I'm Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, publisher of "Skeptic" magazine. We investigate claims of the paranormal, pseudo-science, fringe groups and cults, and claims of all kinds between, science and pseudo-science and non-science and junk science, voodoo science, pathological science, bad science, non-science, and plain old non-sense. And unless you've been on Mars recently, you know there's a lot of that out there.
Sem Michael Shermer, direktor organizacije Skeptična družba in založnik revije Skeptik. Raziskujemo paranormalnost, psevdo-znanost, obrobne skupine in kulte ter take in drugačne trditve; znanost in psevdo-znanost, ne-znanost, junk-znanost, vudu-znanost, patološko znanost, slabo znanost in preproste starodavne bedarije. Razen če niste ravno prišli z Marsa, veste, da je veliko teh znanosti na svetu.
Some people call us debunkers, which is kind of a negative term. But let's face it, there's a lot of bunk. We are like the bunko squads of the police departments out there -- well, we're sort of like the Ralph Naders of bad ideas,
Ljudje nam pravijo razbijalci bedarij, kar je negativen izraz. Soočimo se z resnico - obstaja veliko bedarij. Mi smo kot policijski preiskovalci bedarij. Mi smo kot Ralph Naders s slabimi idejami.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
trying to replace bad ideas with good ideas.
Poskušamo zamenjati slabe ideje z dobrimi.
I'll show you an example of a bad idea. I brought this with me, this was given to us by NBC Dateline to test. It's produced by the Quadro Corporation of West Virginia. It's called the Quadro 2000 Dowser Rod.
Pokazal vam bom primer slabe ideje. To sem prinesel s sabo. To smo dobili za testiranje od NBC Dateline. Izdelala ga je korporacija Quadro iz Zahodne Virginije. To je detektorska palica Quadro 2000.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
This was being sold to high-school administrators for $900 apiece. It's a piece of plastic with a Radio Shack antenna attached to it. You could dowse for all sorts of things, but this particular one was built to dowse for marijuana in students' lockers.
Palice so prodali srednjim šolam za 900 dolarjev na kos. To je kos plastike z anteno. S palico bi lahko iskal karkoli, a ta palica je bila izdelana za odkrivanje marihuane v šolskih omaricah.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
So the way it works is you go down the hallway, and you see if it tilts toward a particular locker, and then you open the locker. So it looks something like this. I'll show you.
Deluje tako. S palico hodiš med omaricami, če se palica obrne proti določeni omarici, odpreš omarico. To bi izgledalo tako. Pokazal vam bom.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
Well, it has kind of a right-leaning bias. Well, this is science, so we'll do a controlled experiment. It'll go this way for sure.
Malo se nagiba v desno... To je znanost. Naredili bomo kontroliran preizkus. Gotovo se bo obrnila tja.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
Sir, do you want to empty your pockets, please, sir?
Gospod, bi izpraznili žepe, prosim?
(Laughter)
(smeh)
So the question was, can it actually find marijuana in students' lockers? And the answer is, if you open enough of them, yes.
Vprašanje je bilo, ali lahko res najde marihuano v omarici? Odgovor je... Če odprete dovolj omaric, ja.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
(Applause)
(aplavz)
But in science, we have to keep track of the misses, not just the hits. And that's probably the key lesson to my short talk here: This is how psychics work, astrologers, tarot card readers and so on. People remember the hits and forget the misses. In science, we keep the whole database, and look to see if the number of hits somehow stands out from the total number you'd expect by chance.
V znanosti moramo upoštevati zmote, ne le zadetke. To je ključna lekcija mojega govora; tako delajo jasnovidci, astrologi, vedeževalci s kart... Ljudje si zapomnijo zadetke in pozabijo na zmote. V znanosti moramo voditi vso podatkovno zbirko in ugotoviti, če število zadetkov izstopa iz skupnega števila, ki je pričakovano po naključju.
In this case, we tested it.
To napravo smo testirali.
We had two opaque boxes: one with government-approved THC marijuana, and one with nothing. And it got it 50 percent of the time --
Imeli smo dve neprosojni škatli. V eni je bila THC marihuana, v drugi pa nič. Palica je zadela v 50% testov.
(Laughter)
To je pričakovana kvota pri metanju kovanca.
which is exactly what you'd expect with a coin-flip model. So that's just a fun little example here of the sorts of things we do.
To je zabaven primer tega, kar delamo.
"Skeptic" is the quarterly publication. Each one has a particular theme. This one is on the future of intelligence. Are people getting smarter or dumber? I have an opinion of this myself because of the business I'm in, but in fact, people, it turns out, are getting smarter. Three IQ points per 10 years, going up. Sort of an interesting thing.
Skeptik izide vsake tri mesece. Vsak ima določeno temo. Ta je o prihodnosti inteligence. Postajajo ljudje pametnejši ali neumnejši? O tem imam svoje mnenje zaradi dela, ki ga opravljam. Izkazalo se je, da postajajo ljudje pametnejši. Vsakih 10 let se IQ dvigne za tri točke. Zanimiva zadeva.
With science, don't think of skepticism as a thing, or science as a thing. Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things. Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.
Ne mislite, da je skepticizem stvar ali da je znanost stvar. Sta znanost in religija združljivi? Sta znanost in vodovodarstvo združljiva? To sta dve različni stvari. Znanost ni stvar. Znanost je glagol. To je način razmišljanja o stvareh. Je način iskanja naravnih razlag za fenomene.
I mean, what's more likely: that extraterrestrial intelligences or multi-dimensional beings travel across vast distances of interstellar space to leave a crop circle in Farmer Bob's field in Puckerbrush, Kansas to promote skeptic.com, our web page? Or is it more likely that a reader of "Skeptic" did this with Photoshop? And in all cases we have to ask --
Kaj je bolj verjetno - da izvenzemeljske inteligence ali večdimenzionalna bitja potujejo skozi širjave medzvezdnega prostora in naredijo kroge na žitnem polju kmeta Boba v Kansasu za promocijo naše strani skeptic.com? Ali je bolj mogoče, da je bralec Skeptika to naredil s programom Photoshop? V vseh primerih se moramo vprašati... (smeh)
(Laughter)
What's the more likely explanation? Before we say something is out of this world, we should first make sure that it's not in this world. What's more likely: that Arnold had extraterrestrial help in his run for the governorship, or that the "World Weekly News" makes stuff up?
...katera razlaga je najbolj možna? Preden rečemo, da je nekaj izven tega sveta, se moramo prepričati, da gotovo ni s tega sveta. Kaj je bolj mogoče... da je imel Arnold izvenzemeljsko pomoč pri kandidiranju za guvernerja? Ali da si World Weekly News izmišlja novice?
(Laughter)
(smeh)
The same theme is expressed nicely here in this Sidney Harris cartoon. For those of you in the back, it says here: "Then a miracle occurs. I think you need to be more explicit here in step two." This single slide completely dismantles the intelligent design arguments. There's nothing more to it than that.
Ista tema je lepo predstavljena na tej sliki s Sidneyjem Harrisom. Za tiste zadaj, tu piše: Nato se zgodi čudež. V drugem koraku morate biti bolj eksplicitni. Ta posnetek poruši vse inteligentne oblikovne argumente v obliki slike. Ničesar drugega ni več.
(Applause)
(aplavz)
You can say a miracle occurs, it's just that it doesn't explain anything or offer anything. There's nothing to test. It's the end of the conversation for intelligent design creationists.
Lahko rečete, da se je zgodil čudež. A to ne razloži ničesar. Ničesar ne ponudi. Ničesar ne moremo testirati. To je konec pogovora za inteligentne ustvarjalce.
And it's true, scientists sometimes throw terms out as linguistic place fillers -- dark energy or dark matter, something like that -- until we figure out what it is, we'll call it this. It's the beginning of the causal chain for science. For intelligent design creationists, it's the end of the chain. So again, we can ask this: what's more likely? Are UFOs alien spaceships, or perceptual cognitive mistakes, or even fakes?
Kjerkoli že - in je res, znanstveniki uporabijo izraze, kot so naslednji izrazi - temna energija ali temna snov ali kaj podobnega. Dokler ne ugotovimo, kaj to je, naj bo ime takšno. To je začetek tradicionalne verige za znanost. Za inteligentne ustvarjalce je to konec verige. Torej še enkrat se lahko vprašamo -- kaj je bolj verjetno -- so NLP-ji vesoljske ladje ali kognitivne napake, morda le ponaredki?
This is a UFO shot from my house in Altadena, California, looking down over Pasadena. And if it looks a lot like a Buick hubcap, it's because it is. You don't even need Photoshop or high-tech equipment, you don't need computers. This was shot with a throwaway Kodak Instamatic camera. You just have somebody off on the side with a hubcap ready to go. Camera's ready -- that's it.
To je posnetek NLP-ja iz moje hiše v Altadeni v Kaliforniji. S pogledom proti Pasadeni. Če zgleda kot pokrov od avtomobilskega kolesa, je to zato, ker to je. Ni potreben niti Photoshop niti vrhunska elektronska oprema, niso potrebni računalniki. To je bilo posneto s Kodakovim fotoaparatom za enkratno uporabo. Potrebuješ le nekoga, ki drži pokrov, in si pripravljen. Fotoaparat je pripravljen - to je to.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
So, although it's possible that most of these things are fake or illusions or so on, and that some of them are real, it's more likely that all of them are fake, like the crop circles.
Čeprav je mogoče, da je večina teh reči ponaredkov ali iluzij, ter da je nekaj od njih resničnih, je bolj verjetno, da so vsi ponaredki, kot žitni krogi.
On a more serious note, in all of science we're looking for a balance between data and theory. In the case of Galileo, he had two problems when he turned his telescope to Saturn. First of all, there was no theory of planetary rings. Second of all, his data was grainy and fuzzy, and he couldn't quite make out what he was looking at. So he wrote that he had seen -- "I have observed that the furthest planet has three bodies." And this is what he ended up concluding that he saw. So without a theory of planetary rings and with only grainy data, you can't have a good theory. It wasn't solved until 1655.
Če se zresnimo, v celotni znanosti iščemo ravnovesje med podatki in teorijo. Na primer, Galilejo je imel dva problema, ko je usmeril teleskop proti Saturnu. Prvič, takrat ni bilo nobene teorije o planetarnih obročih. Drugič, njegovi posnetki so bili nejasni in nečisti, zato ni mogel natančno ugotoviti, kaj gleda. Napisal je torej, kar je videl: "Opazil sem, da ima najbolj oddaljeni planet tri telesa." In to je tisto, kar je na koncu trdil, da je videl. Brez teorije o planetarnih obročih in samo z nejasnimi podatki ni mogoče imeti dobre teorije. In vse do leta 1655 ni bilo rešeno.
This is Christiaan Huygens's book that catalogs all the mistakes people made trying to figure out what was going on with Saturn. It wasn't till Huygens had two things: He had a good theory of planetary rings and how the solar system operated, and he had better telescopic, more fine-grain data in which he could figure out that as the Earth is going around faster -- according to Kepler's Laws -- than Saturn, then we catch up with it. And we see the angles of the rings at different angles, there. And that, in fact, turns out to be true.
To je knjiga Cristiaana Huygensa, v kateri je zapisal vse napake, ki so jih naredili ljudje, ko so skušali ugotoviti, kaj se dogaja s Saturnom. Vse dokler ni imel Huygens dveh stvari. Dobre teorije o planetarnih obročih in delovanju sončnega sistema. Imel je tudi boljši teleskop in natančnejše podatke, iz katerih je lahko ugotovil, da Zemlja kroži hitreje - po Keplerjevih zakonih - kot Saturn, kasneje ga mi dohitimo. Tudi obroči so vidni pod različnimi koti. In to se je izkazalo za resnično.
The problem with having a theory is that it may be loaded with cognitive biases. So one of the problems of explaining why people believe weird things is that we have things, on a simple level, and then I'll go to more serious ones. Like, we have a tendency to see faces.
Problem s teorijo je ta, da je morda v njej veliko dvoumnosti. Zato je eden od problemov, zakaj ljudje verjamejo v čudne stvari ta, da gledamo na stvari na osnovni ravni. Potem bom pokazal zapletenejše primere. Na primer, ljudje pogosto vidimo obraze.
This is the face on Mars. In 1976, where there was a whole movement to get NASA to photograph that area because people thought this was monumental architecture made by Martians. Here's the close-up of it from 2001. If you squint, you can still see the face. And when you're squinting, you're turning that from fine-grain to coarse-grain, so you're reducing the quality of your data. And if I didn't tell you what to look for, you'd still see the face, because we're programmed by evolution to see faces.
To je obraz na Marsu, ki je bil slikan leta 1976, med NASINIM raziskovanjem in slikanjem tistega območja, ker so ljudje mislili da je to arhitektura, ki so jo naredili Marsovci. No, izkaže se - tu je bližnji posnetek iz leta 2001. Če nekoliko zaškilimo, vidimo obraz. In ko škilimo v bistvu spreminjamo kvaliteto iz dobre v slabo. Torej zmanjšujemo kvaliteto podatkov. Tudi če vam ne bi povedal, kaj morate videti,bi še vedno videli obraz, ker smo ljudje z evolucijo programirani, da vidimo obraze.
Faces are important for us socially. And of course, happy faces, faces of all kinds are easy to see. You see the happy face on Mars, there.
Obrazi so za nas družbeno pomembni. In seveda - srečni obrazi. Enostavno je videti različne obraze. (smeh)
(Laughter)
Lahko opazite nasmejan obraz na Marsu.
If astronomers were frogs, perhaps they'd see Kermit the Frog. Do you see him there? Little froggy legs. Or if geologists were elephants?
Če bi bili astronavti žabe, bi morda videli Kermita. Ali ga vidite? Majhne žabje nogice.
Religious iconography.
Ali pa če bi bili geologi sloni?
(Laughter)
Verska ikona. (smeh)
Discovered by a Tennessee baker in 1996. He charged five bucks a head to come see the nun bun till he got a cease-and-desist from Mother Teresa's lawyer. Here's Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Watsonville, just down the street, or is it up the street from here? Tree bark is particularly good because it's nice and grainy, branchy, black-and-white splotchy and you can get the pattern-seeking -- humans are pattern-seeking animals.
Odkril jo je pekar iz Tennesseeja leta 1996. Računal je 5$ na osebo, ki je hotela videti nuno, vse dokler ni dobil prepovedi odvetnika Matere Tereze. Tukaj je Naša Dama iz Guadalupe in Naša Dama iz Watsonvilla, dol po cesti. Ali morda navzgor po cesti? Vzorec na drevesu je še posebej dober, ker je grob, črnobel in nepravilen. Kot nalašč za iskanje vzorcev -- ljudje smo iskalci vzorcev.
Here's the Virgin Mary on the side of a glass window in Sao Paulo. Here's when the Virgin Mary made her appearance on a cheese sandwich -- which I got to actually hold in a Las Vegas casino -- of course, this being America.
Tukaj je Devica Marija na zunanjem delu steklenega okna v Sao Paulu. In tukaj je Devica Marija na sendviču - ki sem ga držal lasvegaškem kazinoju, seveda - v Ameriki.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
This casino paid $28,500 on eBay for the cheese sandwich.
Ta kazino je plačal 28,500$ na eBay-u za dva sirova sendviča.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
But who does it really look like? The Virgin Mary?
Ampak komu je zares podobna, Devici Mariji?
(Laughter)
(smeh)
It has that sort of puckered lips, 1940s-era look.
Ima lička iz 1940-ih let.
Virgin Mary in Clearwater, Florida. I actually went to see this one. There was a lot of people there. The faithful come in their wheelchairs and crutches, and so on. We went down and investigated. Just to give you a size, that's Dawkins, me and The Amazing Randi, next to this two, two and a half story-sized image. All these candles, thousands of candles people had lit in tribute to this. So we walked around the backside, to see what was going on. It turns out wherever there's a sprinkler head and a palm tree, you get the effect. Here's the Virgin Mary on the backside, which they started to wipe off. I guess you can only have one miracle per building.
Devica Marija v Clearwathu na Floridi. Slednjo sem dejansko šel pogledat. Veliko ljudi je bilo tam, vernikov v invalidskih vozičkih, z berglami in tako naprej. Zadevo smo raziskali. Samo da dobite predstavo o velikosti - Dawkins, jaz in neverjetni Randi, nasproti teh dveh pa dva in pol nadstropja velika slika. Vse te sveče so prižgali verniki. Odšli smo na zadnjo stran, da bi videli, kaj se dogaja tam. Izkazalo se je, da kjerkoli imamo škropilnico in palmino drevo, dobimo ta efekt. Tu je Devica Marija na zadnji strani, katero so začeli brisati. Ugibam, da imaš lahko le en čudež na zgradbo.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
So is it really a miracle of Mary, or is it a miracle of Marge?
Ampak, ali je res Marijin čudež ali je to Marge?
(Laughter)
(smeh)
And now I'm going to finish up with another example of this, with auditory illusions. There's this film, "White Noise," with Michael Keaton, about the dead talking back to us. By the way, the whole business of talking to the dead is not that big a deal. Anybody can do it, turns out. It's getting the dead to talk back that's the really hard part.
Zaključil bom še z enim primerom. Z glasbo - glasbeno iluzijo. Obstaja film "Bel Šum", z Michaelom Kaeatonom, govori o mrtvih, ki govorijo z nami. Mimogrede, ves ta posel govorjenja mrtvim sploh ni tako težaven. Vsakdo lahko to naredi. Težje je narediti, da mrtvi odgovori.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
In this case, supposedly, these messages are hidden in electronic phenomena. There's a ReverseSpeech.com web page where I downloaded this stuff. This is the most famous one of all of these. Here's the forward version of the very famous song.
V tem primeru so sporočila skrita v elektronskem zapisu. S spletne strani ReverseSpeech.com sem prenesel te stvari. Tukaj je normalen posnetek - najbolj znan od vseh tovrstnih posnetkov. To je normalen posnetek ene najbolj znanih pesmi.
(Music with lyrics)
If there's a bustle in your hedgerow don't be alarmed now. It's just a spring clean for the May Queen. Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, There's still time to change the road you're on.
(Music ends)
Ne bi to lahko poslušali cel dan?
Couldn't you just listen to that all day?
(smeh)
All right, here it is backwards, and see if you can hear the hidden messages that are supposedly in there.
In zdaj posnetek nazaj, poskusite, če boste slišali sporočilo, ki je baje zakrinkano.
(Music with unintelligible lyrics)
(Lyrics) Satan!
(Unintelligible lyrics continue)
What did you get? Audience: Satan!
Kaj ste ujeli?
Satan. OK, at least we got "Satan". Now, I'll prime the auditory part of your brain to tell you what you're supposed to hear, and then hear it again.
(Občinstvo: Satan.) Satan? Vsaj to smo ujeli. Sedaj bom prepričal glasbeni del vaših možganov, kaj morate slišati in vam posnetek zopet predvajal.
(Music with lyrics)
(Music ends)
(smeh)
(Laughter)
(Applause)
(Aplavz)
You can't miss it when I tell you what's there.
Ne morete zgrešiti, ko vam povem, kaj je tam.
(Laughter)
(smeh)
I'm going to just end with a positive, nice little story. The Skeptics is a nonprofit educational organization. We're always looking for little good things that people do.
Končal bom z lepo pozitivno zgodbo o - the Skeptics je neprofitna izobraževalna organizacija. Vedno iščemo male, dobre stvari, ki jih ustvarijo ljudje.
And in England, there's a pop singer. One of the top popular singers in England today, Katie Melua. And she wrote a beautiful song. It was in the top five in 2005, called, "Nine Million Bicycles in Beijing." It's a love story -- she's sort of the Norah Jones of the UK -- about how she much loves her guy, and compared to nine million bicycles, and so forth. And she has this one passage here.
V Angliji je priljubljena pop pevka. Zelo priljubljena - na vrhu lestvic priljubljenosti v Angliji danes, Katie Melua. Napisala je prečudovito pesem. Leta 2005 je bila med prvimi petimi na svetu s pesmijo "Nine Milion Bicycles in Beijing". Je ljubezenska zgodba - ona je kot Norah Jones Velike Britanije - o tem, kako močno ljubi svojega fanta v primerjavi z devetimi milijoni koles in tako naprej. V pesmi je ta odlomek.
(Music)
♫Smo 12 miljardd svetlobnih let od roba♫©
(Lyrics) We are 12 billion light-years from the edge
♫To je ugibanje♫
That's a guess,
♫Nihče ne more potrditi, da je res♫
No one can ever say it's true,
♫Vendar vem, da vedno s tabo bom♫
But I know that I will always be with you.
No, to je prijetno.
Michael Shermer: Well, that's nice. At least she got it close. In America it'd be, "We're 6,000 light years from the edge."
Navsezadnje je bila blizu. V Ameriki bi bilo, "Smo 6000 svetlobnih let od roba"
(Laughter)
(smeh)
But my friend, Simon Singh, the particle physicist now turned science educator, who wrote the book "The Big Bang," and so on, uses every chance he gets to promote good science. And so he wrote an op-ed piece in "The Guardian" about Katie's song, in which he said, well, we know exactly how far from the edge. You know, it's 13.7 billion light years, and it's not a guess. We know within precise error bars how close it is. So we can say, although not absolutely true, it's pretty close to being true.
Toda moj prijatelj Simon Singh, fizik, sedaj znanstvenik, je napisal knjigo Veliki Pok. Vsako priložnost izkoristi za promoviranje dobre znanosti. Zato je v časopisu Guardian napisal članek o pesmi, v katerem je zatrdil, da vemo natančno, kako stari, kako daleč od roba smo. Smo 12, 13.7 milijard let stari in to ni ugibanje. Natančno vemo, kako blizu smo. In tako lahko rečemo, da ne absolutno resnično, a zelo blizu resničnemu.
And, to his credit, Katie called him up after this op-ed piece came out, and said, "I'm so embarrassed. I was in the astronomy club. I should've known better." And she re-cut the song. So I will end with the new version.
Po objavi članka ga je Katie poklicala. Ogovorila ga je: "Zelo me je sram". Bila sem članka astronomskega krožka in lahko bi vedela bolj natančno. Tako je popravila pesem. Končal bo z novo verzijo.
(Music with lyrics)
♫Smo 13.7 miljarde svetlobnih let♫
We are 13.7 billion light years from the edge of the observable universe. That's a good estimate with well-defined error bars. And with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you.
♫od roba opazovanega vesolja♫ ♫To je dober približek z dobro natančnostjo napake♫ ♫In z dosegljivi informacijami♫ ♫predvideva, da s tabo vedno bom♫ (aplavz)
(Laughter)
Kako kul je to?
How cool is that?
(aplavz)
(Applause)