Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

The mysterious Kaimanawa wall

I recently attended an interesting science communicators conference in Dunedin. At coffee, someone told me that often people he met at barbeques held that knowing things (or wanting to find out about things) was bad. It’s a belief you occasionally come across. At school, those who get good marks are derided as girly swots, and academics are often accused of living in ivory towers (sometimes with justification).

His example was of someone (at a barbeque) who told him that thunder kills goose eggs. Being a scientist, he was intrigued and asked for an explanation of how this process might work. It was not forthcoming and it seemed that none was necessary, as she knew from experience that this was so.

Someone commented that this was the tall-poppy syndrome. But that’s not quite it – that’s about building people up only to cut them down. This was about not being open minded, or, taking it a step further, not even being curious about the world. It was about belief.

Science is about humility (though scientists themselves are not always humble): if you don’t know how something works (which is the most likely case scenario) you use systematic methods to see if you can find out. Scientists are often more interested in telling you what they don’t know than what they do.

It seems to me that the goose egg believer is on the road to Roswell or perhaps the Kaimanawa Wall. While thunder probably does not kill goose eggs, just as lights in the sky are probably not aliens, they certainly are intriguing explanations. Maybe that’s what mystics are on about – for some, the world is much more interesting if they choose to believe in grand conspiracy theories.

Alternate views of reality flourish on the web, as seen in the case of the Kaimanawa Wall and the umpteen pre-Māori civilisations in New Zealand. (This phenomena of choosing the outlandish over the logical was recently parodied in a South Park episode.)

Maybe the mystics should lower the cone of silence over the goose nests in thunderstorms?