The Magic of Reality

IN THE FIRST chapter of this book I talked about magic, and separated supernatural magic (casting a spell to turn a frog into a prince, or rubbing a lamp to conjure up a genie) from conjuring tricks (illusions, such as silk handkerchiefs turning into rabbits, or women being sawn in half). Nobody nowadays believes in fairytale magic. Everybody knows that pumpkins turn into coaches only in Cinderella. And we all know that rabbits come out of apparently empty hats only by trickery. But there are some supernatural tales that are still taken seriously, and the ‘events’ they recount are often called miracles. This chapter is about miracles – stories of super-natural happenings that many people believe, as opposed to fairy-tale spells, which nobody believes, and conjuring tricks, which look like magic but we know are faked.

Some of these tales are ghost stories, spooky urban legends or stories of uncanny coincidence – stories like, ‘I dreamed about a celebrity whom I hadn’t thought about for years, and the very next morning I heard that he’d died in the night.’ Many more come from the hundreds of religions around the world, and these in particular are often called miracles. To take just one example, there is a legend that, about 2,000 years ago, a wandering Jewish preacher called Jesus was at a wedding where they ran out of wine. So he called for some water and used miraculous powers to turn it into wine – very good wine, as the story goes on to tell us. People who would laugh at the idea that a pumpkin could turn into a coach, and who know perfectly well that silk handkerchiefs don’t really turn into rabbits, are quite happy to believe that a prophet turned water into wine or, as devotees of another religion would have it, flew to heaven on a winged horse.

Rumour, coincidence and snowballing stories

Usually when we hear a miracle story it’s not from an eye witness, but from somebody who heard about it from somebody else, who heard it from somebody else, who heard it from somebody else’s wife’s friend’s cousin… and any story, passed on by enough people, gets garbled. The original source of the story is often itself a rumour that began so long ago and has become so distorted in the retelling that it is almost impossible to guess what actual event – if any – started it off.

After the death of almost any famous person, hero or villain, stories that somebody has seen them alive start rushing around the globe. This was true of Elvis Presley, of Marilyn Monroe, even of Adolf Hitler. It’s hard to know why people enjoy passing on such rumours when they hear them, but the fact is that they do, and that is a big part of the reason why rumours spread.

Here’s a recent example of how such a rumour gets started. Soon after Michael Jackson died in 2009, an American television crew was given a guided tour of his famous mansion called Neverland. In one scene of the resulting film, people thought they saw his ghost at the end of a long corridor. The recording is very unconvincing – however, it was enough to start wild rumours flying around. Michael Jackson’s ghost is at large! Copycat sightings soon emerged. For example, there is a photograph that a man took of the polished surface of his car. To you and me, especially when we compare the ‘face’ with the other clouds on either side, what we are looking at is obviously the reflection of a cloud. But to the overheated imagination of the devoted fan it could only be the ghost of Michael Jackson, and the picture on YouTube has received more than 15 million hits!

Actually, there’s something interesting going on here, which is worth mentioning. Humans are social animals, the human brain is pre-programmed to see the faces of other humans even where there aren’t any. This is why people so often see faces in the random patterns made by clouds, or on slices of toast, or in damp patches on walls.

Spine-tingling ghost stories are fun to tell, especially if they are really scary, and even more so if you claim that they are true. When I was eight, my family lived briefly in a house called Cuckoos, about 400 years old, with wonky black Tudor beams. Not surprisingly, the house had a legend about a long-dead priest hidden in a secret passage. There was a story that you could hear his footsteps on the stairs, but with the twist that you could hear one step too many – spookily explained by the fact that the staircase was said to have had an extra step in the sixteenth century! I remember the pleasure I took in passing the story on to my schoolfriends. It never occurred to me to ask how good the evidence was. It was enough that the house was old, and my friends were impressed.

People get a thrill from passing on ghost stories. The same applies to miracle stories. If a rumour of a miracle gets written down in a book, the rumour becomes hard to challenge, especially if the book is ancient. If a rumour is old enough, it starts to be called a ‘tradition’ instead, and then people believe it all the more. This is rather odd, because you might think they would realize that older rumours have had more time to get distorted than younger rumours that are close in time to the alleged events themselves. Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson lived too recently for traditions to have grown up, so not many people believe stories like ‘Elvis seen on Mars’. But maybe in 2,000 years’ time…?

What about those strange stories people tell of having a dream about somebody they haven’t seen or thought of for years, then waking up to find a letter from that person waiting on the doormat? Or waking up to hear or read that the person died in the night? You may have had such an experience yourself. How do we explain coincidences like that?

Well, the most likely explanation is that they really are just that: coincidences, and nothing more. The key point is that we only bother to tell stories when strange coincidences happen – not when they don’t. Nobody ever says, ‘Last night I dreamed about that uncle I haven’t thought of for years, and then I woke up and found that he hadn’t died in the night!’

The more spooky the coincidence, the more likely the news of it will spread. Sometimes it strikes a person as so remarkable that he fires off a letter to a newspaper. Perhaps he dreams, for the first time ever, of a once famous but long forgotten actress from the distant past, then wakes to discover that she died in the night. A ‘farewell visit’ in a dream – how spooky! But just think for a moment what has actually happened. For a coincidence to be reported in a newspaper, it only has to be experienced by one person among the millions of readers who might write to the paper. If we just take Britain alone, about 2,000 people die every day, and there must be a hundred million dreams every night. When you think of it like that, we’d positively expect that from time to time somebody will wake up and discover that the person they had been dreaming of had died in the night. They are the only ones who would send their stories to the papers.

Another thing that happens is that stories grow in the telling and re-telling. People enjoy a good story so much that they embellish it to make it a bit better than it was when they heard it. It is such fun giving people goose-pimples that we exaggerate the story – just a little, to make it a bit more colourful – and then the next person to pass the story on exaggerates a bit more, and so on. For example, having woken up to find that a famous person had died in the night, you might make enquiries to discover exactly when she died. The answer might come back, ‘Oh, it must have been approximately 3 a.m.’ Then you work out that you could well have been dreaming about her somewhere around 3 a.m. And before you know where you are, the ‘approximately’ and the ‘somewhere around’ get left out of the story as it does the rounds until it becomes: ‘She died at exactly 3 a.m., and that is exactly the moment when my cousin’s friend’s wife’s granddaughter was dreaming about her.’

Sometimes we can actually pin down the explanation of a weird coincidence. A great American scientist called Richard Feynman tragically lost his wife to tuberculosis, and the clock in her room stopped at precisely the moment she died. Goose-pimples! But Dr Feynman was not a great scientist for nothing. He worked out the true explanation. The clock was faulty. If you picked it up and tilted it, it tended to stop. When Mrs Feynman died, the nurse needed to record the time for the official death certificate. The sickroom was rather dark, so she picked up the clock and tilted it towards the window in order to read it. And that was the moment at which the clock stopped. Not a miracle at all, just a faulty mechanism.

Even if there had been no such explanation, even if the clock’s spring really had wound down to a stop at exactly the moment when Mrs Feynman died, we shouldn’t be all that impressed. No doubt at any minute of every day or night, quite a lot of clocks in America stop. And quite a lot of people die every day. To repeat my earlier point, we don’t bother to spread the ‘news’ that ‘My clock stopped at exactly 4.50 p.m., and (would you believe it?) nobody died.’

One of the charlatans I mentioned in the chapter on magic used to pretend he could restart watches by the ‘power of thought’. He would invite his large television audience to go and fetch any old broken-down watch in the house and clutch it in their hand while he tried to start it remotely with the power of thought. Almost immediately the phone in the studio would ring, and a breathless voice at the other end would announce, in awed tones, that their watch had started.

Part of the explanation may have been similar to that in the case of Mrs Feynman’s clock. It’s probably less true of modern digital watches, but in the days when watches had springs, simply picking up a stopped watch could sometimes restart it as the sudden movement activated the hairspring balance wheel. This can happen more easily if the watch is warmed up, and the heat from a person’s hand can be enough to do that – not often, but it doesn’t have to be often when you have 10,000 people, all over the country, picking up their stopped watches, perhaps shaking them, and then clutching them in warm hands. Only one of the 10,000 watches has to start in order for the owner to phone through the news in great excitement and impress the entire television audience. We never hear about the 9,999 watches that didn’t restart.

A good way to think about miracles

There was a famous Scottish thinker in the eighteenth century called David Hume who made a clever point about miracles. He began by defining a miracle as a ‘transgression’ (or breaking) of a law of nature. Walking on water, or turning water into wine, or stopping or starting a clock by the power of thought alone, or turning a frog into a prince, would be good examples of breaking a law of nature. Miracles like that would be very disturbing indeed to science, for the reasons discussed in the chapter on magic. Disturbing if they ever happened, that is! So how should we respond to stories of miracles? This was the question Hume turned to; and his answer was the clever point I mentioned.

If you want to know Hume’s actual words, here they are, but you have to remember that he wrote them more than two centuries ago, and English style has changed since then.

Let’s put Hume’s point into other words. If John tells you a miracle story, you should believe it only if it would be even more of a miracle for it to be a lie (or a mistake, or an illusion). For example, you might say, ‘I would trust John with my life, he never tells a lie, it would be a miracle if John ever told a lie.’ That’s all well and good, but Hume would say something like this: ‘However unlikely it might be that John could tell a lie, is it really more unlikely than the miracle that John claims to have seen?’ Suppose John claimed to have watched a cow jump over the moon. No matter how trustworthy and honest John might normally be, the idea of his telling a lie (or having an honest hallucination) would be less of a miracle than a cow literally jumping over the moon. So you should prefer the explanation that John was lying (or mistaken).

That was an extreme and imaginary example. Let’s take something that really happened, to see how Hume’s idea might work in practice. In 1917, two young English cousins called Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright took photographs, which they said were of fairies. To modern eyes, the photographs are obvious fakes, but at the time, when photography was still quite a new thing, even the great writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the famously un-foolable Sherlock Holmes, was taken in by it, and so were quite a lot of other people. Years later, when Frances and Elsie were old women, they came clean and admitted that the ‘fairies’ were nothing more than cardboard cut-outs. But let’s think like Hume, and work out why Conan Doyle and the others should have known better than to fall for the trick. Which of the following two possibilities do you think would be the more miraculous, if it were true?

It’s really no contest, is it? Children play make-believe all the time, and it is so easy to do. Even if it were hard to do; even if you felt that you knew Elsie and Frances very well, and they were always completely truthful girls, who would never dream of playing a trick; even if the girls had been given a truth drug, and had sailed through a lie-detector test with flying colours; even if this all added up to its being a miracle if they told a lie, what would Hume say? He would say that the ‘miracle’ of their lying would still be a smaller miracle than the fairies they claimed to show actually existing.

Elsie and Frances didn’t do any serious harm with their prank, and it is even rather funny that they managed to fool the great Conan Doyle. But such tricks by young people are sometimes no laughing matter, to put it mildly. Back in the seventeenth century, in a village in New England called Salem, a group of young girls became hysterically obsessed with ‘witches’, and started imagining, or making up, all sorts of things which, unfortunately, the very superstitious adults of the community believed. Numerous older women, and some men too, were accused of being witches in league with the devil, and of casting spells on the girls, who said they had seen them flying through the air, or doing other strange things that witches were popularly believed to do. The consequences were extremely serious: the girls’ testimony sent nearly twenty people to the gallows. One man was even ceremonially crushed under stones, which is an appalling thing to happen to an innocent person, purely because a group of children made up stories about him. I can’t help wondering why the girls did it. Were they trying to impress each other? Could it have been a bit like the cruel ‘cyber-bullying’ that happens today in emails and on social networking sites? Or did they genuinely believe their own tall stories?

Let’s come back to miracle stories in general, and how they get started. Perhaps the most famous instance of young girls saying weird things and being believed is the so-called miracle of Fatima. In 1917, at Fatima in Portugal, a ten-year-old shepherd girl called Lucia, accompanied by her two young cousins, Francisco and Jacinta, claimed to have seen a vision up on a hill. The children said the hill had been visited by a woman called the ‘Virgin Mary’, who, though long dead, had become a kind of goddess of the local religion. According to Lucia, the ghostly Mary spoke to her and told her and the other children that she would keep returning on the 13th of each month until October 13th, when she would perform a miracle to prove she was who she said she was. Rumours of the expected miracle spread around Portugal, and on the appointed day a huge crowd of more than 70,000 is said to have gathered at the spot. The miracle, when it came, involved the sun. Accounts of exactly what the sun is supposed to have done vary. To some witnesses it seemed to ‘dance’, to others it whirled round and round like a Catherine wheel. The most dramatic claim was that

Now, what do we think really happened? Was there really a miracle at Fatima? Did the ghostly Mary really appear? Conveniently, she was invisible to everybody except the three children, so we don’t have to take that part of the story very seriously. But the miracle of the moving sun is supposed to have been seen by 70,000 people, so what are we to make of that? Did the sun really move (or did the Earth move relative to it, so that the sun appeared to move)? Let’s think like Hume. Here are three possibilities to consider.

Which of these possibilities do you think is the most plausible? All three of them seem pretty unlikely. But surely Possibility 3 is the least far-fetched, the least deserving of the title of miracle. To accept Possibility 3 we only have to believe that somebody told a lie in reporting that 70,000 people saw the sun move, and the lie got repeated and spread around, just like any of the popular urban legends that whizz around the internet nowadays. Possibility 2 is less likely. It requires us to believe that 70,000 people simultaneously experienced a hallucination involving the sun. Rather far-fetched. But however unlikely – almost miraculous – Possibility 2 may seem, even that would be far less of a miracle than Possibility 1.

The sun is visible all over the daylight half of the world, not just in one Portuguese town. If it really had moved, millions of people all over the hemisphere – not just those in Fatima – would have been terrified out of their wits. Actually the case against Possibility 1 is even stronger than that. If the sun really had moved at the speed reported – ‘crashing down’ towards the crowd – or if something had happened to change the Earth’s spinning sufficiently to make it look as though the sun had moved at that colossal speed – it would have been the catastrophic end of all of us. Either the Earth would have been kicked out of its orbit and would now be a lifeless, cold rock hurtling through the dark void, or we’d have careered into the sun and been fried. Remember from Chapter 5 that the Earth is spinning at a rate of many hundreds of miles per hour (1,000 mph if measured at the equator), yet the apparent motion of the sun is still too slow for us to see it, because it is so far away. If sun and Earth suddenly moved relative to one another fast enough for a crowd to see the sun ‘crashing down’ towards them, the real movement would have to be thousands of times faster than usual and it literally would be the end of the world.

It was said that Lucia told her audience to stare at the sun. This is an extremely stupid thing to do, by the way, because it could permanently damage your eyes. It also could induce a hallucination that the sun was wobbling in the sky. Even if only one person hallucinated, or lied about seeing the sun move, and told somebody else, who told somebody else, who told lots of other people, each of whom told lots of other people… that would be enough to start a popular rumour. Eventually one of those people who heard the rumour would be likely to write it down. But whether or not that’s actually what happened is not what matters, for Hume. What matters is that, however implausible it might or might not be for 70,000 witnesses to be wrong, it is still far less implausible than for the sun to have moved in the way described.

Hume didn’t come right out and say miracles are impossible. Instead, he asked us to think of a miracle as an improbable event – an event whose improbability we might estimate. The estimate doesn’t have to be exact. It’s enough that the improbability of a suggested miracle can be roughly placed on some sort of scale, and then compared with an alternative such as a hallucination, or a lie.

Let’s go back to that game of cards we talked about in the first chapter. You remember we imagined that four players were each dealt a perfect hand: pure clubs, pure hearts, pure spades, pure diamonds. If this actually happened, what should we think about it? Again, we can write down three possibilities.

Now, what do you think, bearing in mind Hume’s advice? Each of the three possibilities may seem a bit hard to believe. But Possibility 3 is by far the easiest to believe. Possibility 2 could happen, but we have calculated how unlikely it is, and it is very very unlikely indeed: 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 to 1. We can’t calculate the odds against Possibility 1 as precisely as that, but just think about it: some power or force, which has never been properly demonstrated and which nobody understands, manipulated red and black printing ink on dozens of cards simultaneously. You might be reluctant to use a strong word like ‘impossible’, but Hume isn’t asking you to do that: all he’s asking you to do is to compare it to the alternatives, which in this case consist of a conjuring trick and a gigantic stroke of luck. Haven’t we all seen conjuring tricks (often involving cards, by the way) which are at least as mind-boggling as this? Obviously the most likely explanation for the perfect deal is not pure luck, still less some miraculous interference with the laws of the universe, but a trick by a conjuror or a dishonest card-sharp.

Let’s look at another famous miracle story, the one I mentioned earlier about the Jewish preacher called Jesus turning water into wine. Once again, we can list three main kinds of possible explanation.

I think there is not much doubt about the order of likelihood here. If Explanation 1 were true, it would violate some of the deepest scientific principles we know, for just the same kind of reason we met in the first chapter when talking about pumpkins and coaches, frogs and princes. Molecules of pure water would have to have been transformed into a complex mixture of molecules, including alcohol, tannins, sugars of various kinds and lots of others. The alternative explanations will have to be very unlikely indeed, if this one is to be preferred over them.

A conjuring trick is possible (much cleverer tricks than that are done regularly on stage and on television) – but less likely than Explanation 3. Why bother even to suggest a conjuring trick, given the lack of evidence that the incident occurred at all? Why even think about a conjuring trick, when Explanation 3 is so very likely, by comparison? Somebody made up the story. People invent stories all the time. That’s what fiction is. Because it is so very plausible that the story is fiction, we don’t need to trouble ourselves to think about conjuring tricks, still less about real miracles that violate the laws of science and overturn everything we know and understand about how the universe works.

As it happens, we know that lots of fiction has been made up about this particular preacher called Jesus. For example, there’s a pretty little song called the Cherry Tree Carol, which you may have sung or heard. It’s about when Jesus was still inside his mother Mary’s womb (that’s the same Mary as in the Fatima story, by the way), and she was walking with her husband Joseph by a cherry tree. Mary wanted some cherries, but they were too high on the tree and she couldn’t reach them. Joseph wasn’t in the mood to climb trees, but…

You won’t find the cherry-tree story in any ancient holy book. Nobody, literally nobody who is at all knowledgeable or well educated, thinks it is anything but fiction. Plenty of people think the water-into-wine story is true, but everybody agrees that the cherry-tree story is fiction. The cherry-tree story was made up only about 500 years ago. The water-into-wine story is older. It appears in one of the four gospels of the Christian religion (the Gospel of John: none of the other three, as it happens), but there is no reason to believe it is anything but a made-up story – just one made up a few centuries earlier than the one about the cherry tree. All four of the gospels, by the way, were written long after the events that they purport to describe, and not one of them by an eye witness. It is safe to conclude that the water-into-wine story is pure fiction, just like the cherry-tree story.

We can say the same thing about all alleged miracles, all ‘supernatural’ explanations for anything. Suppose something happens that we don’t understand, and we can’t see how it could be fraud or trickery or lies: would it ever be right to conclude that it must be supernatural? No! As I explained in Chapter 1, that would put an end to all further discussion or investigation. It would be lazy, even dishonest, for it amounts to a claim that no natural explanation will ever be possible. If you claim that anything odd must be ‘supernatural’ you are not just saying you don’t currently understand it; you are giving up and saying that it can never be understood.

Today’s miracle, tomorrow’s technology

There are things that not even the best scientists of today can explain. But that doesn’t mean we should block off all investigation by resorting to phoney ‘explanations’ invoking magic or the supernatural, which don’t actually explain at all. Just imagine how a medieval man – even the most educated man of his era – would have reacted if he had seen a jet plane, a laptop computer, a mobile telephone or a satnav device. He would probably have called them supernatural, miraculous. But these devices are now commonplace; and we know how they work, for people have built them, following scientific principles. There never was a need to invoke magic or miracles or the supernatural, and we now see that the medieval man would have been wrong to do so.

We don’t have to go back as far as medieval times to make the point. A gang of Victorian international criminals equipped with modern mobile phones could have co-ordinated their activities in ways that would have looked like telepathy to Sherlock Holmes. In Holmes’s world, a suspect in a murder case who could prove that he was in New York the evening after the murder was committed in London would have a perfect alibi, because in the late nineteenth century it was impossible to be in New York and in London on the same day. Anyone who claimed otherwise would seem to be invoking the supernatural. Yet modern jet planes make it easy. The eminent science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke summed the point up as Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If a time machine were to carry us forward a century or so, we would see wonders that today we might think impossible – miracles. But it doesn’t follow that everything we might think impossible today will happen in the future. Science-fiction writers can easily imagine a time machine – or an anti-gravity machine, or a rocket that can carry us faster than light. But the mere fact that we can imagine them is no reason to suppose that such machines will one day become reality. Some of the things we can imagine today may become real. Most will not.

The more you think about it, the more you realize that the very idea of a supernatural miracle is nonsense. If something happens that appears to be inexplicable by science, you can safely conclude one of two things. Either it didn’t really happen (the observer was mistaken, or was lying, or was tricked); or we have exposed a shortcoming in present-day science. If present-day science encounters an observation, or an experimental result, that it cannot explain, then we should not rest until we have improved our science so that it can provide an explanation. If it requires a radically new kind of science, a revolutionary science so strange that old scientists scarcely recognize it as science at all, that’s fine too. It’s happened before. But don’t ever be lazy enough – defeatist enough, cowardly enough – to say ‘It must be supernatural’ or ‘It must be a miracle’. Say instead that it’s a puzzle, it’s strange, it’s a challenge that we should rise to. Whether we rise to the challenge by questioning the truth of the observation, or by expanding our science in new and exciting directions, the proper and brave response to any such challenge is to tackle it head-on. And, until we have found a proper answer to the mystery, it’s perfectly OK simply to say, ‘This is something we don’t yet understand, but we’re working on it.’ Indeed, it is the only honest thing to do.

Miracles, magic and myths – they can be fun, and we have had fun with them throughout this book. Everybody likes a good story, and I hope you enjoyed the myths with which I began most of my chapters. But even more I hope that, in every chapter, you enjoyed the science that came after the myths. I hope you agree that the truth has a magic of its own. The truth is more magical – in the best and most exciting sense of the word – than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.