‘… you heard the weirdo.’

The Roman governor Pontius Pilate asked Jesus ‘What is truth?’(John 18:38). Francis Bacon, in his essay ‘On truth’ observes that ‘jesting Pilate stayed not for an answer’. The question, however, has echoed, more or less, down history, provoking responses from across the philosophical, theological, scientific, cultural and more or less any other sector of human life that we might care to think of.

These days, of course, we are moving into a ‘post-truth’ era. Perhaps we have just given up on the idea of there being a truth that we can access ever out there. Truth, if it exists, is something that is forever beyond our grasp, so why do we bother even trying? Is it not a bit easier just to reduce our dependence on what is true and just live for the moment, for the now, the next sound bite or bit of entertainment dressed up as fact that might come our way?

Then again, various truths are always around us. We know stuff to be the case from our experience. If we trip, we fall down. On the face of it, that is not an exciting bit of knowledge, but it suggests that gravity is a fact. We cannot deny the laws of nature, nor can we negotiate with them, nor ignore them. They happen to us, whether we like it or not. In a sense this is akin to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein being thrown into a situation: we can only work with where we are.

Postmodernism teaches us that objective truth is hard to reach. Funnily enough modern physics teaches that the truth, certainly at scales of the very big and the very small, is hard to get hold of. One of my colleague undergraduates once told me that he liked quantum mechanics because if the answer came out weird, it was probably right.

Which sort of brings me back to the title of this piece: ‘You heard the weirdo.’ It is, of course, a quote from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. At, I believe, the end of series two it has just been revealed that Zaphod Beeblebrox has conspired, as President of the Galaxy, with a load of psychoanalysts, to destroy the Earth just before it delivered the answer to life, the universe and everything. Ford Prefect asks Zaphod if it is true, and Zaphod replies along the lines of Pontius Pilate: ‘What is truth man? You heard the weirdo.’ The weirdo in question is the person who really runs the universe, who has just made the revelation among a huge quantity of other things, including the statement that asking him questions could, in fact, be singing to his cat.

Truth, then, in politics and personal relationships, is starting to be seen as negotiable. Barefaced denial of something regarded as a fact, such as a statement, is more acceptable, so long as the denier does not falter in the face of evidence. As a (hopefully) less charged example than a contemporary one, my great-grandmother steadfastly believed that the United States had not landed a man on the Moon. It was all faked – the television pictures, the Moon rocks and so forth. Facts and truths have little purchase in the face of such denial.

For myself, I ‘believe’ in ‘truth’. The scare quotes are advisory, because both truth (as I have described) and belief (which is relativized: ‘If it works for you, believe it’) are concepts in discourse which have become contested. Nevertheless, truth is something I have been seeking for much of life. While academic rigour does not necessarily entail that the research is ‘right’, it does require that it increases the stock of human knowledge. The idea seems to be that truth (or ‘truth’) is approached, by asymptotically.

Certainly, in physics research, what is right is approached slowly, with a lot of hiccoughs along the way. I recall stilling rather glumly looking at a piece of negative with some blobs on it, purporting to be the visible spectrum of aluminium. The principal investigator came in on a visit and inquired as to why we looked so depressed. I showed him the negative. ‘But you’ve got data!’ he exclaimed. ‘Yes, but we don’t understand it.’ That did not seem to matter; data is data, it can be understood with sufficient effort.

In that case, it was true. With a great deal of effort, some novel approaches to computing the visible spectrum of aluminium and more experiments, I did come to understand that spectrum. That is, I knew why it was the shape it was, why it looked odd and could account for many of the features. So far as I can find, approximately seven research papers derived from that work, one of which is still occasionally cited in the literature. The point is that the process was iterative; the understanding did not come all at once. It needed puzzling over, finding out more information about, for example, the atomic structure of aluminium ions, assorted models for the depression of the ionization potential in a plasma, spectral line broadening and so on. These bits came together into a whole, most of which was, of course, in my head.

We have perhaps come a long way from Pontius Pilate, Francis Bacon and Zaphod Beeblebrox, but from another perspective, we are all suffering from the same problem. Establishing what is true is not a trivial task. Working out what happened in the past is difficult, as multiple series of television detective stories will testify. Deciding on what is happening now is harder, as we have to make snap judgements about the people and object before us. Much of the time we process this by habit and something vaguely called intuition. Thinking about the future is almost impossible. We make the assumption that the future will look pretty much like the past, and we get deeply unsettled by the idea that it might not.

Unfortunately, David Hume, centuries ago, punctured the certainty of continuity. Just because the sun rose today, it does not mean that it must rise tomorrow. R. John Elford (Elford, R. J. (2000) The Ethics of Uncertainty, Oxford, Oneworld) argues that uncertainty and modernity are inseparable; he is probably right. Hence Pilate and Beeblebrox also have a point: the question ‘what is truth?’ hangs over us still in uncertain times.