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[Phys-l] The Crazy Old Sea Captain - A Parable of Science?



Ralph Raimi <http://www.math.rochester.edu/people/faculty/rarm/>, who occasionally posts on Math-Learn, sent me the story of "The Crazy Old Sea Captain" (APPENDIX). According to Ralph:

(a) the story is more or less as told by the late Everett Hafner <http://www.everetthafner.com>, physicist, musician, author, and former Science Dean of Hampshire College;

(b) Hafner regarded the story as an explicit parable for science, which he could only see as logically circular [Raimi agrees].

Any comments?

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands.
<rrhake@earthlink.net>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi>


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APPENDIX
THE CRAZY OLD SEA CAPTAIN

There was this crazy old sea captain who retired from the sea; he bought a little white house on top of a hill overlooking a small seaside village and lived there all alone. He converted the windows to portholes and the stairways to ladders, scraped the rust off everything and had it
ship-shape in every way. Out in the yard he mounted a small cannon, which he fired off to sea every day at precisely noon. He associated with nobody except the lad who brought him groceries and other things from the village, and even then he mostly hauled the basket up to his window with a rope and pulley. He had a peg leg, of course, but didn't make much of it, since he wore good long canvas pants at all times.

He spent much of his time with his glass, looking out towards the horizon for passing ships, and sometimes studying the village, too. He got to know all the streets and shops, and even many of the people as they passed in and out: those who bought pork chops and those who bought lamb, and what kind of hats and gloves they bought and where. One shop in particular was important to him, the shop of the watchmaker, who sold clocks and repaired them, and had a large clock hanging outside (a real one, showing the time, hanging from two heavy chains) as his sign. It was by this clock that the sea-captain set his own watch, for in the days of which I tell, radio and television had not yet been invented.

So that while the villagers did not know the sea captain, he knew them, and one day he decided to go down and have a closer look. He went to the butcher, the shoemaker, the baker and the dry-goods store. Nobody knew him and he didn't tell. When he went to the watchmaker's he spent some time looking at the displays and asking some technical questions about the tools and such. Then he asked how the watchmaker set the time on his clocks, and the man said, "Well, there's this crazy old sea captain who lives up on that hill there, and every day exactly at noon he fires off this cannon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ."
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Regarding the above story, Ralph Raimi wrote to me on 13 September 2007:

"It is entirely possible that Everett Hafner invented the story himself, though when he told it to me apropos of the philosophical discussion we were having I simply took it as the sort of story current among physicists. Of course I have changed the wording somewhat, but it was a sea captain and the story itself is unchanged; my improvements were in the direction of ensuring that the surprise at the end is not telegraphed by the wording by which the story unfolds. I have never found it necessary to invent an ending to the last sentence."