If you will see into the heart of a people, look closely at what they create. Examine the inventions to which they pay the most attention. Read their best-selling books. Listen to their popular music. This is how you will know them.
Having made my ninety-minute presentation on “Society’s Forty-Year Pendulum” to over 240 auditoriums full of people in the past eight years, I began this book by trying to disprove my own “forty-year” hypothesis.
My friend, Dr. Kary Mullis, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said,
Roy, there are few true scientists left in the world. Too often a scientist will develop a hypothesis and then look for supporting evidence. They identify with their hypothesis, and they want it to be correct. This is bad science. When you have a hypothesis, your job is to try to disprove it. No one knows more about your hypothesis than you do. No one else is as qualified to discover its flaws. When you believe a thing to be true, your first responsibility is to do everything you can to disprove it.
As I attacked my hypothesis to disprove it, I found three major loopholes:
1. I had chosen the examples in my presentation after I developed my theory.
2. My presentation was US-centric. I was using the Billboard charts to follow patterns in music and the New York Times Best Sellers List to follow patterns in literature.
3. All my examples came from the past 120 years. My original motive in this was that my audience needed to be familiar with the events. But if my forty-year hypothesis was true, it should be observable in any century.
With Kary’s voice ringing in my head, I decided to:
A. throw out all the familiar data in my ninety-minute presentation;
B. begin a new investigation using completely new data, whose patterns and connections I would have no way of knowing in advance;
C. gather this new data from persons who had never seen my presentation;
D. use the international hit-tracking website TsorT instead of Billboard;
E. use the Publishers Weekly list instead of the New York Times;
F. examine every forty-year window in the past three thousand years; and
G. use a single source, Wikipedia, for establishing the dates of events in question.
This book is the result of that investigation.
Note: The careful reader will notice a number of sentence fragments, lists and short passages taken directly from Wikipedia and TsorT. The authors wish to acknowledge our debt to the worldwide teams of unnamed experts who have graciously contributed their time and expertise to these marvelous online endeavors. Thank you.
Due to the fact that each of these databases is updated daily with new information, it is inevitable that some of the dates will change and the song rankings will be altered. When this occurs, we hope you will retest our hypothesis against the new facts as they are presented and judge for yourself whether our thesis remains reliable.
—Roy H. Williams and Michael R. Drew