“Education is only a ladder to gather fruit from the tree of knowledge, not the fruit itself”.



It's getting summery out there and the Epistream is feeling a bit fruity.


Bananas don't grow on trees you know.

The banana plant is in fact, a giant herb. Bananas are it's giant berries.

A herb is defined as "any plant with a fleshy, rather than woody stem, which, after the plant has bloomed and set seed, dies down to the ground." The exceptions to this rule are: sage, thyme and rosemary, which have woody stems. With bananas, as the above ground section of the plant dies, a new stem forms a little along the root. This means that over a few years, the plant will appear to "walk".

Bananas are native to Malaya and have been cultivated for over 10,000 years. Wild bananas can still be found in South-East Asia. They have large seeds, a small amount of flesh and are pollinated by bats.

Most banana plants haven't had sex for the past 10,000 years either. Pretty much every banana we eat has been propagated by hand. As a result, bananas are extremely susceptible to disease. Many species have already succumbed to fungal infections like black Sigatoka and Panama disease. In fact, unless a genetically modified version is developed soon, bananas may actually become extinct.

As the most profitable export crop in the world, this would have major ramifications. The industry is worth about $12 billion annually, give or take. It also supports about 400 million people, the vast majority of whom live well below the bread line.

• Europe's largest producer of this tropical fruit is..... Iceland. The bananas are grown in huge greenhouses, heated by geothermal water, two degrees below the Arctic Circle.

Berries are defined as a "fleshy fruit containing several seeds."

Strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are not berries but 'aggregated drupes'. A drupe is a fleshy fruit containing a single stone or pit.

These are called aggregated drupes because each individual fruit is actually a cluster of mini-drupes, the characteristic bumpy bits which make up blackberries and raspberries. Each of these drupelets contain an individual seed.

Peaches, plums, nectarines and olives are drupes. As is a coconut, the world largest drupe, which is known as a "dry drupe" because of it's hard flesh.

Tomatoes, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, watermelons, kiwi fruit, cucumbers, grapes, passion fruit, papaya, peppers and bananas are all actually berries.

Blueberries are berries. Selected pseudonym for the blueberry are: bleaberries, bilberries, whortleberries, huckleberries, hurtleberries, myrtleberries and trackleberries.

Fruity Facts:

Apples and Pears

Cultivated apples all descend from wild crab apples that grow in Northern Europe, Asia, and America.

Apple trees can grow up to 40 feet (12 meters) high.

The U.S. crop of apples is about 4,427,000 metric tons per year.

Pear trees can grow to 60 feet (18 meters) and may be as old as 300 years.

Pear wood is hard and can be used to make furniture.

Apple wood is soft and is sometimes used to make decorative in-lays on wooden furniture.

Oranges, Lemons, and Limes

Orange trees first grew in China.

Oranges were taken to Europe by Arab traders more than 1,000 years ago.

A medium-sized orange contains the amount of vitamin C that a healthy adult should eat daily.

Lemons, oranges, and limes are all citrus fruits. Their juices contain citric acid.

Grated lemon peel is called zest an is sometimes used as flavoring in baking and in candies.

British sailors were given lime juice to keep them from getting a disease called scurvy (malnutrition illness caused by a lack of certain vitamins). British sailors were often called “Limeys” because of this.

Bananas


There are more than 100 varieties of bananas, some even have red skin.

Bananas have high levels of sugars, starch, and vitamins A and C.

Banana ash is used to make soap.

Pineapples

The name pine-apple was the original name for a pine cone (grows on pine trees). Because the fruit pineapple looked like a huge pine cone, it too was called a pine-apple.

Pineapples contain an enzyme that is used in blood tests.

Fibers in pineapple leaves are used to make rope and a cloth called pino.

Pineapples are related to rainforest plants called bromeliads.

Strawberries and Raspberries

The strawberry probably got its name originally from the Anglo-Saxon word streawberige, which means “spreading berry.”

Most raspberries are red, but some varieties are white, yellow, or black.

Raspberries may have been named after a 16th century French wine called raspis.

Raspberries used to be called hindberries.

Peaches, Apricots, Cherries, and Plums

Peaches and apricots and rich in vitamins A and C.

Apricots were first grown in China more than 4,000 years ago.

The wild plum of Northern Europe is the sloe. Sloes have small, hard, bitter fruit. The sloe fruit is used to make a type of alcoholic beverage called sloe gin.

Round cherry pits were used to play games such as marbles.

Almonds are the nutlike seeds from a fruit that looks like a green apricot.

Berries Blackberry juice was used to dye cloth navy blue and indigo.

Black currants are rich in vitamins C and B.

Currant juice can be used to soothe sore throats and colds.

Pemmican is a Native American cake of dried meat flavored with dried currants. (For a modern recipe see Snack in the Saddle Again).

The gooseberry is called the “mackeral currant” in French because gooseberry sauce is served with mackerel, a type of fish.

Melons

Watermelons are related to climbing plants that probably came from tropical Africa.

Melons can grow to 40 pounds (18 kilograms) or more.

Vine fruits Grapes were grown by the ancient Egyptians more than 6,000 years ago.

Passion fruits were first grown in Brazil.

Kiwi plants were first grown in China.

Kiwis were once known as Chinese gooseberries.

Some Mediterranean Fruits

Olive trees can live for more than 1,500 years.

Figs were one of the fruit most often eaten by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Soft dates contain saccharine, which is sometimes used as a sugar substitute for diabetics.

“Man is more ape than many of the apes.” - Friedrich Nietzsche



Regardless of what you may or may not think you know about human evolution; we definitely did not evolve from apes.

No, I'm not touting the creationist fairytale.


We human beings, or Homo Sapiens Sapiens to be exact, share a common ancestor with apes. This is the elusive 'missing link', whom you've probably heard about before. All we really know about this famous intermediary is that he lived in the Pliocene era, more than five million years ago, and that he descended from squirrel-esque tree-shrew. Who, in turn, evolved from hedgehogs and before that, starfish.

Our closest relative is the chimpanzee and a comparison of our respective genomes shows that we split far more recently than previously thought. This would raise the possibility of interbreeding between early humans and chimps, resulting in a hybrid species which is now extinct. The final separation between the two species occurred just under five and a half million years ago.

Described by Stephen Jay Gould as a "recent African twig on the bushy tree of human evolution", it is most feasible that Homo Sapiens Sapiens indeed has it's roots in Africa. Genetic evidence suggests that the first human population outside Africa were the Andaman islanders. The islands lie off the cost of India and the indigenous population has been isolated for over 60,000 years. Even longer than Australia's aborigines.

Less than 400 Andamanese survive today, divided into two tribes. These tribes are the Jarawa and the Sentinelese. In fact, the hundred or so Sentinelese are so isolated that no-one has ever even studied the language. The other Andamanese languages don't have any known relatives either.

They only have five numbers. Rather, they only really have five 'concepts' of numbers. These are: 'one', 'two', 'one more', 'some more' and 'all'. Nonetheless, they have twelve distinct words to describe the different stages of ripening fruit and two of these are impossible to translate into English.

The Andamanese are one of the only two tribes in the world that cannot make fire. The other are a tribe of African pygmies called the Ake. Instead of making fire, they have developed an elaborate system for keeping and transporting embers in clay pots. These fires have been kept alive for thousands of years, probably having been started by ancient lightening strikes.

As alien as all this sounds, they do share some remarkable similarities with Western civilisation. In particular, their concept of God. Their principle deity's called Puluga. He's invisible, immortal and omnipresent. He's also responsible for creating everything, except evil. He has a big problem with sin but offers great comfort to those in despair. Oh, and he also sent a great flood to punish man's wrongdoing.

Strangely enough, the 2004 tsunami hit the Andaman Islands with it's full force but, as far as recent study has been able to ascertain, left the ancient Andamanese peoples unharmed.

"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way." - Mark Twain


Cat's are clever.

They've got that 'knowing' vibe about them.

They've also got some pretty amazing hidden talents.

In 1987, a paper in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association studied the cases of 132 cats that had fallen from New York apartments. The average height of the fall was about five and a half storeys and 90% of the precarious pussy cats survived. The range in injuries they suffered followed quite an interesting trend. As perhaps anticipated, the severity of the injuries rose in proportion to the number of storeys they fell. Up to the seventh floor. Above the seventh floor, the number and severity of the injuries to each cat dropped dramatically. So, as a rule, the further the cat falls, the better it's chances actually are.

There are records of cat's falling from more than 30 storeys without injury. In fact, one cat is noted as having survived a 46 storey fall. The record for moggy mettle, however, must be held by the poor pussy thrown 800 feet (244 metres) from a Cessna light aircraft, deliberately. Why some sick S.O.B thought this was a good idea, I don't know. Needless to say, this is not an experiment to be repeated.

As with a lot of small animals, cat's have a non-fatal terminal velocity. It's about 60mph. Once they relax a bit, get orientated and spread themselves out, they can parachute back to earth a bit like a flying squirrel.

Terminal velocity is the speed at which a body's weight equates to air resistance and it stops accelerating. This point occurs at around 120mph for humans and takes about 1,800 feet (550 metres) of free fall.

In 1944, Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade leaped from the tail of his burning Lancaster bomber and fell 19,000 feet (5800 metres). His fall was luckily broken by a pine tree and a well placed snow drift. He was found totally unharmed, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette.

Vesna Vulovic fell a whopping 34,777 feet (10,600 metres) when a terrorist bomb ripped apart her Yugoslavian Airlines DC-10 in 1972. She broke both legs and suffered some spinal damage but her life was saved by her seat and the toilet booth it was attached to.


Cat Facts:

• Both humans and cats have identical regions in the brain responsible for emotion.

• A cat's brain is more similar to man's brain than that of a dog.

• The cat's clavicle, or collarbone, does not connect with other bones but is buried in the muscles of the shoulder region. This lack of a functioning collarbone allows them to fit through any opening the size of their head.

• Cats have 32 muscles that control the outer ear (compared to humans, 6 muscles each). A cat can rotate its ears independently 180 degrees, and can turn in the direction of sound 10 times faster than those of the best watchdog.

• A cat sees about 6 times better than a human at night, and needs 1/6 the amount of of light that a human does - it has a layer of extra reflecting cells which absorb light.

• Recent studies have shown that cats can see blue and green. There is disagreement as to whether they can see red.

• Blue-eyed, pure white cats are frequently deaf.

• Cats have a special scent organ located in the roof of their mouth, called the Jacobson's organ. It analyzes smells - and is the reason why you will sometimes see your cat "sneer" (called the flehmen response or flehming) when they encounter a strong odor.

• Cats purr at the same frequency as an idling diesel engine, about 26 cycles per second.

• Domestic cats purr both when inhaling and when exhaling.

• The cat's front paw has 5 toes, but the back paws have 4. Some cats are born with as many as 7 front toes and extra back toes (polydactl).

• Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway was one of the more famous lovers of polydactyl cats, after being first given a six-toed cat by a ship's captain. Upon Hemingway's death in 1961, his former home in Key West, Florida, became a museum and a home for his cats, and it currently houses approximately fifty descendants of his cats (about half of which are polydactyl). Because of his love for these animals, Hemingway cat, or simply Hemingway, is a slang term which has come to describe polydactyls.

• A domestic cat can sprint at about 31 miles per hour.

• Cat's urine glows under a black light.

• Cats lose almost as much fluid in the saliva while grooming themselves as they do through urination.

• The domestic cat is the only species able to hold its tail vertically while walking. You can also learn about your cat's present state of mind by observing the posture of his tail.

“You don't have to have a professor's dome, Not to go for the honey when the bee's at home” – Berlin Irving


Bees are pretty damned impressive you know. Aside from all of the little tidbits about bees that were covered in the last installment of the Epistream, that bolster out own intelligence with useless facts, we never even touched on the Bees' vast intellect.

OK, maybe vast is a bit strong.

But, did you know that it was Bees who first worked out that the world was round?

Take that Columbus.

Bees have quite a complex language system. They communicate through buzzing and "waggle dancing", passing on important information about the location of the best nectar.

We've identified a few distinct types of buzz and have even managed to link these to specific actions or activities.

• 'Fanning', to cool the hive: a steady 250 beats per second
  
• 'Danger', progressively louder, followed by a series of pulses at 500 beats per second to signal the 'all clear'.
• 'Piping', high pitched chirrup by a new-born queen.
• 'Quarking', the response to 'piping' from the queen's unhatched sisters. The new queen uses this 'quark' to locate them and, as there can only be one queen, kill each and every one.

Bees use their legs to hear, picking up the vibrations from the hive. Their antennae, as well as having chemical receptors to 'smell', may also be covered in small, eardrum-like plates. This would explain why workers touch a bees thorax with their antennae during the "waggle dance", rather than touch the "waggling" abdomen. They're hearing rather than seeing directions to the nectar. Which makes sense, as it's probably pretty dark in a hive.

There was a theory that bees buzzed by using the fourteen spiracles (breathing holes on their sides) in much the same way as a trumpeter uses the valves on his trumpet. However, entomologists from the University of California bunged up the holes, scientifically speaking, and the bees still buzzed. Now, the theory is that buzzing is caused by the vibration of beating wings, amplified by the thorax. Clipping a bees wings doesn't stop the buzzing but does change it's timbre.

The purpose of all this bee chatter is essentially to tell one another where the good nectar is. The reference point for this direction is the Sun. What's really smart is that they can do this when it's overcast or dark by calculating the position of the Sun on the other side of the Earth.

So, despite having a brain that's one and a half million times smaller than our own, bees can learn and store this information. In terms of neurons, humans have somewhere between 100 and 200 billion whereas a bees brain has 950,000 neurons.

Honeybees have a built-in map of the Sun's movements across the sky for a 24 hour period and can adapt it to local conditions very quickly. They make all decisions about where to fly within 5 seconds.

They're also more sensitive to the Earth's magnetic field than any other creature, using it to navigate and make the honeycomb panels of their hive. If you were to put a strong magnet next to a young hive, the bees would construct a cylindrical comb unlike anything found in nature.

• The temperature inside a hive is a steady 37 degrees, the same as the human body.
• The Queen produces an enzyme that stops the other bees developing ovaries.
• It takes the entire lifetime of 12 bees to make a teaspoon full of honey.
• They can cover about seven and a half miles in a single trip and will do this several times a day.
• A single bee would have to fly the equivalent of twice round the world to make a pound of honey.
  

"Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it, so it goes on flying anyway." Mary Kay Ash


While writing the last instalment of the Epistream, I suddenly realised that I had a distinct Hymenoptera knowledge deficiency.

I know, I know, I'm gutted. Don't tell anyone, but I didn't even know what Hymenoptera were.

Having sorted that out now, I'm glad to be able to share a bit more about these interesting insects and put the heinous oversight behind me. So, here is everything you'll ever want to know about them. Apart from how to get rid of them.

Ok, here goes.

Hymenoptera:

* One of the larger insect order, comprising the sawfly, wasp, bee and ant.
* The name refers to the membranous wings of the insects. It's derived from the Ancient Greek words 'humen' (ὑμήν), meaning membrane, and 'pteron' (πτερόν), meaning wing. Their hind wings are connected to their forewings by a series of hooks called hamuli.
* Females typically have a special ovipositor for inserting eggs into hosts. The ovipositor often evolves into their sting.
* The young develop through metamorphosis. That is, they have a worm-like larval stage and an inactive pupal stage before reaching maturity.
* Hymenoptera originated in the Triassic period, the oldest fossils belonging to the family Xyeldae. Social hymenopterans appeared during the Cretaceous.

The order divides into two sub-categories: the Symphyta (sawflies) and the Apocryta (wasps, bees and ants).

Symphyta

* Sawfly adults look like wasps, except they don't have a waist.
* They don't have a sting either.
* They don't form social groups like bees and ants but their larvae do stay together for the defence.
* The females have a special egg-laying tool, a bit like a saw funnily enough, to cut through leaf tissue.
* Sawfly larvae are caterpillar-ish, with five or more abdominal prolegs.


Apocryta

* Apocryta are far more diverse than Symphyta.
* They have one common characteristic - a waist.
* They live in a highly organized group and each member are divided into castes.
* A special genetic configuration (haploid-diploid sex determination, don't you know) leads to this social behaviour.
* Other behaviors that are only found in this order include: their precise navigation skill and communication capacity. All bees, wasps and ants can return to their nest after travelling kilometres away and can tell the others where to go.
* The main difference between bees and wasps is: bees feed their larvae on honey, which is a mixture of pollen and nectar, whereas wasps feed their larvae on meat (mostly paralysed arthropods).


Bee Facts:

* There are more than 2000 different species of bee in the world, but only four of them produce honey.
* Bees cruise at about 15 mph but can hit speeds of up to 20 mph.
* They never sleep.
* When flying, a bee will beat its wings about 180 times per minute.
* The chemical that makes a bee sting itch is called mellitin.
* A bee sees 300 frames per second.
* According to fossil records, bees first appeared on earth about 150 million years ago.


Bumble Bees:

* Unlike honeybees, bumblebees only produce enough honey to feed their young.
* The drone (male) bumblebee doesn't have a sting.
* Despite their size, bumblebees are far less aggressive than honeybees and will usually never attack unless they feel threatened.
* Unlike a honeybee, if a bumblebee does use its sting, it won't die or lose it.


Honey Bees:

* Honeybees have hair on their eyes.
* A full pollen load weighs about 1/6th of the weight of a bee.
* A full load of nectar weighs about ½ the weight of a bee.
* The oldest known record of human interest in honeybees is a drawing on cave wall in eastern Spain, which is about 8,000-11,000 years old. It depicts a man climbing a ladder to collect honey from a nest. Similar drawings have also been found in caves in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
* Ancient records show that beekeeping originated about 6,000 years ago in both China and Egypt.
* Honey Bees have pollen baskets on their legs. They're called 'corbicula'.
* The average worker bee will fly approximately 500 miles before it wears out and dies.
* A Queen has to eat 80 times her own weight to produce 2,000 eggs per day.
* A bee will visit 50-100 flowers during one trip.
* Honey can range in colour from white to gold to dark brown. It's usually a stronger tasting honey when its colour is darker.
* A bee must tap 2 million flowers to make 1lb of honey and would have to fly 55,000 miles to get it.
* One bee will make 0.8g (1/10 of a teaspoon) of honey during its lifetime.
* Mead is made from fermented honey.
* Drambuie is also made from honey.



Wasp Facts:

* There are almost 300 species of wasps in the British Isles alone.
* Only the female wasp stings.
* Wasps, unlike bees, do not die after stinging.
* There are 3 groups of classification for wasps - parasitic, social and solitary.
* Only the Queen wasp survives the winter, by hibernating.
* The common wasp makes her nest from chewed and pulped wood, a bit like paper.
* Parasitic wasps do not build their own nest but use plants, caterpillars and other beasties to host their eggs
* Some parasitic wasps are bright green or blue.


Ants Facts:

* Ants don't sleep.
* When the queen ant dies, so does the entire colony, because no new workers are born.
* The study of ants is called Myrmecology.
* For every human in the world there are one million ants.
* The brain of an ant has about 250,000 brain cells. [There's about a hundred billion in a human brain. Collectively, a colony's hive mind can approach this.]
* An ant's sense of smell is just as good as a dog's is.
* Ants can lift, with their mouths, an object up to fifty times their body-weight and carry it over their heads.
* A leaf-cutter ant queen mates only once before establishing a new colony. She can then keep the sperm viable for up to 15 years and produce as many as 300 million offspring.
* Fire ants first entered the United States about 1918, near Mobile, Alabama and reached Mississippi around 1930.
* Unlike other ants, which bite and then spray acid on the wound, fire ants only bite to get a grip, then sting from the abdomen and inject toxic alkaloid venom called Solenopsin. The sensation is similar to being burned by fire. Thus, Fire Ant

"The only source of knowledge is experience." Albert Einstein


My mother didn't raise a fool you know.

If you tell me there are fairies at the bottom of your garden, I'm going to remain sceptical.
I need to see that kind of thing for myself.

I never thought I'd like sprouts. I was a sucker and fell for the old, "don't knock it til you've tried it". Thus confirming what I already thought I knew.

I have, on a few occasions, burned myself. Not intentionally, of course, but accidents happen. This has given me a pretty solid understanding of the relationship between heat, touch and pain. Enough of an understanding that I no longer need to touch it to know it.

Pain is a tricky one though. Sure, the root of knowledge may well be in experience, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and take someone's word for it every once in a while. I guess that all depends how intent you are on knowing things for yourself. Some folk are just that bit more die-hard I suppose.

Cue American entomologist Justin O. Schmidt...

The Schmidt Sting Pain Index or the Justin O. Schmidt Pain Index is a scale rating the relative pain caused by different Hymenopteran stings. (Hymenoptera are a large order of insects including bees, wasps and ants.) Bet you can tell where this is going, huh?

His original paper, published in 1984, was an effort to categorise and compare the haemolytic properties (involving the distruction of red blood cells) of insect venom. For this paper, he created an index. Starting at 0 for stings that are completely ineffective against humans, progressed through 2, a familiar pain such as a common bee or wasp sting, and finished at 4 for the most painful stings. In his conclusion, he offered some descriptions of the most painful examples... " Paraponera Clavata stings induced immediate, excruciating pain and numbness to pencil-point pressure, as well as trembling in the form of a totally uncontrollable urge to shake the affected part." Now, that stikes me as a man talking from experience.

Schmidt has since refined his scale, culminating in a paper published in 1990 which classifies the stings of 78 species and 41 genera of Hymenoptera.

Again, Schmidt described some of the experiences in vivid detail:

• 1.0 Sweat Bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
• 1.2 Fire Ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
• 1.8 Bullhorn Acacia Ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced Hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing his cigar on your tongue.
• 2.x Honet Beeand European Hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
• 3.0 Red Harvester Ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
• 3.0 Paper Wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
  
• 4.0 Tarantula Hawk: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
• 4.0+ Bullet Ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

OK....

That static shock from walking across shag carpet and touching the light switch, I get. It's a pretty universal example. I'll even buy being asked to imagine W.C. Fields stubbing his cigar out on my tongue. I haven't experienced it but it's within my imagining. However, I for one have never mashed my hand in a revolving door. But, this could well be the man that has, purely in the name of science.

Anyway, I'm going to take this guy's word for it.

There are issues with this though. For starters, this is the kind of person that describes a Sweat Bee sting as "almost fruity" and a Hornet sting as "slightly crunchy". Not to mention that this is the type of selfless nutcase that gets himself stung so he can tell others how sore it is. I don't want to burst his bubble but I'm still going to try and avoid being stung anyway, no matter what it's by. And if I am stung, the knowledge that this crazy s.o.b. can empathise will provide little comfort. I'll even go out on a limb and admit that Schmidty can probably take more than me. Some folks are just a bit more into pain. I know this. I have cable TV.

Anesthesiologist Henry Knowles Beecher (1904 - 1976), while serving as an Army medical consultant on the Anzio beachhead, observed that soldiers with pretty serious wounds complained of pain much less than his postoperative patients at Massachusetts General Hospital. Beecher hypothesized that the soldier's pain was alleviated by his survival of combat and the knowledge that he could now spend a few weeks or months recovering in safety and relative comfort. The hospital patient, however, had been removed from his home environment and faced an extended period of illness and the fear of possible complications. Beecher argued that "the reaction component" made pain such a complex and individualized phenomenon that it could only be studied effectively in the clinical setting. Patients with real pain would not exhibit the same physiologic manifestations or the same responses to analgesics as experimental subjects, who knew that they were in no serious danger and that the pain would soon cease.

So, I guess Einstein was right. The only definitive source of knowledge is experience.

But can I take his word for it?

"Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice." Anton Chekhov


"Theory" is quite interesting.

A theory is essentially an explanation. An analytic tool for understanding any given subject matter, based on abstract ideas about that subject matter.

Uh... Eh?

Well, we have this concept of theory somehow not belonging to the real world. It's something that exists conceptually, rather than in reality. I just want to chuck in the word hypothetical and leave it there. But that's where I started today...

So what do we know?

I've heard of Quantum Theory. This must be different to the driving theory test. I don't remember any of the highway code being based on the principle that matter and energy have the properties of both particles and waves.

So, theory's based on informed guess work. An educated guess about the properties of matter and energy lets you build an elaborate framework of more guessing on top and then call it a theory. A bit like guessing how long it takes a car to break from 30mph if it's icy I suppose. The logic is sound enough that we feel confident in calling it a theory.

Sometimes we use the term theoretical in place of hypothetical to describe a result that is predicted by theory but has not yet been adequately tested by practical experiment. It is not entirely unheard of for a theory to produce predictions that are later found to be incorrect. By inference, a prediction proved incorrect by experiment demonstrates that the hypothesis is invalid. So does the buck stop with the theory? Was the experimental conjecture wrong and the theory failed to predict the hypothesis? This is pretty deep you know.

It feels to me a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle and finding a few pieces missing. Even without the picture on the box, it's not really a guess that you need a blue piece to fill in that bit of sky. Also, if you've got pieces with blue sky, sea and sand, the theory that you're making a beach scene is a pretty sound one. But how many little pieces do you think you'd actually need to form the basis of this theory? One piece of sea, one of sand and a nice bit of blue sky would make a solid case for beach, right? Well, there's not a red piece or a bit of sail but suppose the focus of the picture is a big red boat with white sails. Our theory may still be correct; this is the beach. But we've missed the key point. And I'm in dander of doing the same now.

Theories are great, in theory. They move thought on, passed the limitations of actual experience. You run with one until you fill in the gaps and it stops to being a theory. Like when we were thinking about ignorance, the gaps are a good thing. They inspire us to go on and learn. The beef, as usual, is with false knowledge. This is when theories can be damaging. Either they go on long enough that they're taken as fact themselves, or they are cited as evidence, forming the basis of some false knowledge.

The term "theory" is often used colloquially to refer to any explanatory thought, even fanciful or speculative ones. However, in scholarly use it is reserved for ideas which meet baseline requirements about the kinds of observations made, the methods of classification used, and the consistency of the theory in its application among members of that class. Either way, they exist to be scrutinized. They must be continually revised to conform to new observations, by restricting the class of phenomena the theory applies to or changing the assertions made.

Sometimes, scholars set aside a theory because there is no way to examine its assertions analytically. These may continue on in the popular imagination until some means of of examination is found which either refutes or lends credence to the theory. But, it does not simply turn into fact just because it's a long-standing theory. Whether it's about relativity or evolution, theories have to be a work in progress.