We have to trust our toothpicks or live in a world totally devoid of securitya world where 2+2 can equal anything from 3 to 11, all the laws change unannounced every few days, and Greenwich Mean Time is determined by a roulette wheel.
When we scorn a phono cartridge because it is too bright, we assume the brightness is in the cartridge, not in the rest of our system. When we reach for the car's brake pedal without glancing at it, we assume it will be where it was yesterday, and that it will stop the car. When we set the alarm clock, we assume there will be a tomorrow. The toothpick was labeled "basic premise," the inverted pyramid was the entire body of scientific knowledge.Įverything we do or think or know is based upon assumptions, some of which are rather more justified than others. Many years ago, the now-defunct Life magazine ran a feature article about science and its sacred cows, in which a cartoon showed a huge inverted pyramid-shaped structure of great complexity, tapering downward to a single support at its base: a toothpick.
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