From Pentominoes to Conspiracy Theories

A couple of years ago I bought Katamino, a wooden Pentomino puzzle. I felt a surge of nostalgia when I saw it in a shop, as I vaguely remembered Pentominoes from Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth, which I had read in my early teens. I was also convinced of the game's educational value to my kids, who were three years old and one year old when I brought the puzzle home.

I explained the game to the eldest and let him play by giving him a small puzzle, that is a short area to fill with any of the available pieces. He did fill it, but not in the way I expected. He started putting in the pieces on the area to be filled. Then, as the area filled up, he continued adding pieces, but standing on their vertical sides, instead of lying down horizontally. For example, he would add the "I" piece standing up on one square, instead of lying down and using up four squares. Like most parents I guess, I was thrilled by this display of non-lateral thinking, and withheld any urge to show the "correct" solution.

After a while I recalled that I had seen somewhere this kind of unconventional thinking in tackling hard Computer Science problems. After some searching, I found that Scientific American had run an article on the topic: "On the Spaghetti Computer and Other Analog Gadgets for Problem Solving", Scientific American, 250(6):19-26, June 1984. The article was written by A. K. Dewdney and the material has been reprinted in books; I own "The Turing Omnibus", which I consider a great way to introduce Computer Science.

I checked Dewdney's Wikipedia entry and was surprised to find that "he has developed hypotheses which disagree with the official version of events surrounding the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks, in which he claims that phone calls from the planes must have been faked and that the plane that hit the Pentagon was not Flight 77".

I am not an expert in this discussion; others are far more knowledgeable. Skeptic magazine offers a series of interesting podcasts. The August 10, 2010 Skepticality installment featured author David Aaronovitch talking about his book "Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History". Among other things, Aaronovitch mentioned the 9/11 conspiracy theories and talked about David Ray Griffin. Aaronovitch noted that Griffin is obviously a very intelligent person, but still held strange views about the attacks, involving the use of thermite or nanothermite to bring down the buildings.

The Skepticality podcasts are produced in the US. Closer to Aaronovich, over in the UK, on October 29, 2009, Noam Chomsky gave a talk in the London School of Economics. The topic of the talk was "Human Rights in the 21 Century". At the end of the talk the audience was invited to ask questions; and one question was about the veracity of some of the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Chomsky replied by noting that people advocating such theories should put them under review in the appropriate venue; for instance, if somebody argues that traces of some explosive, or whatever, were found among the rubble, they should submit their views in an appropriate scientific journal to be judged on their merits.

This does not happen. The Internet has made discussion more open, but has allowed conspiracy theorists to blossom, as they tend to flock together—in fact, it seems that the advent of online communities has rather facilitated parochialism than encouraged openness. Moreover, intelligence guarantees neither rationality not reason.