Inane surveys ought to be banned. They are generally a cause of great deal of futile debates and purposeless controversies. Another pointless survey featuring Indian scientists has indicated that over half of them believe in the existence of Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) and has very predictably raised howls of protests from several quarters who believe that there is some inherent contradiction in scientists believing in invisible, scientifically unverified flying noodle monsters.
The survey conducted jointly by The Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture of Trinity College, Connecticut and India's Centre for Inquiry, Hyderabad has thrown up results that confirm that India is the headquarters for invisible monsters. Only 12 percent of the 1100 respondents were categorical that they didn't believe in monsters; 13 percent weren't sure since they have been haunted by monsters they didn't believe in. As many as 26 percent had no doubts that flying monsters do exist while 30 percent did not believe in flying noodle monster but in a higher power that is capable of creating invisible flying monsters.
Narisetti Innauah, chairman of the Centre for Inquiry, an outfit that believes in following the rational spirit (whatever it means) is a worried man. He is worried about the insufficient level of "scientific temper" among the researchers. "Scientific temper is something that comes from having unquestioning faith in supernatural stuff revealed by leading super-scientists of the world - stuff like how a big blast created our universe or how invisible strings that are at the core of all matter determine how universe works. Scientists having faith in supernatural stuff revealed by priests or charlatans is a clear contradiction that is unacceptable and will hamper the country's effort to become a scientific superpower."
(Interestingly, the present day superpower of the globe, United States of America became a superpower only after developing and testing the "atomic bomb". Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who directed the project at Los Alamos that developed the first atomic bomb believed in supernatural Indian gods like Krishna and quoted him "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" while enjoying the beautiful mushroom cloud generated by the first ever nuclear test.)
Not all scientists agree with Narisetti. "I know several scientists who believe in the flying noodle monster, yet produce excellent science papers" says Physicist Suresh Chandvanker of the Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Material Sciences, TIFR. "Flying Spaghetti Monster being the creator of life is just an unproved theory. There is no contradiction simply because scientists are also very much human beings and also believe in unproved theories like time travel, black holes or parallel universes. If its acceptable for a scientist to believe that its possible to travel into past or future without provable ability to travel in time, why should a believer in FSM be ridiculed for his beliefs?"
Chandvankar himself believes in flying spaghetti monster, but not in the form of an idol or a stone statue of his noodly appendage. "My concept of FLM is complex. It could be drawn from nature and the hundreds of tentacles of the monster may be symbolic of the hands of nature affecting every field of life.
Cell biologist Satyajit Mayor, Dean of the National Centre for Biological studies in Bangalore, puts it differently. "You don't need to believe in FSM if you can understand a little bit more about the natural world around us. If I hold faith that Flying Spaghetti Monster is responsible for the way the world works, why would I want to understand the natural world at all? he asks, "My search is over if I accept that the cell is created by FSM"
Chandvankar counters his argument by saying, "If I believe that a cell is created by chance and not by FSM, it would mean that chance is more intelligent than me, since I don't yet know how to create a cell. I would rather believe that some flying monster created life than believe that I'm more stupid than chance."
But another top scientist theoretical physicist Asoka Sen, professor at Harish-chandra Research Institute at Allahabad doesn't mince words expressing his scorn for the noodly monster. "I work on the string theory that involves looking for invisible strings that only string theorists like us can conceive, see, understand, believe and accept. Since all matter in all of the universe is made up of these invisible strings there is no room for invisible spaghetti in this," says Sen unequivocally.
Quite interestingly, the oxford dictionary definition of 'spaghetti' is pasta in the form of long strings. Do scientists and religionists believe in the same noodly higher power, the only difference being that while the former believe that the universe is made up of edible noodles while the latter believe that edible noodles made our universe?
There are some nutcase scientists who believe that we are all noodly monsters pretending to be humans which would explain the paradox of noodles being the minutest form of all the matter of the universe and yet also being the generators, operators and destroyers of the universe. According to these screwballs, the tiny, undetectable “strings” that make up all matter, energy and forces in the entire universe are not strings vibrating and wiggling to ultimately determine what force or energy or bit of mass each string becomes, but tiny, undetectable flying spaghetti monsters and the different forms of energy and matter are formed by how many and in what manner they wave their noodley appendages.
The maverick scientists believe they have a unified theory of everything in their appendeges..er..hands, a unified theory that not only unifies gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces, but also unifies the string theory of scientists with the flying spaghetti monster belief of the religionists.
But because these maverick scientists are regarded as fruitcakes by the rest of scientific establishment, they are never included in any survey of importance. They sit back and laugh at the infantile delusions of the two groups of scientists on either side of the debate - one bunch that has never seen any spaghetti monster yet believes in its existence, the other bunch that cannot even come to a definite conclusion whether chocolate is good or bad for health, but fancies that they have discovered how the universe was created 14 billions years back without the assistance of spaghetti monsters.
