Children, Scientists, and Truth
Picture the scene: two children, cousins, on holiday in Scotland with their grandparents. I’ll call the children Tom and Mary. That’s not their real names, but they’re still alive and while they might recognize themselves I certainly wouldn’t want to embarrass them by letting anyone else recognize them. They’ve both grown up into very nice responsible adults.
They’re in the back seat of the car, in the Highlands, somewhere north of Ullapool. Wild country!
Mary is staring out, looking for any sign of wildlife – seeing some, but not much, and not managing to identify most of the things she sees, although she has good eyesight and knows very well what she’s looking for.
Tom has his head deep in a book – the very book Mary spent so long studying the previous evening in the B&B, a bird book.
Suddenly Tom looks up and points, “Look! There’s an eagle!”
Everybody looks where Tom points, but “it’s gone behind that rock,” and no-one else sees it.
(I wasn’t there. The grandparents used to tell the story, with great amusement.)
Was there really an eagle? Was there anything at all? I don’t know. I can’t prove there wasn’t, any more than Tom could prove there was.
This isn’t something that necessarily changes as one grows up. All these years later I wouldn’t embarrass Tom or myself by asking him – he might not really even know; memory can play tricks like that.
It’s not even as simple as memory playing tricks – eyesight can play tricks, too. What one sees is not necessarily what is actually there; what you see is constructed by your brain using a combination of what’s actually impinging on your eyes, and what your brain thinks should be there.
This is something the police and courts are familiar with in dealing with witnesses, I’m sure. And if sometimes they’re not, they surely should be.
Scientists aren’t immune either…there are doubtless many cases, but there’s one possible case I’m particularly familiar with.
In 1953, some scientists worked out what conditions would have made it possible for a fission reactor to happen naturally. Extraordinary conditions, involving incredibly pure ores with unbelievably little in the way of neutron absorbing impurities, even though the percentage of fissile 235U would have been higher in the past. In 1972, the remains of such a reactor were apparently found, in a uranium ore body in a uranium mine. (Tom looked up just in time to “see” an eagle…)
Other scientists have studied samples from this ore body, and done all kinds of investigations on them. They’ve generally accepted the story that a natural reactor (or several, in different parts of the ore body) operated a couple of billion years ago.
Did it really? I don’t know. I can’t prove it didn’t, although I’m quite sceptical.
In fact, unless at least a few of the scientists are lying, it must have done: the evidence they present is convincing, if they really observe what they claim to observe. But are some of the scientists lying? There’s plenty of motivation for them to do so, and it only takes a few of them to be deliberate liars; most of them might honestly think they’re seeing what they say they’re seeing, perhaps not scratching too deeply because they want to believe. There’s money in nuclear power, and a need for some way to dispose of nuclear waste...can it be safely contained underground?
Of course even if one natural nuclear reactor did produce radioactive material similar to that produced in power reactors, and that material did happen to be safely contained, it doesn’t prove that one can rely on it. There could have been thousands of them, and that one might be a rarity in not having been breached. Predicting what sites might be breached and which are safe would be difficult if not impossible. But that’s another story (Nuclear Waste).
The location of the mine is remote, at Oklo, in Gabon. The mine is heavily guarded. I’ve not even tried to visit* and I’ve not seen samples from the mine. Nor would I necessarily know they were really what they purported to be if I did.
I first became aware of this story in 1976, when Scientific American published an article about it in their July issue, pp.36-47.
*I did try to visit the environs of a uranium mine in India, but that’s another story.
My friend Ankush has visited – see Nuclear Radiation Poisoning in Jadugoda.