DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 209, 23 November 1927, Page 5

DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

SCIENTIFIC BUNK (Copyright, 1927) AND now comes along an astronomer of the Yerkes Observatory and says that there is probably going to be an explosion of the sun which will doom the earth and its inhabitants to extinction and may happen any minute, although again it may not happen for a million years or so. Another astronomer says that the universe is 194 quadrillion miles in diameter. One hundred and ninety-four quadrillions is all there is—there isn’t any more. Ordinarily statements like this leave us dumb and awestricken. We accept them as true because we have no way of contradicting them. They are like the statements that used to be made about theology, when they argued whether one million or ten angels could stand on the point of a pin. Nobody knew anything about it, anyhow, and so the declarers were safe. We read somewhere in our youth of a story of a man who professed to know everything. Ask him how many fishes there were in the Fiver and he could tell you to the last minnow. There were exactly seventeen million and ninety-six. He also knew the number of nails that went into the bridge and the number of stars in the heavens and the number of hairs on your head and could tell you the number exactly in a minute's notice. This was all right because nobody could dispute it, but it was simply a bold bluff. If you say there are nine trillion blades of grass on the lawn nobody is going to take the trouble to count them. Your statement goes unchallenged. A lot of this scientific data is pure bluff intended to awe the common man and it succeeds pretty well. We have passed the age when people are stricken dumb by theological dictum, but we are in the zone now where people are bludgeoned by scientific data. Science has done some wonderful things. It predicts an eclipse of the moon to the minute and tells us how electricity will act and all sorts of things, but that is no reason why scientists should lay back their ears and talk lightly about things that are manifestly pure guesses. The sun may explode to-morrow and again it may not. One man's guess is as good as another’s. We have made some progress in finding out about earthquakes and we have elaborate theories as how- they occur, but just when an earthquake is going to hit us we know about as well as the scientists. The best things we can do is to run along and sell our papers and if the works blow up we are as well off as anybody and no worse.