ON OCCAM'S RAZOR
14th JANUARY 2003
One important component of 'The Plain View' is the principle of Occam's Razor - Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum - Entities are not to be multipled beyond necessity. A version of this might be a little less formal ...... theories should be only as complex as the data rerquire ....... don't adopt a way-out explaantion when a more ordonary one will do.
The practical difficulty (as I often had resaon to remind my chemistry students) is to know where overcomplication begins and where ovesimplification begins.
The following, not very meritoroius, story illustrates this difficulty.
PROGRESS .......WHAT PROGRESS?
A very odd thing happened to me a few months ago (as the stage parson always says). The e-mail, whose function is almost solely to deliver junk, brought me what seemed to be a personal letter. This promised a rare and exciting prospect - that of not putting it straight into the electronic bin.
I opened the file and glanced at the letter. The sender's e-address, of course, gave no clue as to the place of origin. Apart from that, the first things that struck me were the evident typographical error in the date at the head of the text (April 12th 2200) and the terminal 'signature' - The Stockton Family of Boston. None of this was very informative; I have no known relatives in any of the several places named Boston listed in my atlas. But the Stockton lineage is long and plodding. Ned (Sir Edward Stockton) was Lord Mayor of London in the fifteenth century but there are long intervals in the line. My father's youngest grandchild is now a man of nearly sixty and, at the time of writing this, there are no great-grandchildren of his extant.
But the letter itself ....... I forbear to quote it in full. The text began "Hi". A bit of a letdown, that! It was obviously one of those circular letters from Very Important and Interesting People whose recent family history they expect you to be keen to know. These VIIP's assume that many people are more interested in them than they, themselves, are in the addressees and that, consequently, they have no call to address people personally. The recipients are evidently seen not as people so much as names on a file.
There used to be an excuse for these pseudo-personal circular reports of personal matters but, with software that I was using as early as the late 1980's, it is perfectly possible, by adroit use of delete, copy and paste, to create an impression that a circular to almost everybody is a proper letter to somebody. Courtesy demands this deception. Postcards carrying the message "Dear Eric, Having a lovely time; wish you were here!" may be doubly mendacious but at least they are personal both in intent and in impact.
"Hi!" - so help us all. It was from a Stockton family whom I had certainly not seen for years. Indeed I cannot even recall their very existence.
The crunch news was about the latest prospective grandchild shortly to be born of their daughter Tweeta and her man Juffo. Juffo, is reputedly a professor in the Virtual Anatomy of Inter-Galactic Nothingness. The letter says that he is at the final stages of an important discovery/invention.
It appears that Juffo was pleased about the new child but that Tweeta was thinking that enough is enough. The careers of the preceding issue were sketched rather copiously. Suffice it to say that these offspring are the proceeds of a successful Siamese Twin Separation. Somewhat insensitively, my correspondent refers to them as May and Hem.
They are both doing well at university majoring in Sub-Aqua Gardening and Three Dimensional Bingo respectively.
The new child is to be initiated into the church. He or she will, it is reported, be baptised by Rev Ashley Dollyboy at the local Chapel of ES - the Evangelite Siblinghood. The previous incumbent, Rev Melanie Mung, retired some years ago and sadly - for the safety of others and of herself - she has been permanently vegetabalised in the House of Perpetual Futility which, I am asked to recall, was opened some years ago by the Anti-Death League. "You remember Mellie and her sadly deceased husband, Gilbert, who ran a betting shop ....... but that's going back a bit."
Meanwhile Tweeta is actively networking in the local branch of the Charles Windsor Multi-Faith Marriage Counselling Foundation
And so on and on!
There is a lot more of this stuff but you will have to curb your curiosity. I tried the Reply Button and crashed my computer as a result.
The only thing that really exercises me is the question - is this circular a hoax? If so .... then why? The circular must, if genuine, come from people living in a hi-tech world of numbskulls. But there is something of the flavour of authentic Stocktonhood about it. The people in it could be in some sense real? I feel somehow at home among them and the more I read and re-read the full text the stronger is this feeling of mine. Blood is thicker than water even if mud is thicker than either. Blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.
I know Boston in Lincolnshire quite well and I am pretty sure that there are no Stocktons there but, wait a minute, there is a certain hint of America in the letter - the America of the wonders of high tech and the wonders of nutty religion. That's it ....... the letter is from Boston USA where there may well be some Stocktons unknown to me. That left the year, 2200, as the only outstanding puzzzle.
I glanced again at the date at the top of the circular letter. It was April 12th 2200. Could this be the correct date after all? Surely a crude hoaxer could not have resisted the temptation to date it April 1st. I took fright. Perhaps April 12th 2200 is not a typographical error? Will old Juffo have invented, in 2200, a time machine and this tedious circular is its trial run?
I wonder if dear old Ned has a copy too.
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The obvious simple expalantrion of this reported e-mail with the 'wrong' year date - 2200 instead of 2002 - the Typographical Error Theory compares favourably withh the alternatve complexity of the Time Machine Theory, But there have to be doubts unless we are to rule out, a priori, the notion of time machines.
There are many features of the contemporary world that are seen by us staid old bodies as daft. The tendency to give children bizarre names is well established but do not Juffo and Tweeta striike us a as a bit absurd? Again, we all know that the academic scene is not short of courses and modules and projects that are dangerously close to the lower levels of intellectual respectability but does not the Virtual Anatomy of Inter-Galactic Nothingness seem a bit much and as for three dimensionsl bingo .... surely no?. Crazy cults and pressure groups are common enough but ...... so help us ....... the Evangelite Siblinghood and the Anti-Death League are surely not yet. The Charles Windsor outfit is more plausble but the fact remains that the letter contains much that seems futuristic.
Maybe we should not dismiss the Time Machine Theory so easily. After all, people were confident that iron ships could never float - end of story.
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