A Field Guide to Lies Deluxe

FOUR CASE STUDIES

Science doesn’t present us with certainty, only probabilities. We don’t know for 100 percent sure that the sun will come up tomorrow, or that the magnet we pick up will attract steel, or that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. We think these things very likely, but science yields only the best Bayesian conclusions we can have, given what we know so far.

Bayesian reasoning asks us to consider probabilities in light of what we know about the state of the world. Crucial to this is engaging in the kind of critical thinking described in this field guide. Critical thinking is something that can be taught, and practiced, and honed as a skill. Rigorous study of particular cases is a standard approach because it allows us to practice what we’ve learned in new contexts—what learning theorists call far transfer. Far transfer is the most effective way we know to make knowledge stick.

There is an infinite variety of ways that faulty reasoning and misinformation can sneak up on us. Our brains weren’t built to excel at this. It’s always been a part of science to take a step back and engage in careful, systematic reasoning. Case studies are presented as stories, based on true incidents or composites of true incidents, and of course, we are a story-loving species. We remember the stories and the interesting way they loop back to the fundamental concepts. Think of the following as problem sets we can all explore together.

Shadow the Wonder Dog Has Cancer (or Does He?)

We got our dog Shadow, a Pomeranian-Sheltie mix, from a rescue shelter when he was two years old. He got his name, we learned, because he would follow us from room to room around the house during the day, never far away. As often happens with pets, our rhythms synchronized—we would fall asleep and wake up at the same time, get hungry around the same time, feel like getting exercise at the same time. He traveled with us often on business trips to other cities, becoming acclimated to planes, trains, and automobiles.

When Shadow was thirteen, he began having trouble urinating, and one morning we found blood in his urine. Our vet conducted an ultrasound examination and found a growth on his bladder. The only way to tell whether it was cancerous was to perform two surgical procedures that the oncologist was urging: a cystoscopy, which would run a miniature camera through his urethra into the bladder, and a biopsy to sample the mass and study it under the microscope. The general practitioner cautioned against this because of the risks of general anesthesia in a dog Shadow’s age. If it did turn out to be cancerous, the oncologist would want to perform surgery and start chemotherapy. Without any further tests, the doctors were still pretty certain that this was bladder cancer, known as transitional cell carcinoma (TCC). On average, dogs live only six months following this diagnosis.

As my wife and I looked into Shadow’s eyes, we felt utterly helpless. We didn’t know if he was in pain, and if so, how much more he was facing, either from the treatment or from the disease. His care was entirely in our hands. This made the decision particularly emotional, but that didn’t mean we threw rationality out the window. You can think critically even when the decision is emotional. Even when it’s your dog.

This is a typical medical scenario for people or pets: two doctors, two different opinions, many questions. What are the risks of surgery? What are the risks of the biopsy? How long is Shadow likely to live if we give him the operation and how long is he likely to live if we don’t?

In a biopsy, a small needle is used to collect a sample of tissue that is then sent to a pathologist, who reports on the likelihood that it is cancerous or not. (Pathology, like most science we’ve seen, does not deal in certainties, just likelihoods and the probability that the sample contains cancer, which is then applied to the probability that the unsampled parts of the organ might also contain cancer; if you’re looking for certainty, pathology is not the place to look.) Patients and pet owners almost never ask about the risk of biopsy. For humans, these statistics are well known, but they are less well tracked in veterinary medicine. Our vet estimated that there was a 5 percent chance of life-threatening infection, and a 10 percent chance that some cancerous material (if indeed the mass was cancerous) would be “shed” into the abdomen on the needle’s way out, seeding further cancer growth. An additional risk was that biopsies leave behind scar tissue that makes it more difficult to operate later if that’s what you decide to do. The anesthesia needed for the procedure could kill Shadow. In short, the diagnostic procedure could make him worse.

Our vet presented us with six options:

Biopsy through the abdominal wall in the hope of obtaining a more definitive diagnosis.
Diagnostic catheterization (using a catheter to traumatize a portion of the mass, allowing cells to exfoliate and then be examined).
Biopsy using the same cystoscopic camera they wanted to use anyway to better image the mass (through the urethra).
Major surgery right now to view the mass directly, and remove it if possible. The problem with this is that most bladder cancers return within twelve months because the surgeons are unable to remove every cancerous cell, and the ones left behind typically keep on growing at a rapid rate.
Do nothing.
Put Shadow to sleep right now, in recognition of the fact that it most probably is bladder cancer, and he doesn’t have long to live anyway.

We asked about what the treatment options were if it was found to be cancer, and what they might be if it was not cancer. Too often, patients focus on the immediate, upcoming procedure without regard for what the next steps might be.

If the mass was cancerous, the big worry was that the tumor could grow and eventually block one of the tubes that brings urine into the bladder from the kidneys, or that allows urine to leave the bladder and end up on a lawn or fire hydrant of choice. If that blockage occurs, Shadow could experience great pain and die within a day. Along the way to this, there could be temporary blockages as a result of swelling. Because of the position of the bladder within the body, and the angle of ultrasound, it was difficult to tell how close the mass was to these tubes (the ureter and urethra).

So what about the six options presented above—how to decide which (if any) to choose? We ruled out two of them: putting Shadow to sleep and doing nothing. Recall that the oncologist was pushing for surgery because that is their gold standard, their protocol for such cases. We asked for some statistics and she said she’d have to do some research and get back to us. Later, she said that there was a 20 percent chance that the surgery would end badly, killing Shadow right away. So we ruled out the major surgery because we weren’t even sure yet if the mass was cancerous.

We asked for life-expectancy statistics on the various remaining scenarios. Unfortunately, most such statistics are not kept by the veterinary community, and in any case, those that are kept skew toward short life expectancy because many pet owners choose euthanasia. That is, many owners opt to put their pets down before the disease progresses because of concerns about either the animal’s quality of life or the owners’ quality of life: Dogs with TCC often experience incontinence (we had already noticed that Shadow was leaving us little surprises around the house). We didn’t have a definitive diagnosis yet, but based on the sparse statistics that existed, it looked as though Shadow would live three months with or without treatment. Three months if we do nothing, three months if we give him chemo, three months if we give him surgery. How could that be? Ten years ago, we found out, vets would recommend euthanasia on first diagnosis of TCC. And at the first sign of chronic incontinence, owners would put their dogs down. So owners were typically ending their dogs’ lives before the cancer did, and this made the statistics unreliable.

We did some research on our own, using “transitional cell carcinoma” and “dog or canine” as the search terms. We found out that there was a 30 percent chance Shadow could improve simply by taking a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory called Piroxicam. Piroxicam has its own side effects, including stomach upset, vomiting, loss of appetite, and kidney and liver trouble. We asked the vet about it and she agreed that it made sense to start him on Piroxicam no matter what else we were doing.

From the Purdue University website—Purdue has one of the leading veterinary medical centers—we were able to obtain the following survival statistics:

Median survival with major surgery = 109 days
Median survival with chemotherapy = 130 days
Median survival with Piroxicam = 195 days

The range of survival times in all of these studies, however, varied tremendously from dog to dog. Some dogs died after only a few days, while others lived more than two years.

We decided that the most rational choice was to start Shadow on the Piroxicam because its side effects were relatively minor, compared to the others, and to get the cystoscopy in order to give the doctor a better look at the mass and the associated biopsy to give us more to go on. Shadow would have to be lightly anesthetized, but it was only for a short time and the doctors were confident that he would emerge fine.

Two weeks later, the cystoscopy showed that the mass was in fact very close to the ureters and the urethral openings—so close, in fact, that surgery wouldn’t help if the mass was cancerous because too much of the tumor would be left behind. The pathologist wasn’t able to tell if the tissue was cancerous or not because the procedure ended up not getting a large enough sample. So after all that, we still didn’t have a diagnosis. Yet the statistics above suggested that if Shadow was among the 30 percent of dogs for whom Piroxicam worked, that would yield the best life expectancy. We wouldn’t have to subject him to the discomforts of surgery or chemo, and we could just enjoy our time together at home.

There are many instances, with both pets and humans, that a treatment doesn’t statistically improve your life expectancy. Taking a statin if you are not in a high-risk group or surgically removing the prostate for cancer if you do not have fast-moving prostate cancer are both treatments with negligible impact on life expectancy. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true: Not all treatments actually help. It’s clear that Shadow would be better off without the surgery (so that we could avoid the 20 percent chance it would kill him) and the chemo wouldn’t buy him any time, statistically.

Shadow responded to the Piroxicam very well and within three days he was back to himself—energetic, in a good mood, happy. By one week he had no more difficulty urinating. We saw occasional minor amounts of blood in the urine, but we were told this was normal after biopsy. Then, 161 days after the initial suspicion (which was never confirmed) of TCC, his kidneys started to fail. We checked him into a specialty oncology clinic. The doctors weren’t sure whether the organ failure might be related to TCC, or why it was occurring now. They prescribed medications to address common kidney conditions and ran dozens of tests without getting any closer to understanding what was happening. Shadow grew increasingly uncomfortable and stopped eating. We put him on an IV drip painkiller and two days later, when we took him off for just a few minutes to see how he was doing, he was clearly in pain. We talked to his current and former doctors, carefully describing the situation, its progression, and his condition. All agreed it was time to let him go. We had Shadow’s company—and he had ours—for a month longer than the average chemotherapy patient, and during that month he was able to avoid hospitals, catheters, IV lines, and scalpels.

We went to the oncology hospital—the staff knew us well because we had been visiting Shadow there every day in between his tests and treatments—and arranged for him to be put to sleep. He was in pain, and we felt that we had perhaps waited one or two days too long. It was awful to see that large personality suddenly drift away and disappear. We found comfort knowing that we had considered every stage of his care and that he had as good a life as we were able to give him for as long as possible. Perhaps the most difficult emotion that people experience after a disease ends a life is regret over the choices made. We were able to say good-bye to Shadow with no regrets over our decisions. We let our critical thinking, our use of Bayesian reasoning, guide us.

Were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin Thespians?

Moon-landing deniers point to a number of inconsistencies and unanswered questions. “There should have been more than a two-second delay in communications between the Earth and the moon, because of its distance.” “The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.” “There are no stars in the sky in any of the photos.” “How could the photos of the American flag show ripples in it, as though waving in the air, if the moon has no atmosphere?” The capper is a report by an aerospace worker, Bill Kaysing, who wrote that the probability of a successful landing on the moon was .0017 percent (note the precision of this estimate!). Many more such claims exist. Part of what keeps counterknowledge going is the sheer number of unanswered questions that keep popping up, like a game of Whac-A-Mole. If you want to convince people of something that’s not true, it’s apparently very effective to simply snow them with one question after another, and hope that they will be sufficiently impressed—and overwhelmed—that they won’t bother to look for explanations. But even 1,000 unanswered questions don’t necessarily mean that something didn’t happen, as any investigator knows. The websites dedicated to the moon landing denial don’t cite the evidence for it, nor do they publish rebuttals to their claims.

In the case of the moon landing, each of these (and the other claims) is easily refuted. There was a two-second delay in Earth-moon communications that can be easily heard on the original tapes, but some documentary films and news reports edited out the delay in the interest of presenting a more compelling broadcast. The quality of the photographs is high because the astronauts used a high-resolution Hasselblad camera with 70mm high-resolution film. There are no stars in the lunar sky because most of the images we saw were taken during lunar daytime (otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to see the astronauts). The flag doesn’t show ripples: Aware that there was no atmosphere, NASA prepared the flag with a t-bar to support its top edge and the “ripples” are simply folds in the fabric. With no wind to blow the flag, its creases stay in place. This claim is based on still photos in which there appears to be a rippling effect, but moving film images show that the flag is not blowing, it’s static.

But what about the report of an aerospace worker that a moon landing was highly improbable? First, the “aerospace worker” was not trained in engineering or science; he was a writer with a BA in English who happened to work for Rocketdyne. The source of his estimate appears to be from a Rocketdyne report from the 1950s, back when space technology was still in its infancy. Although there are still unanswered questions (e.g., why are some of the original telemetry recordings missing?), the weight of evidence overwhelmingly points to the moon landing being real. It’s not certainty, it’s just very, very likely. If you’re going to use spuriously obtained probability estimates to claim that past events didn’t happen, you’d have to similarly conclude that human beings don’t really exist: It’s been claimed that the chances of life forming on Earth is many billions to one. Like many examples of counterknowledge, this uses the language of science—in this case probability—in a way that utterly debases that fine language.

Statistics Onstage (and in a Box)

David Blaine is a celebrity magician and illusionist. He also claims to have completed great feats of physical endurance (at least one was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records). The question for a critical thinker is: Did he actually demonstrate physical endurance or was he using a clever illusion? Certainly, as a skilled magician, it would be easy for him to fake the endurance work.

In a TED talk with more than 10 million views, he claims to have held his breath for seventeen minutes underwater, and tells us how he trained himself to do it. Other claims are that he froze himself in a block of ice for a week, fasted in a glass box for forty-four days, and was buried alive in a coffin for a week. Are these claims true? Are they even plausible? Are there alternative explanations?

In his videos, Blaine has a down-to-earth manner; he doesn’t speak quickly, he doesn’t seem slick. He’s believable because his speech sounds so awkward that it’s difficult to imagine he’s calculated just what to say and how to say it. But bear in mind: Professional magicians typically calculate and plan everything they say. Every single move, every apparently spontaneous scratch of the head, is typically rehearsed over and over again. The illusion they’re trying to create—the feat of magic—works because the magician is expert at misdirecting your attention and subverting your assumptions about what’s spontaneous and what’s not.

So how do we apply critical thinking to his endurance performances?

If you’re thinking about hierarchies of source quality, you’ll focus on the fact that he has a TED talk and TED talks are fact-checked and very tightly curated. Or are they? Well, actually, there are more than 5,000 TED-branded events, but only two are vetted—TED and TEDGlobal. Blaine’s video comes from a talk he delivered at TEDMED, one of the more than 4,998 conferences that are run by enthusiasts and volunteers and are not vetted by the TED organization. This doesn’t mean it’s not true, just that we can’t rely on the reputation and authority of TED to establish its truth. Recall TMZ and the reporting of Michael Jackson’s death—they’re going to be right some of the time, and maybe even a lot of the time, but you can’t know for sure.

Before looking at the underwater breath holding, let’s look more closely at a couple of Blaine’s other claims. For starters, Fox television reported his ice-block demonstration to be a hoax. A trap-door beneath the chamber he was in led to a warm and comfortable room, Fox reported, while a body double took his place in the ice block. How did he get away with this trick? A lot of what magicians practice over and over again is getting the audience to accept things that are a bit out of the ordinary. There are some telltale clues that all was not as it seems. First, why is he wearing a mask? (You might assume that it’s because it’s part of the show, or because it makes him look fierce. The real reason might be because it makes it easier to fool you with a body double.) Why do they need to spray sheets of water over the ice at periodic intervals? (Blaine says it’s to prevent the ice from melting; maybe it’s so that he can change places with the body double during the brief moment you can’t see through the ice.) What about the physiological monitoring equipment on his body, reporting his heart rate and body temperature—surely that’s real, isn’t it? (Who says that the equipment is actually hooked up to him? Perhaps it wasn’t and was instead being fed by a computer.)

If Blaine was lying about the ice block—claiming it was a feat of endurance when in reality it was just conjuring, a magic trick—why not lie about other feats of endurance too? As a performer with a large audience, he would want to ensure that his demonstrations work every time. Using illusions and tricks may be more reliable, and safer, than trying to push endurance limits. But even if it did involve a trick, perhaps it’s too harsh to call it a lie—it’s all part of the show, isn’t it? No one really believes that magicians are calling upon unseen forces; we know that they rehearse like the dickens and use misdirection. Who cares? Well, most reputable magicians, when asked, will come clean and admit that what they are doing are rehearsed illusions, not demonstrations of the black arts. Glenn Falkenstein, for example, performed a mind-reading act that was among the most impressive ever seen. But at the end of each show, he was quick to point out that there was no actual mind-reading involved. Why? Out of a sense of ethics. The world is full of people who believe things that aren’t true, and believe many things that are ridiculous, he said. Millions of people who have a poor understanding of cause and effect waste their money and energy on psychics, astrologers, gambling, and “alternative” therapies with no proven efficacy. Being forthright about how this sort of entertainment is accomplished is important, he said, so that people are not led to believe things that aren’t so.

In another demonstration, Blaine claims to have stuck a needle clear through his hand. Was this an illusion or did he really do it? In videos, it certainly looks real, but of course, that’s what magic is all about. (Search YouTube and you’ll find videos showing how it can be done with specialized apparatus.) What about the forty-four-day fast in a glass box? There was even a peer-reviewed paper in the New England Journal of Medicine about that, and in terms of information sources, that’s about as good as it gets. Upon closer examination, however, the physicians who authored that paper only examined Blaine after the fast, not before or during, and so they can’t provide independent verification that he actually fasted. Was this question ever raised during peer review? The current editor of the journal searched his office archives but the records had been destroyed, since the article was published a decade before my inquiry. The lead author on the article told me in an email that based on the hormones she measured after the event, he was indeed fasting, but it’s possible as well that he was sneaking in some food; she couldn’t comment on that. She did point me to an article by a colleague of hers in another peer-reviewed journal, in which a physician did monitor Blaine throughout the fast (the article didn’t show up in my PubMed or Google Scholar searches because David Blaine was not mentioned in the article by name). Relevant is the following passage from the article, which appeared in the journal Nutrition:

Immediately before the start of the fast, DB appeared to have a muscular build that was consistent with the body mass index, body composition figures, and upper arm muscle circumference, which are reported below. On the evening of Saturday, September 6, 2003, DB entered a transparent Perspex box, measuring 2.1 x 2.1 x 0.9 m, which was suspended in air for the next 44 d, close to Tower Bridge, London. Continuous detailed video monitoring was available to one of the investigators (ME, office and at home), who was able to assess the clinical state and physical activity of DB. DB, who was 30 y old, had consumed before the event, a diet that was estimated, but not verified, to have increased his weight by as much as 6–7 kg. He also took some multivitamin tablets for a few days before the event, which he stopped on entry into the box. He felt weaker and more lethargic as the event progressed. From about 2 wk onward he experienced some dizziness and faintness on standing up quickly, and on some occasions, temporary visual problems, as if “blacking out.” He also developed transient sharp shooting pains in his limbs and trunk, abdominal discomfort, nausea, and some irregular heart beats. . . . A small amount of bleeding from his nose occurred on the fifth day after entry to the box and this recurred later. There were no other obvious signs or symptoms of a bleeding tendency. There were also no signs of edema before or at the end of the fast. In addition, there were no clinical signs of thiamine deficiency. DB, who was initially a muscular looking man, was visibly thinner on exit from the box. His blood pressure taken almost immediately before the event began was 140/90 mmHg while lying and 130/80 mmHg while standing, and at the end it was 109/74 mmHg while lying (pulse 89 beats/min) and 109/65 mmHg while standing (pulse 119 beats/min).

From this report, it does sound as though he really did fast. A skeptic might discount his reports of pain and nausea as showmanship, but it is difficult to fake irregular heartbeat and weight loss.

But it’s the breath holding, televised on Oprah Winfrey’s show, that is the focus of Blaine’s TEDMED talk. In it, Blaine uses a lot of scientific and medical terminology to prop up the narrative that this was a medically based endurance demonstration, not a mere trick. Blaine describes the research he did:

“I met with a top neurosurgeon and I asked him how long . . . anything over six minutes you have a serious risk of hypoxic brain damage . . . perflubron.” Blaine mentions liquid breathing; a hypoxic tent to build up red blood cell count; pure 02. That got him to fifteen minutes. He goes on to elaborate a training regimen in which he gradually built up to seventeen minutes. He throws out terms like “blood shunting” and “ischemia.” Did Blaine actually do what he said he did? Was the medical jargon he threw out for real, or just pseudoscientific babble he invoked to overwhelm, to make us think he knew what he was talking about?

As always, we start with a plausibility check. If you’ve ever tried holding your breath, you probably held out for half a minute—maybe even an entire minute. A bit of research reveals that professional pearl divers routinely hold their breaths for seven minutes. The world record for breath holding before Blaine’s was just under seventeen minutes. As you continue to read up on the topic, you’ll discover that there are two kinds of breath-holding competitions: plain old, regular old breath holding, like you and your older brother did in the community pool when you were kids, and aided breath holding, in which competitors are allowed to do things like inhale 100 percent pure oxygen for half an hour prior to competing. This is sounding more plausible, but how far can you get with aided breath holding—can it actually bridge the gap between a few minutes and seventeen minutes? At this point, you might try to learn what the experts have to say—pulmonologists (who would know something about lung capacity and the breathing reflex) and neurologists (who would know how long the brain can last without an influx of oxygen). The two pulmonologists I checked with described a training regimen much like the one Blaine describes in his video; both felt that with these “tricks” or special measures, seventeen minutes of breath holding would be possible. Indeed, Blaine’s record was broken in 2012 by Stig Severinsen, who held his breath for twenty minutes and ten seconds (after inhaling pure oxygen, of course), and who then broke his own record a month later, achieving twenty-two minutes. David Eidelman, MD, a pulmonary specialist and dean of the McGill Medical School said: “I agree that it does sound hard to believe. . . . However, by inhaling oxygen first, fasting, and using yoga-type techniques to lower metabolic rate while holding one’s breath underwater, it seems that this is possible. So, while I retain some skepticism, I do not think I can prove it is impossible.”

Charles Fuller, MD, a pulmonary specialist at UC Davis, adds, “There is sufficient evidence to indicate that Blaine is being truthful, as this event is physiologically feasible. Given the caveat that Blaine is a magician and there could have been other contributing factors to his successful seventeen-minute breath hold, there is also ample physiological evidence that this feat could have been accomplished. There is a subset of people in the breath-hold world who vie for a record officially known as ‘pre-oxygenated static apnea.’ In this event, breath holding is sponsored by Guinness World Records, as sports divers consider this cheating. Breath-hold duration is measured after hyperventilating (blowing of carbon dioxide) for thirty minutes while breathing 100 percent pure oxygen. Further, the event is typically held in a warm pool (which reduces metabolic oxygen demand), with the head held just below the surface, which induces the human dive reflex (further depressing metabolic oxygen demand). In other words, all ‘tricks’ which extend the human capacity for conscious breath hold. Most importantly, prior to Blaine, the record was just under his seventeen minutes [by an athlete who was not a magician], and there are additional individuals who have now been recorded for longer breath holds in excess of twenty minutes. Thus, ample evidence that this feat could have been accomplished as claimed.”

So far, Blaine’s story seems plausible, and his talk hits all the right notes. But what about brain damage? Blaine himself mentioned this as a problem. You’ve no doubt heard that if the brain loses oxygen for even three minutes, irreparable damage and brain death can occur. If you’re not breathing for seventeen minutes, how do you prevent brain death? A good question for a neurologist.

Scott Grafton, MD: “Oxygen doesn’t stay in the blood all by itself. Think oil and water. It will quickly diffuse out of the liquid blood—it needs to bind to something. Blood carries red cells. Each red cell is loaded with hemoglobin (Hgb) molecules. These hemoglobin molecules can potentially bind up to four oxygen molecules. Each time a red cell passes through the lungs, the number of Hgb molecules with oxygen bound to them increases. The stronger the concentration of oxygen in the air, the more Hgb molecules will bind to it. So load ’em up! Breathe 100 percent oxygen for thirty minutes so that total oxygen binding is as close to 100 percent saturation as you can get.

“Each time the red cell passes through the brain, oxygen will have a probability of unbinding from the molecule, diffusing across cell membranes to enter the brain tissue, where it binds to other molecules that use it in oxidative metabolism. The probability of a given oxygen molecule unbinding from hemoglobin and diffusing is a function of the relative difference of oxygen concentration on either side of the membranes.”

In other words, the more oxygen the brain needs, the more likely it will be to pull oxygen out of hemoglobin. By breathing pure oxygen for thirty minutes, the competitive breath holder will maximize the amount of oxygen in the brain and in the blood. Then, once the breath-holding event starts, oxygen levels in the brain will decrease as they normally do over time, and the competitive breath holder will very efficiently pull out whatever oxygen happens to be left in hemoglobin to oxygenate the brain.

Grafton continues, “Not all the hemoglobin molecules are loaded up with oxygen on each pass through the lungs, and not all of them unload on each pass through the organs. It takes quite a few passes to unload all of them. When we say that brain death happens quickly due to a lack of oxygen, it is usually in the context of a lack of circulation (heart attack) when the heart is no longer delivering blood to the brain. Stop the pump, and no red cells are available to offer up oxygen and brain tissue dies fast. In a person submerged, there is a race between brain injury and pump failure.

“One key trick: The muscles need to be at rest. Muscles are loaded with myoglobin, which holds on to oxygen four times more strongly than red-cell hemoglobin does. If you’re using your muscles, this will accelerate the loss of oxygen overall. Keep muscle demand low.” This is the static in the static apnea that Dr. Fuller mentioned.

So from a medical standpoint, David Blaine’s claim appears plausible. That might be the end of the story, except for this. An article in the Dallas Observer claims the breath holding was a trick, and that Blaine—a master illusionist—used a well-hidden breathing tube. There’s nothing about this in other mainstream media, which doesn’t mean the Observer is wrong, of course, but why is this paper the only one reporting it? Perhaps a magician who performs a trick but claims it wasn’t one is not big news.

Reporter John Tierney traveled to Grand Cayman Island to write about Blaine’s preparation for the breath holding for an article in the New York Times, and then wrote about the Oprah appearance in his blog a week later. Tierney makes a lot out of Blaine’s heart rate, as reported on a monitor next to his tank on the Winfrey show, but as with the ice-block demonstration, there’s no evidence this monitor was actually connected to Blaine, and it might really have been more for showmanship—to make the audience think that the conditions were really rough (a standard practice for magicians). Neither Tierney nor a physician involved in the training mention how closely they were monitoring Blaine during practice trials in the Caymans—it’s possible that they took him at his word that he didn’t have any apparatus. Perhaps the real motive of this training was that Blaine figured if he could fool them, he could fool a television audience. Tierney writes, “I was there at the pool along with some free-divers who are experts at static apnea (holding your breath while remaining immobile). Dr. Ralph Potkin, a pulmonologist who studies breath holding and is the team physician for the United States free-diving team, attached electrodes to Blaine’s body during the session and measured his heart, blood, and breathing as Blaine kept his head submerged in the water for sixteen minutes.

“I’ve always been skeptical of cons—I did a long piece on James Randi a while back, and was with him in Detroit when he was exposing an evangelist named Peter Popoff—but I saw no reason to doubt Blaine’s feat. His breath hold in front of me was done in clear water in the shallow end of the very ordinary swimming pool at our hotel, with experts in breath holding a few feet away watching him all the time. His nose and mouth were clearly below the water—but just a couple of inches, so they were visible at all times. You tell me how he snuck a breathing tube in there so that no one noticed it or any bubbles. Magicians fool people by distracting them with motions and patter, but the whole point of static apnea is to remain absolutely motionless in order to conserve oxygen, which is what David did. (It’s remarkable what a difference that makes—the trainers who were working with David did a short session with me and my photographer. We pre-breathed air instead of oxygen, but we were amazed at how long we went—I got up to 3 minutes and 41 seconds, and the photographer even longer.)”

So now the Dallas Observer says it was faked, and a New York Times reporter seems to believe it wasn’t. What do professional magicians think? I spoke to four. One said, “It’s got to be a trick. A lot of his demonstrations are known, at least within the magic community, to use camera trickery and [a] very involved setup. It would be very easy for him to have a breathing tube that allows him to take oxygen in, and to exhale carbon dioxide, without making bubbles in the water. And if he practices, he wouldn’t need to be doing it all that often—he could actually hold his breath for a minute or two at a time in between tube breaths. And there could be other camera trickery—he might not actually be in the water! Projection or green screen could make it appear that he was.”

The second magician, who had worked with Blaine a decade earlier, added, “His hero is Houdini, who became famous for doing stunts. Houdini made a reputation in part by doing things that people did in the 1920s—flagpole sitting and so on. Some do require endurance and some are faked slightly; some aren’t as hard as you’d think, but most people never try them. I don’t see why Blaine would fake the block-of-ice trick—that one is simple because of the igloo effect—it’s not actually that cold in there. It looks impressive. If he was in a freezer that would be different.

“But seventeen-minute breath holding? If he can super-oxygenate his blood, that can help. I know that he does train and does some things that are remarkable. But I’m sure the breath-holding trick is partly enabled. He does hold his breath, I think, but not 100 percent of the time. It’s quite easy to fake. He probably has [a] breathing tube and other apparatus.

“Note that a lot of his magic is on TV and there are edits at key points. We assume it’s real information and we’re seeing everything because that’s how our brains construct reality. But as a magician, I see the edits and wonder what was happening during the missing footage.”

A third magician added, “Why would you go to all the trouble to train if, as an illusionist, you can do it with equipment? Using equipment creates a more reliable, replicable performance that you can do again and again. Then, you just need to act as though you’re in pain, dizzy, disoriented, and as though you’ve pushed your body beyond all reasonable limits. As an entertainer, you wouldn’t want to leave anything to chance—there’s too much at stake.”

The fact that no one reports seeing David Blaine use a breathing tube does not constitute evidence that he didn’t, because it is precisely the job of illusionists to play tricks with what you see and what you think you see. And the illusion is even more powerful when it happens to you. I’ve had the magician Glenn Falkenstein read off the serial numbers of dollar bills in my wallet from across the room while he was blindfolded. I’ve had the magician Tom Nixon place the seven of diamonds in my hand, yet a few minutes later it had become a completely different card without my being aware of him touching me or the card. I know he’s switching the card at some point, but even after having the trick done to me five times, and watching it performed on other people many more times, I still don’t know when the switch occurs. That is part of the magician’s genius, and part of the entertainment. I don’t think for a moment that Falkenstein or Nixon possess occult powers. I know it’s entertainment, and they sell it as that.

The fourth magician I asked about it was James Randi, the professional skeptic I (and John Tierney) mentioned earlier, who replicates alleged psychic phenomena through his deft use of illusions and magic tricks. Here’s what he wrote via email:

I recall that when David Blaine first showed up on television performing his stunts, I voluntarily contacted him with a friendly warning that he was—in my opinion as a conjuror—taking chances of personal physical damage. We exchanged friendly correspondence on this matter, until I was abruptly informed that his newly engaged management agency had changed his email address and that he’d been instructed not to correspond further with me. I of course accepted this decision, while hoping that Mr. Blaine would heed my well-intended suggestions.

I have not been in touch with David Blaine since that time. I was alarmed to see the unwise statements he made on the TED appearance, and I have respected the—to me—rather unwise slant that his agency has chosen to give to his claims, but I have respected his privacy.

He let his agency even terminate his connection with me, perhaps because I might have tried to keep him honest. Can’t have too much of that quality, of course.

The weight of our fact-checking suggests that the seventeen-minute breath hold is very plausible. That doesn’t guarantee that Blaine didn’t use a breathing tube. Whether you believe Blaine pulled off the stunt legitimately is up to you—each of us has to make our own decision. As with any magician, we can’t be sure what’s true and what’s not—and that is the world of ambiguity that magicians spend their professional lives trying to create. In critical thinking, one looks for the most parsimonious account, but in some cases, as here, it is difficult or impossible to choose between the possible explanations or to figure which is more parsimonious. Does it even matter? Well, yes. As Falkenstein said, people who have a poor understanding of cause and effect, or an insufficient understanding of chance and randomness, are easily duped by claims such as these, leading them to too readily accept others. Not to mention the many amateurs who may try to replicate these spectacles, despite the ubiquitous warning of “do not try this at home.” The uneducated are easy targets. The difference between doing this by training and doing it by illusion is the difference between being duped and not being duped.

Statistics in the Universe

When you hear names like hydrogen, oxygen, boron, tin, and gold, what do you think of? These are chemical elements of the periodic table, usually taught in middle or high school. They were called elements by scientists because they were believed to be fundamental, indivisible units of matter (from the Latin elementum, matter in its most basic form). The Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev noticed a pattern in the properties of elements and organized them into a table that made these properties easier to visualize. In the process, he was able to see gaps in the table for elements that had not yet been discovered. Eventually all of the elements between 1 and 118 have either been discovered in nature or synthesized in the laboratory, supporting the theory underlying the table’s arrangement.

Later, scientists discovered that the chemical elements were not actually indivisible; they were made of something that the scientists called atoms, from the Greek word atomos, for “indivisible.” But they were wrong about the indivisibility of those, too—atoms were later discovered to be made up of subatomic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. These were also initially thought to be indivisible, but then—you guessed it—that was found to be incorrect. The so-called Standard Model of Particle Physics was formulated in the 1950s and ’60s, and theorized that electrons are indivisible, but protons and neutrons are composed of smaller subatomic particles. With the discovery of quarks in the 1970s, this model was confirmed. To further complicate terminology, protons and electrons are a type of fermion, and neutrons are a type of boson (photons are also a type of boson). The different categories are necessary because the two different types of particles are governed by different laws. Fermions and bosons have been given the name elementary particle because it is believed that they are truly indivisible (but time will tell).

According to the Standard Model, there are seventeen different types of elementary particles—twelve kinds of fermions and five kinds of bosons. The Higgs boson, which received a great deal of press in 2012 and 2013, has been the last remaining piece of the Standard Model to be proven—the other sixteen have already been discovered. If it exists, the Higgs would help to explain how matter obtains mass, and fill in a key hole in the theory used to explain the nature of the universe, a hole in the theory that has existed for more than fifty years.

How do we know if we’ve found it? When particles collide at great . . . Oh, forget it. I’ll let a physicist explain it. Here’s Professor Harrison Prosper, describing this plot and the little “blip” next to the arrow corresponding to 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) on the horizontal axis:

The graph shows “a spectrum arising from proton-proton collisions that resulted in the creation of a pair of photons (gammas in high energy argot),” Prosper says. “The Standard Model predicts that the Higgs boson should decay (that is, break up) into a pair of photons. (The Higgs is predicted to decay in other ways too, such as a pair of Z bosons.) The bump in the plot at around 125 GeV is evidence for the existence of some particle of a definite mass that decays into a pair of photons. That something, as far as we’ve been able to ascertain, is likely to be the Higgs boson.”

Not all physicists agree that the experiments are conclusive. Louis Lyons explains, “The Higgs . . . can decay to different sets of particles, and these rates are defined by the S.M. [Standard Model]. We measure these ratios, but with large uncertainties with the present data. They are consistent with the S.M. predictions, but it could be much more convincing with more data. Hence the caution about saying we have discovered the Higgs of the S. M.”

In other words, the experiments are so costly and difficult to conduct, that physicists want to avoid a false alarm—they’ve been wrong before. Although CERN officials announced in 2012 that they had found it, many physicists feel the sample size was too small. There is so much at stake that the physicists have set for themselves a standard of proof, a statistical threshold, that is much stricter than the 1 in 20 used in other fields—1 in 3.5 million. Why such an extreme evidence requirement? Prosper says, “Given that the search for the Higgs took some forty-five years, tens of thousands of scientists and engineers, billions of dollars, not to mention numerous divorces, huge amounts of sleep deprivation, tens of thousands of bad airline meals, etc., etc., we want to be sure as is humanly possible that this is real.”

Physicist Mads Toudal Frandsen adds, “The CERN data is generally taken as evidence that the particle is the Higgs particle. It is true that the Higgs particle can explain the data but there can be other explanations; we would also get this data from other particles. The current data is not precise enough to determine exactly what the particle is. It could be a number of other known particles.” Recall the discussion earlier in the Field Guide about alternative explanations. Physicists are on the alert for this.

If the plot is showing evidence of a different kind of particle, something that is not the Higgs, this could substantially change our view of how the universe was created. And if it does exist, some physicists, such as Stephen Hawking, fear that this could spell the end of the universe as we know it. The fear is that a quantum fluctuation could create a vacuum bubble that rapidly and continually expands until it wipes out the universe. And if you think physicists don’t have a sense of humor, Joseph Lykken, a physicist and director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, noted that it won’t happen for a long, long time—10100 years from now—“so probably you shouldn’t sell your house and you should continue to pay your taxes.”

Not everyone is happy with the discovery, and not because it may signal the end of the world—it’s because finding something in science that the standard theories predict doesn’t open the door for new inquiry. An anomalous, unexplained result is most interesting to scientists because it means their model and understanding was at best incomplete, and at worst, completely wrong—presenting a great opportunity for new learning. In one of the many intersections between art and science, the conductor Benjamin Zander says that when a musician makes a mistake, rather than swearing or saying “oops” or “I’m sorry,” she should say, “Now that’s interesting!” Interesting because it represents an opportunity for learning. It could be that the discovery of the Higgs boson answers all the questions we had. Or, as Wired writer Signe Brewster says, “It could lead to an underlying principle that physicists have missed until now. The end goal, as always, is to find a string that, when tugged, rings a clarion bell that draws physicists toward something new.” As Einstein reportedly said, if you know how it’s going to turn out, it’s not science, it’s engineering.

Scientists are curious, lifelong learners, eager to find the next challenge. There are some who fear that the discovery of the Higgs may explain so much that it ends the ride. Others are so filled with wonder and the complexities of life and the universe that they are confident we’ll never figure it all out. I am among the latter.

As of this writing, tantalizing evidence has emerged from CERN of a new particle that might be a graviton, or a heavier version of the Higgs boson. But the most probable explanation for these surprising new bumps in the data flow is that it is a coincidence—the findings have a 1 in 93 chance of being a fluke, far more likely than the 1 in 3.5 million probability used for the Higgs. But there are qualitative considerations. “What is nice is that it is not a particularly crazy signal, in a quite clean channel,” physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed told the New York Times. “So, while we are nowhere near moving champagne even vaguely close to the fridge, it is intriguing.” Nobody knows yet what it is, and that’s just fine with Lykken and many others who love the thrill of the chase.

Science, history, and the news are full of things that we knew, or thought we did, until we discovered we were wrong. An essential component of critical thinking is knowing what we don’t know. A guiding principle, then, is simply that we know what we know until we don’t any longer. The purpose of the Field Guide was to help you to think things through, and to give you greater confidence both in what you think you know, and what you think you don’t, and—hopefully—to be able to tell the difference between them.