Occam’s Razor

In learning about science, you won’t go far without hearing or reading about the term, “Occam’s razor.”

You see, while we might think our ancestors weren’t very smart, that’s really not true.  People were thinking important thoughts for hundreds and thousands of years. In the 14th century, William of Ockham promoted the idea that the simplest explanation for something is more likely than a complicated one.

This is a way of explaining something you see by cutting away (as if using a razor) everything that seems overly complicated.

In other words, don’t add more to an explanation than it takes to explain it .

Think back to your days in school.  Let’s say your teacher asks for last night’s homework and one boy says he did it but it was chewed up by the dog and then his mother found the pieces and thought it was trash and threw it out and he didn’t notice all this until it was time to go to school this morning.

Now, your teacher has a brain and thinks of two possibilities…

He did his homework, the dog chewed it up, his mom threw it out, and he didn’t notice until it was too late to do it over before class.

or

He just didn’t do his homework.

You have a brain, too.  Which do you think makes more sense? 

People have a good imagination and it’s easy for us to imagine more and more complicated reasons why things work the way they do.

A good example is the “face” on Mars. This was a photo from the first Mars orbiter that had some people buzzing.

“There must have been life on Mars that created something like our own sphinx!”

Those people didn’t use Occam’s Razor.

But, you can.

One possibility was that Mars had intelligent life and that life, leaving no other obvious signs on the planet, carved a human face into a mountain for us to see one day, if and when we became advanced enough to send a spacecraft there to take a look.

or

The sun made a shadow on a mountainside that resembled a face.

Once again, which do you think makes more sense?

Now, if we had evidence of other structures on Mars, things we could see that must have been made by hands other than ours, it would be reasonable to think this was another example of intelligent life.

But, with nothing else to go on, the simple answer of a shadow explained it nicely.

Until we had more information.

And we got that new information with the more advanced Mars explorer we sent years later.  This one took a sharper photo, at a different time of day, to confirm that our simple explanation was the right one… shadows on the random surface of a large mountain.

Explain this to your young scientist, in words they’ll understand.  It can only help them as they learn to think about the things they’ll encounter as they go through life.

And here’s an old joke that shows how we sometimes look for more complicated reasons and miss the simpler ones.  Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before but it does fit well right here.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are out on a camping trip. It’s the middle of the night and Holmes wakes up Watson.

“Watson! Wake up, man!”

“Huh? What?”

“I just woke up and noticed the bright starry universe above me and do you know what I’ve deduced?”

”That we are all just minor players in a larger drama that we’ll never know the outcome of?”

“No.”

“That the universe is too big and too grand for the human mind to ever fully comprehend?”

“No, no.”

“Well then…what have you deduced from looking at the starry sky above us, Holmes?”

“Its rather obvious, Watson – someone has stolen our tent.”

Jerry