Impulse

I am a This American Life junkie as any­one who’s been fol­low­ing this blog knows. For those who are just join­ing us, TAL is a won­der­ful radio show on NPR in which they tell a num­ber of sto­ries, most often true. Old-school sto­ry­telling at its best. A few days ago, I was lis­ten­ing to an episode about an elec­tri­cian who thought he could dis­prove Einstein’s the­o­ries. I was laugh­ing hys­ter­i­cally when slowly, insid­i­ously, my life changed.

This episode is about a guy named Bob, an elec­tri­cian who starts study­ing physics in his spare time. He stud­ied Einstein’s famous equa­tion, E=mc² and con­cluded that Einstein had got it all wrong (It’s E=mc, you see). Bob began telling peo­ple that he could prove, with a few sim­ple dia­grams, how Einstein had erred.
This type of thing isn’t unusual. There are lots of nuts who think they can dis­prove mod­ern physics — so much so that there’s even a test for it. Bob took the test. It said he was a nut. Bob wasn’t con­vinced. So, the dev­il­ish folks at TAL sat him down with a physics pro­fes­sor. After hours of argu­ing, Bob & the doc­tor of physics almost came to blows. In the end, Bob decided that the pro­fes­sor didn’t know what he was talk­ing about. The good doc­tor had been study­ing it too long to see the obvi­ous.
The thing is, Bob doesn’t sound nuts. He sounds intel­li­gent and ratio­nal. He actu­ally sounds like my old high-school physics teacher. He’s just very, very wrong.
As I lis­tened and laughed, I real­ized that Bob sounded a whole lot like my father — coin­ci­den­tally also named Bob. Their con­ver­sa­tional and debate styles were iden­ti­cal. Calm and didac­tic, each opin­ion is stated as an unques­tion­able truth. Offer a counter-argument, and he’ll try to con­vince you that you don’t under­stand, or that the argu­ment is irrel­e­vant, or he’ll shift to undis­puted ground where he can still be right.
I gave up argu­ing with my dad when I was very young. There was no point to it. Later in ado­les­cence and even adult­hood, I’d cringe watch­ing him declaim his opin­ion — an opin­ion gleaned from watch­ing TV and read­ing the news — to some poor soul who couldn’t muster the courage to rebut or run. Once he deduced some­thing there was no con­vinc­ing him of any­thing else. Bob, the elec­tri­cian, sounded exactly like this.
Near the end of the episode, they inter­view Bob’s wife ask­ing her a sim­ple yet bril­liant ques­tion: “What if Bob’s wrong?” Naturally, she says that she’d still love him; it doesn’t mat­ter to her whether he’s right; etc. She does offer some insight into his char­ac­ter: Bob’s a self-taught man. Absolutely every­thing he knows, he taught him­self through expe­ri­ence. To him, there­fore, the entire world can be under­stood by sim­ply observ­ing and think­ing about it for a bit. Maybe draw a few sketches. Bob lives emper­i­cally.
I sud­denly under­stood my father. He too is self-taught. Of course any ran­dom con­clu­sion he comes to is fact — that’s the way the world works. Truth by deduc­tion. All my frus­tra­tion and embar­rass­ment vapor­ized. I for­gave my father. In fact, I began to take pride in him. He’s always watch­ing, think­ing, fig­ur­ing things out. He has clear opin­ions and is not afraid to act on them. Sure, he’s wrong some­times (he voted for Bush) — but he’s right even more fre­quently. More than that, he has some really good ideas.
Come to think of it, my dad’s pretty cool.
And, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I seem to have a habit of think­ing a lot about the world, hav­ing strong opin­ions based on scraps of infor­ma­tion. This blog is all the evi­dence you need.