noticed that in all our lives there is a kind of irrational sense that events seem to make on their own. It is known by many as karmic law but "Goes around comes around" is also used.  Surely our collective experience is of some value to science.  In fact, trust and belief do play a small but essential part.  Every scientist works in good faith and trusts his colleagues to do the same. People stand on the shoulders of their colleagues and predecessors. The careful observation of experimental results or of natural phenomena are held in trust by contemporary practitioners. Nobody suggests doing the experiments over and over again. What really is the difference between trusting laboratory technicians to take down data accurately and trusting carefully chosen witnesses to relate their life's experiences. I suspect it's always been more of a case of pre-judging what that data appears to suggest than any practical considerations of reliability.                                                                                                                                                                                           The value of applying the scientific method to areas of human experience that have hitherto been thought of as little more than superstition may prove to be surprisingly fruitful. In any case I don't see how it can hurt to stop ignoring so much of what people report. If you're looking for a theory of everything you don't want to be throwing away half of the the clues. Otherwise you'd have a theory of this bit over here, the part that doesn't confuse us so much. Recently I saw in a documentary that scientists have found the Ganges to contain an unusually high percentage of anti-bacterial phages and ten times as much oxygen as most rivers.  For millennia the people said that the river had healing qualities and this in spite of it being in a visibly polluted condition.                                                                                                                                                                                                                       All I ask of people who say they definitely don't believe in god is to try to be more specific about the god they don't believe in.  They might have seen a jehova's witless magazine and gone "that's insane" like 99% of us. Very often their innate sense of rightness has at some time been offended by an ignorant or stupid comment and they've understandably decided not to subscribe. I think it's more a case of finding god a job than bringing he, she, it or them back to life.  There is something about our existence here that just doesn't add up. Those of us who think it should make some ordinary mundane kind of sense are bound to go mad, give up or die trying. We have five or even six senses that keep monitoring us in our environment and yet we can't actually prove that we are here or show conclusively where here is.  All the pieces are there and intact yet we can't fit them together no matter how hard we try. Figuring out the way the universe works is simple compared to coming to terms with life and living.                                                                                                                                                                                               ly exist.  Except that to my way of thinking god already is anywhere god might conceivably want to go. Being ubiquitous is a well known divine attribute, I'm not just making this up as I go along. Already being anywhere god might want to go neatly sidesteps the fixed speed of light problem.                                                                                                                                 Another of my thoughts followed on from the discussion that has been around recently over whether or not god is an interventionist. I don't know what Nick the Stripper has to say about it but I don't believe god has any need to intervene in the natural world. It would indicate fallibility. Intervention in the natural world would be tantamount second guessing and god could never do that. As men and women have their own free will it might be possible for god to intervene in their lives but only when they give their permission. This might explain the huge number of miraculous escapes people seem have. They go all their lives without trying to make contact and then when they want something......                                                                                                            Why should the existence of a consciousness in the universe be any more difficult to accept than a consciousness within the human body.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   When it comes to religion I've begun to think that, in a way. one is as good or bad as another. They are all just conventions, ways of encoding a set of ideas into a narrative, a ritual or both.  Look at mormonism. The narrative contains something that talks to americans and it has an element of the impossible about it. This seems to be an important ingredient.  Mainly, though, it's a way of talking about something that's beyond words. Each system has its own emphasis but all religion is flawed in the same way that speech is. To me, the fact that the early christians built christianity from the ground up with all the most popular types of miracles makes it more authentic. The use of impossibilities seems to talk to something in us that wants to believe in more than the mundane of everyday. Even though it's most likely that Jesus didn't actually turn water into wine or raise Lazarus from the dead and that these were real episodes from Jesus' life disguised as miracles, I still believe in keeping an open mind about what's possible and what isn't. There are christians for whom the resurrection is an essential article of faith. They have to believe it or else, so they think, their whole edifice of belief will collapse. It's their belief that is crucial though, not whether or not Jesus actually died. These days we know that death is not a point. It's a process. People are regularly turned off for 45 minutes for very delicate surgery. They are clinically dead for that time. Brain dead is as dead it gets and that's what they are. Yet they come back when they warm them up.                                                                        While doubting the validity of a few of the emblems that people hold up as evidence of something like a god at work in the world, I endorse the faith, inspiration, belief or anything remotely positive that might come out of it. We're all supposed to be terribly grown up and be able to stare down our pain or its cause but it's a bit spartan when you consider the flabby lives we all lead these days.  Recently I heard about a guy who miraculously survived a serious shark attack in Sydney harbour. He knew that the shock could kill him if it hit before they got safely to the nearest hospital. He had the presence of mind to pretend that the whole thing just wasn't happening and he kept his head turned firmly in the other direction. I've come to think of belief as having the potential to be positive and active rather than passive and negative. Of course, we must always keep a close watch on our spectacular capacity for self-deception.                                                                                                                                                                             At the same time I can't help the feeling that if god exists we ought to be able to prove it somehow. We seem to have a science that's just as hard pressed to prove anything certain or absolute as religion is. You can see from the climate change debate that proof, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Are they worried about doing all the physics and having none left? Lately scientists seem to spend a lot of time trumpeting how greatly magnificent we are to be so very clever.  It doesn't matter if we don't find any answers because our theories are so beautiful. WHAT?!! Only a year ago physics  was in disarray because of the snowballing of expansion. There were heartening admissions of confusion. What was happening with gravity?  What could be causing the expansion to accelerate?  At the same time we were all poised to find the Higgs boson and gravity waves. It would be like hitting TWO holes in one......with one ball.  A double holy grail of science.  It would be proof positive of the existence of STUFF in the universe and of an attraction due to and towards it called gravity. (I'm sure plenty of people would be shocked to discover that science has not yet been able to state with any certainty that matter exists.)  They won't find the Higg's boson and they won't find gravity waves and it's as though they know this somehow. We quite conveniently have a new thing to chase after: Dark Matter and its evil twin Dark Energy. It's the worst kind of speculative assumption and so lazy minded. If you haven't yet figured out what gravity is, why not add these new observations to the data you have that a Gravity theory must satisfy. No, instead they just throw up their hands, toss gravity into the too hard basket and start looking for an easier answer somewhere else. Until something comes along these provisional Dark thoughts will be counted as "facts" by the majority of people.  Just as quantum mechanics, solar fusion, gravity theory and the so called laws of thermodynamics are proven facts for millions of people and not provisional ideas until better ones come along. Too much of the communication science has with the public amounts to a kind of confident belief in its own theories and ideas.  The public picks up on this confidence and it becomes a kind of beliief system.  I'm worried that a similar intellectual dishonesty will result in the absence of any attempt to "find a job for god".  There are those scientists for whom dialogue with the rabid right has permanently coloured the way they look at anything that isn't rigidly mechanistic. This neurosis has plagued science for centuries. It's my contention that much of science is motivated by this human need for certainty. We've been running away from a universe without mass or gravity for decades but it can't go on. For one thing a massless universe solves the problem of the big bang getting something from nothing. The cosmos is constructed of deformed space. Space that has been warped by an induced electromagnetic charge. Not spacetime being warped by gravity. Time has no existence beyond our minds and mortality. Time would mean nothing if we didn't die.
        Perhaps a good place to start would be to apply some rigor to the examination of some of the more common inexplicable things that happen to us all. We need to curb specialisation a bit and also to encourage people to have interests in things outside  of their own usual fields of study.  Astronomers should study electromagnetic radiation and anyone looking at cosmology needs to also look at consciousness.                                                                                                                                                                                                     It might serve a dual purpose if we were to enact a proper study of our ability to sense people staring at us. I'd like to know how it works but it would also be a step towards science applying its rigor to a fuzzier realm. I don't know how you'd do it but I would love to apply some scrutiny to the age-old practise of touching wood. Moslems say God willing. Christians say something similar and everyone else says touch wood. I say "thank god" or "please god" and I do it from bitter experience. I couldn't count the number of times I've proudly announced my good fortune of some kind or other only to have that good fortune turn around and bite me due to a failure of "touching wood".  I'm sure the same has happened to all of us. What is it?                                                                                                                      Finally, I wonder about anecdotal evidence and its complete disqualification from mainstream science. There are many experiences we all share and it is this experience that is the true engine of change in human beings. I've noticed that in all our lives there is a kind of irrational sense that events seem to make on their own. It is known by many as karmic law but "Goes around comes around" is also used.  Surely our collective experience is of some value to science.  I know that trust and belief do play a small but essential part.  Every scientist works in good faith and believes his colleagues all do the same. People stand on the shoulders of their predecessors. The careful observations of experimental results or of natural phenomena are held in trust by contemporary practitioners. Nobody suggests doing the experiments over and over again. What really is the difference between trusting laboratory technicians to take down data accurately and trusting carefully chosen witnesses to relate their life's experiences. I suspect it's always been more of a case of what that data would seem to suggest than any practical considerations of reliability.