My interest in explanations was brought to a new higher intensified while I watched a movie. I must regress many more years to tell the entire story. Before I begin, though, I need to assure you that my story is absolutely true.
About 20 years ago, I awoke at about 3 a.m., and I saw the strangest thing. A small orb with a soft greenish glow hovered five feet over my bedroom floor, about an arm’s length out from the foot of the bed. The orb was about the size of a ping-pong ball. I walked toward the orb until my face was one foot from the orb. I tried to see if I could account for the glowing ball by checking for an external source of reflected light through the bedroom windows. I couldn’t find any such external light source, though. The orb itself was glowing and it was still in my bedroom. I considered touching the orb with my hand, but I didn’t. For a moment, I wondered whether it would try to communicate with me—a strange thought, given that I have never believed in disembodied sentience.
I noticed that the orb was slowly descending. It didn’t make any noise. After 30 seconds of descending, the orb reached the floor, then it took the shape of a sunny-side up egg as it melted into the bedroom floor. I went downstairs from my second floor bedroom to the first floor to see whether the orb was “melting” through the ceiling of that room, but I saw nothing. I went back upstairs and sat awake in bed for several minutes, wondering what it possibly could have been. I decided that I didn’t have a clue. Eventually, I went back to bed.
I sheepishly mentioned this weird and disorienting experience to a few close friends in the days after I saw it, always shaking my head with some embarrassment. It bothered me that the thing I witnessed appeared to be something “outside” of physics. I sometimes wondered whether I had been dreaming. I’m sure I hadn’t been dreaming, though (but too bad I didn’t write a note to myself that night “I saw a strange glowing orb tonight”). I don’t have any history of having any hallucinations or visions, nor any episode of vivid dreaming.
Fast forward about eleven years. About nine years ago, I happened to watch a PBS drama in which a female character was literally scared to death when a ball of light floated across the floor of her house—others in the drama referred to the phenomenon as “ball lightning.” After the show, I ran a Google search for “ball lightning,” and found dozens of sober-sounding testimonials. Large numbers of people have also seen things similar to the orb I saw (if you Google “ball lightning,” you’ll be amazed at the large number of reports). Then I found a Scientific American article describing “ball lightning. This column, which was titled something like “Ask the Expert” no longer appears to exist intact. I did copy down the expert’s answer, word for word, when I first read it. Here’s what that early version of the article said:
Ball lightning is a well-documented phenomenon in the sense that it has been seen and consistently described by people in all walks of life since the time of the ancient Greeks. There is no accepted theory for what causes it. It does not necessarily consist of plasma; for example, ball lightning could be the result of a chemiluminescent process. The literature abounds with speculations on the physics of the ball lightning . . .
Ball lightning is typically described as a luminous ball one to 25 centimeters in diameter having about the intensity of a 20-watt incandescent lamp; the phenomenon usually occurs after a lightning strike. It almost always moves, has a top speed of about three meters per second and floats about one meter above the ground. The motion can be counter to the prevailing breeze and can change direction erratically. Ball lightning may last up to 10 seconds, whereupon the ball extinguishes either noiselessly or with a bang. There have been many observations of ball lightning inside of houses and even in airplanes. There have also been a number of observations of ball lightning passing through closed glass windows, with no apparent damage to the glass.
[Again, the new version of the above article [1]has been updated and elaborated].
Upon reading the above description by a scientistic expert, I experienced an intense feeling of relief. To me, this information served as an explanation with real consequences: I wasn’t dreaming. It wasn’t a spirit. Don’t touch glowing orbs! Science might figure this out someday . . .
[Wikipedia [2]also offers an article about ball lighting. This will show my age: back when I saw the ball lightning, there was no World Wide Web [3]; there was no Google [4]]
Here’s an experiment: I am betting that you, the reader, were also intrigued to learn about ball lightning and you also had a gut feeling that the phenomenon was at least somewhat “explained” by the above article I found at the Scientific American website.
I am still fascinated that the meager information provided by that article could “explain” the orb—or even seem to explain it. Consider how little I learned from the article: I learned that the phenomenon had a generally accepted name, “ball lightning.” The article gave me assurances that other people had reported ball lightning. A scientist offered some speculation about the phenomenon. There was no technical information, no measurements, no experiments, no predictability and no mathematics. Though I don’t have any working grasp of “plasmas” and I don’t have any insight into chemiluminescence, when the article described the phenomenon in these terms, it gave me some assurance that it was a natural, rather than a supernatural, phenomenon. And here’s the kicker: the article clearly stated that “There is no accepted theory for what causes it.” Therefore, even though the SciAm article seemed like an “explanation,” it was ostensibly the opposite of an explanation.
The SciAm article provided an (albeit imperfect) explanation, at least from my perspective. The heart and soul of that explanation seemed to be a feeling of intellectual satisfaction. That feeling could be found in a “flip” from my feeling that I didn’t understand the phenomenon to a sudden realization that I was at least somewhat intellectually satisfied. This article, even though it was short and non-technical, somehow seemed to address my concerns and curiosity regarding the glowing orb. The article triggered, in me, the feeling popularized by the cartoon light bulb turning on over one’s head, or of clouds parting. I had a feeling of “ah-HA!” It was a feeling akin to the feeling of recognition of a person.
Unfortunately, that “feeling” does not appear to be susceptible to further meaningful analysis, at least within the current state of cognitive science (though Robert Burton’s new book, On Being Certain,” offers some clues). What I’m left with is that an explanation is largely dependent on a vague feeling of satisfaction.
That good explanations provoke a “feeling” just doesn’t help us to filter out many suspicious “explanations, such as those so often offered by politicians and Bible-literalists. Those people who seek to explain and justify such things as dowsing, astrology pyramid power and virgin birth also tend to have good and satisfying feelings associated with their explanations, just as do world class scientists. What is the value of that good feeling that one has explained something given that such a feeling is even experienced by children who “explain” that thunder is caused by God going bowling during a storm?
To offer subjective satisfaction as a sufficient litmus test to guarantee that an explanation is worthy would be the basis for unending scientific, political, social and religious nonsense. Come to think of it, that’s what we now have—social and intellectual chaos, and it’s caused in large part by the many people who claim that they have offered bona fide explanations whereas they have offered nonsense that they misinterpret as knowledge, based on their own inner glow.
The above story raises many questions for me. Here are a few of those questions: Is an “explanation” merely a description that makes us feel good? Is it relevant to consider subjective states in order to decide what assertions constitute worthy “explanations”? What more (more than subjective satisfaction) is required for an explanation to be worthwhile?
I am already acquainted with some of the philosophical and scientific literature regarding the nature of explanations. These thinkers have suggested various approaches to modeling worthwhile explanations, such as A) conformity with a known scientific law (Hempel’s [5] Deductive-nomological [6]model of scientific explanation) or B) Philip Kitcher’s [7] approach, stressing explanatory unification or C) the ability of that explanation to precisely generate predictions of future events or D) Bas van Fraassen’s approach. For van Fraassen, an explanation is an answer—an informative description evaluated pursuant to the context established by a particular question—a request for a specific kind of information [8].
This topic is critically important for all of us. Outside of laboratories (as well as in those labs), all of us constantly make judgments as to whether particular explanations pass muster. Is it possible that all of us might someday pre-agree on a test that allows us to throw out bad explanations but keep good ones? Is there any sort of approach that all reasonable people could agree to in advance, a test that we can apply, in real-time, that would allow worthy explanations (such as “Days and nights occur because the Earth is rotating relative to the sun”) but exclude false explanations (such as “The Grand Canyon was created in less than 10,000 years”)?
If there were such a practical test, we would waste a lot less time arguing about silly things and we could spend much more time fixing up our world together. But does such a test exist, or even something approaching such a test?
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