Hey Bill.
This is Aditya Bakshi.
I'm a mechanical engineer graduate from India.
My question to you is why are so many people attracted to pseudoscience and what can we
as a society do to stop pseudoscience if it has the support of religious fundamentalists
and hyper nationalist?
For example, the recently concluded Indian Science Congress was criticized heavily for
featuring a lot of pseudoscience and mythology.
Thank you.
Greetings Aditya.
I'm saying it as best I can.
Aditya?
I'm saying it as best I can.
I have spent just about two weeks in India and I got to say I was very impressed with
how much pseudoscience there is, how much spiritualism there is.
I guess those aren't the same thing.
And a lot of people - it's very common for people from my country, from the United States
to go to India to get a new way of looking at life, to get a new spiritual prospective.
And as you suggested these things, pseudoscience and the spiritual perspective seem to be tied
together.
But science, this process that humans have come up with where you make an observation;
you come up with a hypothesis, a reason you think this observation happen, this phenomenon
occurred, and then you come up with a way to test it.
An experiment.
You test it.
You see what happened.
You compare that to what you thought would happen and you know nature and this extraordinary
way that enables us to have cars and trucks and the green revolution and feed everybody
and clean water for a lot of people and electricity and spaceflight and putting things in orbit
around Mars, the Mars Orbiting Mission, ISRO, Indian Space Research Organization's mission.
Very cool.
This is a great concern.
All I can say is, well not all I can say, but something I will say about pseudoscience.
Well, in the United States it's very common to use the phrase critical thinking, being
critical of claims is that it's a process.
When you first, for example, when someone says that he or she spiritually prepares himself
or herself to walk across hot coals, which is a fabulous phenomenon, it's very easy for
an audience member, someone unfamiliar with the science involved, to think that it does
require spiritual preparedness.
But I've walked on hot coals without being spiritually prepared at all.
It just turns out that there's a few things that happen.
Generally fire walkers get their feet wet, they get the grass around the fire very wet
so your feet are wet so that turns to steam.
Then the big thing is your foot is just like a piece of meat, it soaks up a lot of heat
before your skin burns.
It's really amazing.
I always tell people wrap a piece of paper around an empty soda can and hold it over
a candle flame, the paper doesn't burn for quite a while because the heat passes right
through it into the can, the same as the skin of your foot.
So, along this line you have to show people that it was not spiritual preparedness that
enabled them to walk on fire.
And at first, in my experience, the audience will reject that.
No, no you have to be spiritually prepared.
No, no, no you don't.
And after they try it or review it they'll start to change their minds.
If you quiz people about the influence of astrology, the position of the stars with
respect to their personality characteristics, at first quite often they'll reject it.
They'll say no the stars are very influential.
But after a while they'll think about it.
People who believe they can communicate with the dead or get the audience to believe that
they can communicate with the dead, at first it seems reasonable, but after a while you
can show that it's not true.
So what I would say is you've got to stick with it.
You just got to keep nudging people against the pseudoscientific beliefs.
As far as the Indian Science Conference, this spiritualism, at least when I was in India,
it was deep within your culture, deep within the Indian culture.
So it's not something that's going to change right away.
But I claim that it's in everyone's best interest to embrace the process of science so that
Indian agriculture continues to feed your billion people – your, our billion people
and continue to explore space because it brings out the best in us, brings out the best in
people.
When a country has its own space program, it just inherently produces more graduates
in more advanced science, which then enriches technology for everyone.
And soon everybody in India will have access to phone calls.
Everybody in India will have access to higher more advanced transportation systems.
What we all in the developed world very much want is for Indian nation to skip these fossil
fuel steps that we all went through and produced all the greenhouse gas, which has given this
extraordinary quality of life in the West to be sure, but we want, by we the world wants
Indian mechanical engineers such as your self to get right to renewable energy and become
world leaders in renewable energy.
And this to me is very closely related to eschewing or setting aside spiritualism and
pseudoscientific beliefs and embracing science to solve these actual technical problems.
Spiritualism is a separate thing.
If people are enriched by that it's great, but to have spiritualism or believe in psychic
powers or psychic preparedness influence agriculture, for example, or influence electricity production
is inappropriate and is going to hold you all back and that's why, hold us all back
and that's why I think you've asked the question.
But if you're a mechanical engineer you are using science to make things and solve problems
and we appreciate your work.
Carry on sir.
Carry on!