Originally published 11 June 1990
Any scientist who finds himself even marginally in the public eye becomes the recipient of assorted new theories of the universe from earnest natural philosophers who work outside of the mainstream of science. These range from the very clever to the merely silly, but all have two things in common:
They purport to overthrow conventional ideas of space, time, and causality, and they protest against the close-mindedness of orthodox science.
Creators of new theories of the universe are generally wasting their time knocking at the door of the science establishment. For one thing, the typical scientist barely has time to keep abreast of the regular scientific literature, much less read things that come in over the transom.
But aspiring Einsteins need not despair. There is an apparently insatiable market for new theories of the universe outside of science, and the market will grow with the rising tide of New Age superstition that accompanies the end of the millennium.
The cleverest and best new theories of the universe (NTU) stand to make their authors rich. Herewith, rules for packaging your NTU if you want to succeed:
- Give your NTU a superficial aura of real science. Use words like cosmic, morphic, plasma, energy matrix, astral, etheric, resonance, chaos. As a justification for your unconventional physics invoke the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (See! Even scientists are uncertain), or, if you want to sound really sophisticated, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox (What’s that? Never mind, it sounds impressive).
- Flaunt your credentials if you have any. Put an MS or PhD. after your name; it doesn’t matter in what field of study you acquired the degree. If you went to Harvard, of course, that’s perfect; but you can still claim “studied at Harvard” even if you once read a book in Harvard Square.
- Make sure your NTU is easy to understand. You may use schematic drawings of warped space-time, but, please, no mathematics.
- Don’t hesitate to point out all the things that real science can’t explain: the origin of life, the development of embryos, memory, dreams.
- Remember, your NTU needs evidence. A good rule of thumb is this: You can always track down at least a dozen purported occurrences of any phenomenon.
- Distance yourself from the most simplistic superstitions. For example, make fun of newspaper horoscopes. But also make sure your new theory is loose enough to allow for — or, at least, not prohibit — astrology, ESP, psychokinesis, and other popular paranormal phenomena.
- Keep your NTU human-centered. Real science tends to make people feel isolated, forgotten, like cogs in a machine. A good NTU makes every individual the center of a cosmic web of influences.
- Learn from the masters, for example Lyall Watson, who invented not one NTU but several. His classic paperback Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural will show you how to make even the wildest nonsense look respectable. His latest book The Nature of Things: The Secret Life of Inanimate Objects is sure to be a winner. Dr. Watson has been involved (I quote from his dust-jacket bio) “in anthropology in Jordan, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil; archeological excavations in Israel, Turkey, and Peru; paleontology in South and East Africa; marine biology in the Indian Ocean; botany in the deserts of Sonora; medical research in the Philippines.” If Dr. Watson says computers, automobiles, buttons, and paperclips have secret lives of their own, then who are we to doubt?
- Don’t be afraid to evoke the wrath of the scientific establishment; this will prove you are on to something big. The best thing that ever happened to Rupert Sheldrake was a bit of intemperate editorializing in the science journal Nature. Sheldrake (a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard, PhD in biochemistry from Cambridge University) is the author of A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, and more recently The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Memory of Nature, books claiming that everything from crystals to humans become what they are because they remember what they are supposed to be. When the former book was published in 1981, Nature called it an “infuriating book…the best candidate for burning there has been in many years.” And immediately propelled the book into the stratosphere of NTUs. Every subsequent edition of Sheldrake’s book has used the Nature denunciation as a publicity blurb. Why is Sheldrake’s theory of formative causation and morphic resonance so infuriating? Is the establishment running scared? Could it be that…?
- Remember those famous lines from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Scientists don’t know everything. The key to success for any good NTU is to amass enough anomalies, coincidences, oddities, exceptions, prodigies, and wonders that the sheer bulk of your data will convince the reader that your theory is correct. After all, if orthodox science can’t explain All of This, then morphic resonance or supernature or (insert your own theory) begins to look better and better.
