A year or so ago, I read The Ghost Map, which is about the 1854 cholera epidemic in London. One of the book’s narrative threads is the tension between the miasmic theory of disease transmission, which held that “bad air” spread infection, and the emerging germ theory, which recognized that diseases like cholera could be water-borne. Adherents of the miasmic theory had difficulty understanding the data which clearly showed that this outbreak of cholera had originated at a particular public water pump, because the idea of a water-borne illness made no sense to them.
Now, I’m reading Norman Longmate’s history of the V-2, Hitler’s Rockets. One of the great scientific breakthroughs of Germany’s V-2 program was developing a liquid rocket fuel – a mixture of alcohol and oxygen that provided far more power than a similar amount of solid fuel. In the UK, though, the military scientists hadn’t been able to create a similar fuel, with the result that although Britain knew that Germany was investing heavily in rocket technology, it was determined that these rockets used anywhere from four to twenty tons of cordite to get off the ground. There was no evidence of a facility within range of England capable of handling such a blast, so many British authorities believed that Germany’s rockets were incapable of reaching them.
They weren’t.
And so now I’m thinking about the difficulty of seeing something that’s right under your nose, when not only do you not know that it exists – you’ve actually been trained to expect to find something else. You don’t have to be ignorant, unintelligent or close-minded to be blinkered by your prejudices and expectations. I know, of course, that this has real-world consequences (and I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it myself), but what I’m thinking of now is its effect on a character living in London during the bombings – a character in my NaNoWriMo project, who’s got to square the evidence with a worldview that doesn’t allow for the evidence. I’ve known all along that he’d have trouble accepting what he comes to know is true – but now I realize that he’s going to have trouble even seeing it.
We’ve got a lot of work to do.
