Today, a parable about scientific reporting. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Here's a fine lesson in
scientific objectivity. It's an old book about the
Titanic. Experimental science is the
business of sorting out the things we see. This
book is dated May 13, 1912. That's a scant 33 days
after the Titanic sank. Someone has
really raced into print to sort out this event. The
A Graphic and Thrilling Account of the Sinking
of the greatest Floating Palace ever built,
carrying down to watery graves more than 1,500
We've read a lot about the Titanic
since then. We've found the wreck and reconstructed
the accident. Now we know the iceberg didn't tear
the hull. Instead, it sprung the plates. Now we
know that the rear third of the ship broke off as
it cantilevered upward -- lifted by the sinking
For 80 years witnesses have been wrung out and hung
up to dry. We've pored over transcripts. We've
plumbed the human failings that led to the deaths
of two thirds of the people on board.
This book combines photos and data from files with
the eye-witness accounts of people whose clothes
are hardly dry.
The survivors all praise the heroism that granted
them life. History does little to tarnish those
stories. Three quarters of the men on board stood
back so women and children could use the few
lifeboats. Some wives died rather than leave their
husbands. How many of us would've acted so nobly?
The book tells and retells the tale of bandsmen
playing Nearer my God to Thee with water
rising over their knees. Now we know that didn't
happen. Frightened survivors who rowed away from
screaming people in the water tell how they had to,
to keep from being sucked under by the sinking
ship. History has not been kind to them in their
half-filled lifeboats. And listen to this line:
Captain Smith, indeed, was afraid, but it was
only for the precious beings under God committed to
his care. And how manfully he minimized the first
danger until the rising surges creeping o'er the
decks betrayed the awful truth.
How many precious minutes did he lose in
People in the boats thought they heard boilers
exploding as the ship sank. The few who saw it
split in two were ignored for years. Who wanted to
think the great ship was broken?
People in the boats thought they'd taken twice as
many women and children, and half as many men, as
they really did. That's the problem of scientific
reporting -- trying to say what it is we've really
That fearful night warns how hard that is to do. It
reminds us of our own capacity for error. It
reminds us that the true business of science is
defeating our own terrible capacity for believing
what we want to be true -- and not what really is.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Wreck and Sinking of the Titanic. (M.
Everett, ed.) L.H. Walter, 1912.
Lord, W., A Night to Remember. various
publishers from 1955 to 1987. The latest is New
York: Amereon House.
Bonsall, T.E., Great Shipwrecks of the 20th
Century. New York: Gallery Books, 1988,
For more on the sinking of the Titanic
see Episodes 81 and