WHEN asked about his prodigious general knowledge, British novelist Ian McEwan replied, “No one knows anything, really. It’s all rented or borrowed.”
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Of course he was being facetious, but such throwaway lines usually smack of a deeper truth.
And let’s face it, if it was true five years ago, the march of technology and “pocket knowledge” has made fact an even more arbitrary concept.
I’m the first to admit that Google is the column writer’s best friend, but along with its buddy Wikipedia, it can also be as misleading as a 19th century German chemist. Confused? Let me explain.
Said chemist Erich von Wolf had a thing for green vegetables. In 1870 he set about measuring and recording the amount of iron in a whole range of leafy greens, including the ever unpopular spinach.
In recording his findings (possibly after a big night on the kale), he accidently misplaced a decimal point, changing the iron content in spinach tenfold. While there are actually only 3.5 milligrams of iron in a 100-gram serving of spinach, the accepted fact became 35 milligrams – the equivalent of eating a staple.
Once it went to print, the nutritional value of spinach became the stuff of legend – and the food of choice for Popeye the sailor man.
When Paramount Pictures began making animated cartoons of Popeye in the 1930s, studio executives recommended he eat spinach due to its amazing health-giving properties. Together, von Wolf and Popeye increased the consumption of spinach in the US by a third.
The error was eventually corrected, but as recently as 1981 the British Medical Journal published an article about von Wolf’s error in an attempt to finally debunk the myth.
It’s a great example, not just of the arbitrary nature of knowledge and our need to be vigilant, but of how we live in a state of constant flux.
Facts are like rubber bands, often stretched to benefit those with a vested interest.
In a mere sixty years we’ve gone from doctors endorsing the health benefits of smoking, to cigarette packaging with photographs of gangrenous limbs.
In the 1960s and 70s, our parents encouraged us to go out in the summer sun and “get a good dose of Vitamin D”. Remember how red meat used to be good for you? Then it was bad, then good again. Now the jury’s out. The same goes for red wine, tea and butter.
Humans once believed Earth was at the centre of the universe, and, till recently, that Pluto was a planet. Now he’s back to being a Disney character. It’s like living in an endless game of Chinese whispers.
I’m reminded of the erudite American journalist HL Mencken. “We are here and it is now,” said the Sage of Baltimore. “Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
In his wonderfully refreshing book, The Half-Life of Facts: Why everything we know has an expiration date, Samuel Arbesman, an expert in the science of science, explains how the creation of facts actually operates according to scientific principles. How the way we discover new information, and the way errors (like the spinach myth) are dispelled, adheres to a strict mathematical formula.
He likens the acquiring of knowledge to the vibrations caused by plucking a guitar string. “We understand how vibrations work thanks to physics. It’s time we did the same thing for the fluctuations in what we know as well; recognise that there’s an order to all of our changing knowledge.
Personally, I want to believe that the spinach I pile into a korma curry is going to give me biceps like a mountain range. I adhere to Voltaire’s adage that it’s better to judge a person by their questions than their answers.
One of my favourite books of all time, The Book of Questions, was written by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda not long before his death. After a lifetime of political, philosophical and poetic writing, his last offering to the world consisted entirely of questions.
None of them required an answer.
Go to www.johnholtonhereandhome.blogspot.com.au to read more of John Holton's writing.