Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
The amazing things that have happened to me recently include kismet, random romance, encountering the famous and meeting my future wife in an unheated room of sweaty people. Is everything predetermined? Or is the universe running on Random?
Growing up in Larchmont, New York I was given a charge account at a book store. One summer I charged $1000 worth of literature, shocking my parents with the bill. I loved a book called Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine author.
Nearly four decades later I was in Buenos Aires with a modest notion. I wanted to see the café where Borges took a coffee now and again. Chance had different plans, because when we went by Borges’ house his widow was inside.
She wanted to meet me. Incredibly, she not only gave me a tour of his house, but I saw the studio where he wrote the book I had come to love. On that day, I reconnected with the spark of writing.
Had the moment been engineered by unseen forces, or by the simple action of a woman moving to the window to see if it was raining? Forty years ago I plucked a paperback from a shelf and half a world away a woman decided to accept Borges’ offer to become his secretary and later, wife. Try figuring the odds of she and I meeting someday and your head might explode. But let’s try something else instead.
Psychologist Richard Wiseman believes that we all know 300 people by first name. One morning you’re walking among New York’s 8.2 million people. What are the chances of running into someone you know?
I posed this question to a professor of statistics at UC Berkeley. Before he could answer, he had more questions. “How many people does one run into walking in NY in a day? 100? 500? 1000? How many of the 300 people you know visit NY on a given day?”
Roping in random wasn’t going to be easy. Assume that all 300 of my friends were in New York at the same time and assume 26,402.9 persons per square mile, as per US Census data. But since I am walking, you have to calculate how many people I’d meet not per square foot, but while moving in a straight line as I walked. That would be a whopping 733.4139 people per linear mile. Since I know 300 of them, divided by the 8.2 million of New York’s population, it would follow that I’d encounter .0268 friends per mile. The chance of seeing at least one of them was about 12.7%.
Wow.
First, it’s amazing that we can put a number to something that you might think of as random, like running into a friend. Second, the number delivered by our spectacular calculation was meaningless. No way everyone in New York is going to be outside at the same time and distributed randomly so I could run into them in a controlled way. Fuggaboutit! As the statistics professor put it, “These assumptions are ridiculous, of course!”
Of course. But the tortured nature of the calculation shows how the effortless ballet of running into a friend can be awesomely complex.
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Comments on last week’s 500 Words ran the spectrum from “you freaked out Dad,” to “I’m concerned about your mental state.” It got me thinking about which side I was on in the science-spirit game.
Say you’re on West 4th Street in NY. You’re choosing sides for a pickup ball game between the New York Logics and the California Intuitives. The guy leaning on the fence has a great jump shot and is obsessed with hard data. He goes to the Logics. The guy in three point land always makes the right move without thinking about it. He’ll play for the Intuitives. Easy choices? Before I push the basketball metaphor and tear a ligament, consider a crossroads I found myself in a few years ago.
I was making a documentary for the History Channel about the Shroud of Turin, interviewing investigators who wanted proof that the Shroud was the true burial cloth of Jesus. One reputable researcher told me, “if you do the experiment that way, you don’t get the result you want.” The result you want? I realized the guy was no longer a scientist even though he called himself one. He wasn’t playing for the Logics. He’d been traded to the Believers. Thing is, however, other Believers have been pretty good scientists. Francis Bacon, originator of the scientific method, was a Believer. Isaac Newton worked on biblical numerology when he wasn’t working with calculus. This is where the dividing line gets fuzzy.
Charles Darwin was cozy with the Church. According to a piece in Seed Magazine Darwin was close friends with his local pastor, John Brodie Innes. They served on various committees and church-funded groups, including the Sunday School. “We often differed,” Darwin wrote to Innes, “but you are one of those rare mortals, from whom one can differ & yet feel no shade of animosity.”
Innes wrote of Darwin: “He is a most accurate observer, and never states anything as a fact which he has not most thoroughly investigated … He follows his own course as a Naturalist and leaves Moses to take care of himself.” Walking in this crossroads of science and spirit you might encounter Deepak Chopra, who seems a little pissed off at science lately. Dr. Chopra recently wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, an article reprinted on intent.com, about what he calls science’s “diabolical creativity.” The atom bomb, Thalidomide, DDT and hormone-injected meat are all on Dr. Chopra’s “Bad Science” list. He says scientists shouldn’t act like they are above morality.
That’s a tough one. You place limits on research and the free flow of ideas isn’t so free any more. This sort of action produces not Bad Science but Bad Religion: Believers vs. Infidels, Crusades, Holy Wars, regimes that suppress the rights of women. Moral absolutes might feel good to some but do they help investigators get at the truth?
Maybe, in truth, the truth is blurry. Creationists hate Darwin, but in truth he was involved in Church affairs because he knew it was good for the community. Truth is Chopra thinks from the heart, but he has years of medical training and has a scientific mind.
What team do you play for? Or do we need to choose up sides at all?
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Hello and welcome to my blog. This is volume one, number one, paragraph one, sentence two, so you might discover right away that I am writing with assurance or wandering in the wilderness with only a metaphorical flashlight to show the way. Both scenarios are true. That’s the reason I’ve decided to write this. Right now, we’re at a crossroads where the usual definitions melt away. It’s an intersection of science and spirit. There are some curious discussions happening out there. So each week, on Thursday, I’ll offer you 500 words about the questions people are asking.
Can you really think your way into better health? Are there any limits to human consciousness? Does the laying on of hands heal people? Will time ever go in reverse? What is the deep power of chance events? If you do enough yoga, do you go insane? (Probably.) My friends from New York will read this as proof that after twenty years Out West I’ve finally gotten Out There. My Los Angeles friends might wonder why I am holding back. I admit that it’s hard to exactly locate Around the Bend on your GPS, but I see this blog, and my role, as observing and facilitating the connection between two worlds. Can a language be forged that works for both the science talkers and the spirit seekers, without diluting the intent of either?
I’m amazed at the number of organizations springing up to study the connections across the divide. Just a few: The Center for Spirituality and Healing, The Rubin Museum of Art, Bravewell Collective, John Templeton Foundation, Life Science Foundation, Center for Mindfulness, Society for Science and Religion, Columbia University Center for the Study of Science and Religion, the Zygon Center, Adrian Wyard and the Counterbalance Foundation, Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, the Mind & Life Institute, and the Institute for Noetic Sciences. Researchers and scientists like E.O. Wilson, Bruce Lipton, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Ernest Rossi are stretching the boundaries of how we perceive science and spirit, mind and consciousness. Louise Hay and Dr. Mona Lisa make us wonder how we can direct our own wellness by our intention. Two conferences are coming up, one in Washington, DC, the other in Minnesota, to talk about complementary and integrative medicine. That’s a kind of healing practice that can blend East and West and makes mindbody one word. It’s pretty busy out there in the crossroads.
From time to time as a filmmaker and media guy I have the pleasure of meeting science-spirit leaders and I’ll write about those encounters here. I’ll keep you updated on our DocuCinema projects that go to this territory. I promise to veer terribly off course sometimes to rant about Youtube and also India, explain why I’ll never be on Facebook, write about what scares me, reveal who my heroes might be, throw in a movie review and some foodie talk, show why marriage can increase your Google ranking, why there are too many Lee Schneiders already and why videos of cats riding motorcycles are always good.
That’s about 500 words right there. If you’d like to add some, post a comment! Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
