In honor of Earth Month, which begins today, I suggest we all pledge to save money and gas whenever we drive a car.
There’s an easy way to do this. Simply attach a rope to the back seat and pull on it as you drive along the highway. Physics dictates the harder you pull, the more force the rope exerts on the car. This tension helps move the car along the highway, taking some of the load off the car’s engine and thus saving on gas.
Ready to try it? Happy April Fool’s Day.
When you pull the rope, you have to brace yourself against the front seat, or you’d simply slide backward. While you do pull forward on the back seat, you also push backward on the front seat. The two equal and opposite forces cancel each other, resulting in zero net force on the car. You can’t pull a car while sitting in it, any more than you can lift yourself by the shoelaces.
Many of us are intimidated by science. If you didn’t spot the suggestion as a trick, perhaps it was because you saw the word “physics” and felt you wouldn’t understand the rest of the paragraph. Maybe the technical terms “force” and “tension” impressed you into thinking, “Well, it sounds a little strange, but she must know what she’s talking about…”
As a geology student, I have observed many people react this way to complex arguments. It’s unfortunate because, as I just demonstrated, something complicated and technical can be totally bogus.
Even professionals fall into this trap. Mathematician Ian Stewart, writing in a February 2012 issue of the “Guardian,” said one cause of the 2008 crisis was misapplying economic models. The analysts who assured bankers that everything in the housing market was fine used complicated equations without checking their basic assumptions. The bankers trusted this sophisticated analysis, and we all know what happened next.
Academia is not exempt. In 1996, the New York University physicist Alan Sokal sent the academic journal “Social Text” a parody of their style. His paper claimed that science and math are social constructs without objective existence. In the book “The Sokal Hoax,” Sokal describes how he mixed unintelligible statements about quantum theory with unrelated commentary from social scientists, using all the popular buzzwords. The journal published it, at which point Sokal revealed the hoax and stated “incomprehensibility becomes a virtue.”
Of course, nobody understands everything. Whether we’re buying a new appliance or deciding how to vote, all of us have to evaluate unfamiliar information. In my opinion, the best thing to do is not to be silenced by embarrassment. Be brave, ask questions and challenge what doesn’t make sense. Saying “I need a better explanation” is never stupid. It’s much smarter than driving down the highway with a rope over your shoulder.
