There is a routine that Penn and Teller do that demonstrates what they call the "Seven Basic Principals of Magic:"
- Palm: To hold an object in an apparently empty hand.
- Ditch: To secretly dispose of an unneeded object.
- Steal: To secretly obtain a needed object.
- Load: To secretly move a needed object to where it is hidden.
- Simulation: To give the impression that something that hasn’t happened, has.
- Misdirection: To lead attention away from a secret move.
- Switch: To secretly exchange one object for another.
Here is their routine that demonstrates all seven principals:
Once you have a good understanding of the seven principals then you have a good understanding of how most, if not all, magic tricks work.
I was thinking about this routine as I watched the entertaining 2016 CAST keynote presentation by master magician Jason Latimer. Latimer, uses science as the backbone of his magic routine, but he never strays too far from the seven basic principals of magic in his routines. He has degrees in Math, Economics and Applied Science, dabbles in Psychology and works at the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center with a live show that is designed to get the viewers to think not so much about how the magic tricks are done, but rather to think about asking questions about doing the impossible. Can you do the impossible if you just ask the right questions and get the right answers? Of course you can. (Steve Martin once said that you can be a millionaire, you just need to start with a million dollars.) The trick is getting kids to ask the right questions and to search for the right answers. Find out the trick to that, and you hit the biggest payday in education history.
"What happens to the sense of wonder in the age of the internet?" Latimer asks as he works the audience with a Vegas style show full of fog machines and loud music. (Actually, at some points during his presentation, there was so much fog that the audience could not see the trick, such as when he hung a hanger on what appeared to be a beam of light. What should have been a big applause moment was more of a Pavlovian "We will applause because you put your hands up in the air and something must have happened" moment.)
That one question, about wonder, could have taken his entire presentation and then some. How do you instill a sense of wonder when all of the answers to all of everything appear to already be on the internet? How do you get students to ask questions when they do not know how to ask? How do you get students to think beyond the text, beyond Google?
That is a great question and well worth contemplating. That is a question that teachers have been wondering for years. Like Steve Goodman once asked "How ya gonna keep em down on the farm, now that outer-space has lost its charm?"
Sadly, Latimer loses the focus of that question and just skims over it during the show, occasionally reminding audience members that wonder is important, all the while the fog machines blasting away.
Latimer's keynote was long on showmanship, and short on answers for the 6000 assembled educators. He essentially took his 12 minute TEDx talk and stretched it out with tricks to about 55 minutes. The tricks were good, some were really good.
He started out saying that his gift, if you will, is to ask questions that no one asks. To ponder the imponderable and to ask if what we already know is really correct (Indeed, that is what defines a great scientist: Can we go to moon? Can we make electricity move things? Is the world flat? How fast can light travel?
He then did a trick where he asks if water has to stay in liquid form at room temperature. He proceeds to then create a ball of "water" out of, thin air, or water as it were, all the while a poor rube from the audience is left dumbfounded as the magical watery orb pops like a balloon in his hands and goes back into the basin.
The implication of Latimer's story and his trick is this: You can find the answers to problems and do the impossible by asking the right questions, or inventing new questions, or re-asking old questions, which is correct. However, by using magic and changing the rules, he doesn't exactly answer impossible questions.
What he does, at least with the water shape trick, is as much a linguistic slight-of-hand as anything else. He did NOT make pure water act differently simply by creating some kind of previously unknown conditions. Indeed, I can't remember him actually telling the audience that the substances that he pours into the empty clear basin is really water at all. The audience assumes it is, because he was talking about water prior to the trick. Actually, the liquids are not water at all, but rather a chemical that looks like water and loses its polarity when exposed to air or he slips in polymer balls filled with water (see load, steal and ditch above). What he probably did was apply some knowledge of chemistry to make some substances the LOOKED like water behave unlike water behaves in any situation, unless you happen to be in a zero gravity environment. Simulation. Perhaps if he had the audience member DRINK the water, it might have been a little different.
So really, he did not answer the question. He merely manipulated the conditions to suit his needs. And that is not science. It is cheating.
The problem with this way of presenting to educators, is that he is not actually answering the questions that he poses, but rather setting up the situation where he can manipulate the situation to suit his needs, to make it APPEAR he is answering the question, which is the opposite of science. Saying "I wonder if I can manipulate the shape of water?" and then doing a trick that neither uses water nor really manipulates the shape of water is mentally cheating which is what magic, I suppose, is all about.
This reminds me of how Cap't Kirk overcame the Kobayashi Maru test in Starfleet academy: His didn't beat it by his brains, he beat it by reprogramming the computer so that he would win. Misdirection.
Later in the show, he has a trick where the randomly selected card is found inside a box within a box, within a box. How did it get there? Let's just say the stage assistant knows the term "load" from above, and Latimer knows the term "steal" and "misdirection."
Latimer has a good show. It is clearly influenced by his heroes in Vegas, with a hint of Copperfield and a little bit of Penn and Teller. And I suppose that for kids, the effect is one of wonder and awe when they leave the presentation. For me however, the show left me a bit empty. How do you instill a sense of wonder in a world for kids where the answers to every question is a click away?
Latimer said somewhere in the show that "The questions are more important than the answers." What he meant, I suppose, is that students need to be taught to ask questions because the great changes are made by asking big wonder-filled questions. But adults need to be taught that skill as well. So do teachers. More than one person around me was looking up how he did the trick on their smart phone while he was doing them. They were not trying to figure out how he did the tricks, they were looking for someone that had already figured it out (sort of like I did with the water balls). Even the adults were using Google to quickly answer the questions that they had, during the presentation about how questions cannot always be answered by Google.
Latimer also needs to discuss the problem of people asking questions that lead to confusion. "Did ancient aliens breed with prehistoric man?" "Does climate change really exist?" "Is the earth 6000 years old?" "Does evolution actually exist?" One needs to caution teachers about having kids ask those questions that can lead to a lifetime of confusion. Latimer needs to guide teachers on those types of questions as well. The more controversial the question, the harder it is for teachers to address with kids.
Latimer said throughout the program that he "Was not here to trick you." He said that four or five times that I can recall. He then immediately followed that statement with something that tricked everyone.
He didn't want to trick us. Yes he did.
Simulation.