Gain In Translation
Topic 7
Joy Fan
IB Theory of Knowledge 11
Ms. B. Patton Block B
January 28, 2009
In chemistry, charged particles are deflected from their straight-line paths when fired out of the mass spectrometer. Similarly, when presented with a certain idea or phenomenon, people often take on different approaches in tackling the subject. Such is the complexity of the perceptual and reasoning processes one utilizes that the things one see and understand are greatly affected by the people they are. Whether or not one benefits from the translation and gains subsequent knowledge could be a matter of two explanations. One attempt to explain the loss or gain in translation would be that different people, having acquired different degrees of experience and prior knowledge to the topic often have distinctly different perspectives on the question in matter. One other possible explanation would be that once different reasoning process are incorporated in the process of perception the end product would vary significantly.
Although a fair amount of people believe that previous experience in a topic is crucial in aiding the formation of a hypothesis, the movie Pi proves otherwise. The protagonist Max Cohen is a man who is blessed with a gifted mind in mathematics, but is also cursed with severe chronic headaches that often make him pass out from pain. He strongly believes that there is a pattern in all things in nature, and devotes his time to trying to find the pattern. Upon reaching a breakthrough in his work, Max strongly believed that a 216-digit number was the pattern he was looking for, and in his excitement, he shared the discovery with his old mathematics mentor, Sol Robeson. One might predict the latter's reaction to the news to be of pride and joy. Quite the contrary, Sol scolds Max, accusing him of being overly obsessive and fixated on the number itself. When one possesses the previous experience of successfully incorporating the 216-digit number to daily life, he or she tends to find more instances in which this 216-digit number occurs. There might be 216 letters in a sentence somebody says, the bus takes 216 seconds to travel 20 blocks, and even the number of steps one makes from home to work might be precisely 216. Sol mercilessly calls Max out, and points out that "as soon as you discard scientific rigor, you're no longer a mathematician, you're a numerologist!" This is just one way in which one's previous experience with dealing with a certain topic affects their ability to perceive more than what is given. In Max's case, previous success caused him to overlook certain uncertainties and limitations to his hypothesis, thus hindering his perception, causing valuable data to be lost in translation. Therefore, what one can draw from Max's experience is to not let a previous successful experience offset their ability to perceive the whole picture that is the topic itself.
