The Sunday Morning Post: ‘Science Is the Belief in the Ignorance of Experts’
None of this should exist. Not the machine on which I type these words. Not the screen on which you read them. Not the temperature-controlled room you might be reading in, nor the servers warehousing this page of text. All of these things rely on electricity and batteries. And if you subscribe to the idea that humans can only invent what they first understand, electricity has no business existing in the first place.
In the late 1700s, the two dominant ideas about electricity came from two strange men, each in possession of his own fallacy. Alessandro Volta, a physics professor in Lombardy, believed that electricity was born inside the friction between nearby metals. Luigi Galvani, a physician in Bologna, believed that electricity emanated from the bodies of animals. To prove this point, he killed an obscene number of frogs. Galvani chose the little amphibians “because their nerves are easy to locate and their muscular contractions, which continue for up to forty-four hours after their death, are easy to see,” the author Tim Flannery wrote in a sensational essay in The New York Review of Books. Flannery continues, gruesomely:
Galvani’s laboratory was at times festooned with decapitated, disemboweled, and bisected frogs hanging from wires attached to their nerves. A jolt of electricity or even a hand touching one of the wires would create a gruesome pantomime of frog corpses executing demi-pliés.
