FAITH IN SCIENCE

The Edge is running this interesting piece (found via the NYTimes) wherein they ask a bunch of famous scientists, “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” Most of them disappointingly avow to believe in some unproven component of their own research, or simply extrapolate from current trends in their field or some other discipline. You’ve got the pedantic, and you’ve got the bitter, and you’ve got a few gems like Robert Sapolsky:

Well, of course, it is tempting to go for something like, “That the wheel, agriculture, and the Macarena were all actually invented by yetis.” Or to do the sophomoric pseudo-ironic logic twist of, “That every truth can eventually be proven.” Or to get up my hackles, draw up to my full height and intone, “Sir, we scientists believe in nothing that cannot be proven by the whetstone of science, verily our faith is our lack of faith,” and then go off in a lab coat and a huff.

and Freeman Dyson:

Numbers that are exact powers of two are 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 and so on. Numbers that are exact powers of five are 5, 25, 125, 625 and so on. Given any number such as 131072 (which happens to be a power of two), the reverse of it is 270131, with the same digits taken in the opposite order. Now my statement is: it never happens that the reverse of a power of two is a power of five.

The digits in a big power of two seem to occur in a random way without any regular pattern. If it ever happened that the reverse of a power of two was a power of five, this would be an unlikely accident, and the chance of it happening grows rapidly smaller as the numbers grow bigger. If we assume that the digits occur at random, then the chance of the accident happening for any power of two greater than a billion is less than one in a billion. It is easy to check that it does not happen for powers of two smaller than a billion. So the chance that it ever happens at all is less than one in a billion. That is why I believe the statement is true.

Actually, I think my favorite part is the little pictures. Scientists are so wonderfully unphotogenic.