Elliptical Thinking

I promised to bring things full circle, and here we go…

The scientific method does us its greatest service when it simplifies the way we think, understand, and apply our collective knowledge to predicting outcomes. The application of Occam’s Razor is meant to be a guide — not an bulletproof truth in and of itself. In the practical world, there are times when we ought to make fewer cuts. The examples I have in mind involve a different kind of epicycle, focused on time instead of space.

These examples will be far more familiar to the average person, because the time we experience on Earth is more tangible than the vastness of space.

Consider our current calendar. We have long taken for granted that there are 365 days in a year, unless we’re in a leap year, when there are 366. Under what sort of arcane counting system would we ever do such a thing? Again, the epicycle rears its ugly head, warts and all. It turns out that one revolution of the Earth around our Sun takes around 365 and 1/4 days — so every four years we add a day to make up the difference.

In a simpler era, this didn’t matter much. If you go back far enough, you find Roman emperors who would arbitrarily add or subtract days to the year, or name months after themselves (July, August). This made planning the ag season a little dicey, and eventually society settled on the need for an unchanging defined year. The “365.0 day year” did just fine for a time, until those little fractions added up to a major drift. Planting seasons and Easter just weren’t coming out right, so leap days were tacked onto the cycle to right the ship.

Only, as we soon discovered through better measurements, the true Solar Year is more akin to 365.2422 days — which means we have to add more warts. In the late 1500s, Pope Gregory picked the pattern of warts (epicycles) as a standard. The new “Gregorian” calendar replaced the old “Julian” calendar with these key changes:

1. Every year divisible by 4 is a leap year.
2. But every year divisible by 100 is NOT a leap year
3. Unless the year is also divisible by 400, then it is still a leap year.

(Somewhat lost amid all the unnecessary Y2K panic and confusion was a rather strange result. Those who applied ignorantly applied Rule #1 alone were right, but for the wrong reason. Some, who were better educated, applied Rule #2, but erred in not factoring Rule #3, and lost watercooler bets to those who knew no better than the Julian calendar. When an epicycle comes full circle and the warts align, look out…)

Pope Gregory’s recommendation carried mighty weight, but not universal (despite the definition of Catholic.) Some countries stayed with the Julian calendar for a couple of centuries or so, which made things interesting along the trade routes. By the mid-1700s, the gap between the calendars was measured in days, not minutes. In the brief time the Bolsheviks had control, they brought Russia to the Gregorian calendar by ditching the first half of February in 1918.

Fun history, to be sure. So why do we put up with convoluted rules like this today? Surely Occam’s Razor could simplify our understanding of reality!

This is where the Razor breaks down: our perceptions of time are governed more by a different cycle — that of the rotation of the earth. Day and Night mean a lot more to us than the passing of the seasons. We calibrate our diurnal clocks by the amount of sunlight we get (unless we are up at 1:30 writing strangely self-referential blog articles.) Yes, there is a bigger truth out there — but the average Joe doesn’t care, because a more tangible truth trumps it.

Too often in our communications, we lose sight of the level at which messages and memes will be understood. In her book The Story Factor, Annette Simmons writes that we carry with us more facts than we can ever use; we need stories to give those facts context. If you want to persuade someone, you have to replace their internal story with one that is more powerful. We’re not talking about reason. Reason loses to emotion every single time.
Now — here is where I will pass up the chance to opine about how the Earth’s rotation is slowing, and that we’re actually adding Leap Seconds every few years to keep the trains running on time. After all, that is another set of epicycles, and once you’ve seen one cluster of nested warts, you get the drift.

As I bring the Epicycle Epic to a close, just a thought about the language we use. We know now that as far as planetary motion was concerned, Elliptical Thinking was exactly what was needed to express and understand a deeper truth. Yet, we now look at “elliptical thinking” as some sort of indirect, inductive, intuitive means of expressing reality. The term now has a touchy-feely quality that connotes something very different than the rigorous methods used by Kepler and Occam.

At least Elliptical Thinking has a better reputation than Circular Reasoning.