Belief vs. Magic

Warburg apparatus

Just looking at it still makes me shudder… from http://www.oroboros.at/index.php?id=respirometry

I’m making a moroccan-style squash stew.  I thought of posting the recipe, but it would include things like ‘add cumin until it smells right’ and ‘cook till it’s done.’

I cook by smell.  That’s how my parents taught me about spices; smell each bottle until you find one that smells like it ought to be in this kind of food.  But I take it further, having an unreliable stove (mainly because a mouse stole the insulation out of the top of it, but that’s another story); all my oven recipes are cooked at 350 until I can smell them in the living room.

This sort of thing would have driven my father, the chemist, bat-shit.  Not just because he had a poor sense of smell after years in the lab, but because he liked directions he could follow, organic synthesis-style.  My brother went further, wanting to know the dimensions of the chunks he was cutting carrots into. There’s a faith underlying this, a scientist’s faith that events have causes and that by controlling the causes you can control the outcome.

I share that faith because I was raised in it, but every now and then I take an unexpected step back from it and begin to see how magic could explain things.  My cooking methods, for instance.  To someone like my father, what would explain my ability to smell that something’s done from two rooms away?  Talent, skill — magic?  It’s trite to say that advanced technology looks like magic.  Personal abilities look a lot more like it; after all, a really advanced technology will work for whoever pushes the button.

During my masters, I had to use a Warburg constant volume respirometer.  My dad groaned when he heard it. “Otto Warburg was the only person in the world who could make that piece of junk work!”  — which was untrue; my major professor could make it work.  His calibration runs were things of beauty.  Mine? No matter how I tried, every calibration run came out completely different.

In the same project, I had to do thin-layer chromatography.  It did not work.  I even went over to the lab in which it was being done on the main campus, watched their methods, made up the solutions under their watchful eyes; nada.

You may say I was a crappy chemist.  Well yeah!  But that’s not the point.  The point is, what made these other folks GOOD chemists?  Because they couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, or why the same setup worked perfectly when they touched it.  None of us could figure it out, but we all agreed on one thing — it wasn’t magic.

But what if it was?

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