| Stupid Folk Wisdom |
15 September 2003
|
Duck's Quack Does Echo After All
Folk tradition has it that, out of all the sounds in the world, a duck's quack is the only one that doesn't have an echo. At first glance, that sounds like rubbish. An echo is nothing more than sound waves being reflected, yet apparently, something about the quack is different. Thanks to acoustic expert Trevor Cox at the University of Salford (near Manchester for those outside Britain), the world knows that folk tradition is nonsense. The lesson here is to doubt constantly.
"A duck quacks rather quietly, so the sound coming back is at a low level and might not be heard," Professor Cox reported. And since the decay of the sound is gradual, it is hard to tell where the quack ends and the echo begins -- unless one is an acoustic expert who measured such things thereby proving that preceding generations were wrong.
Doubt, of course, is what made Professor Cox study the phenomenon in the first place. Without it, the human race would get up everyday believing all sorts of demonstrably wrong ideas. A geocentric universe, the divine right of kings, and the natural supremacy of white males are all ideas that were held to be true at one time, and now, have been shown to be twaddle.
If such "eternal truths" are now labeled "out-dated rubbish", surely there are things today that one takes as a given in everyday
life
that a generation from now will be as outmoded: the constitutional wisdom of the founding fathers? or the usefulness of the internal combutions engine? or the equality of all individuals regardless of accomplishment? The secret to wisdom is to reject untruths in the
light
of demonstrable facts to the contrary. And that begins with doubt.
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