You’ll never be a success at anything, said the teacher to the pupil with the surname Einstein. We know how that prediction went with regards to Albert’s career! Granted, good old Al may have been a tad disruptive in the classroom, from want of serious challenge; and granted the teacher may have been frustrated out of her wits. (I think it was ‘a her’, from reading it somewhere and this couldn’t have been a very good ad for the famed feminine intuition, for how often have we been reminded of that fact that behind every successful man stands a woman.) Anyhow, young Einstein wasn’t the first and last such example of gross misjudgment.
The manager of one of the popular record labels in the Sixties (a man, hooray!) gave one cursory listen — a reluctant lending of his ear — to a demo recording by a young British group of that time before swiftly and summarily declaring that they wouldn’t go far, didn’t have a future, and so the record company couldn’t invest in them.
Men’s intuition being what it is in the page books of history (which is, truthfully, non-existent; men’s intuition that is, not history; remember the Trojan Horse? How many Trojan soldiers sensed instinctively that this was a gift bearing Greeks? Not one, as history tells us.) So the Sixties record manager can be forgiven for being true to form in predicting the exact opposite of what eventually did happen. The music band, of course, being the Beatles.
People in their own personal lives have perhaps experienced something similar. In my case, my father predicted I would play cricket big time; my mother frowned. She was right in the end, giving WI a big tick. My father not wrong; to his credit I did continue playing cricket big time and nearly forgot to get going searching for a job until that gentle tap on the shoulder and that quiet voice in the ear said, “Time to put in some strict nine to five, cool down in a shady office somewhere, where people may even pay you for duties rendered and you might only on a very rare occasion (like when you don’t get the pay rise everyone else around appears to have been granted) let out a deafening appeal, “Howzat?”
All the aforementioned examples may be classified under the heading of intuitive forecast. What science does, however, falls into another category, one that is, to all intents and purposes, based on verified fact. Papers are published in prestigious journals backing up theories and findings.
The coffee myth
And so it was about three decades ago that I — inveterate coffee drinker — came to learn that with every sip and with every cup I was significantly shortening my life. At the age of twenty-eight, one has only been living a short while, one feels, at least I did, but dare I turn my back bravely on such incontrovertible proof and pour myself another cup of dark satiny Instant, no milk? I dared not, for someone somewhere in Portugal or Guatemala had had a heart attack at the early age of 34 induced by coffee drinking. How about coffee diluted with a generous helping of milk?
Tea, said my mother, drink tea. Does one dare go against the advice of the woman who predicted correctly the early demise of a cricket career? Tea it became; with a smidgen of reluctance that grew incrementally.
Decades later, a fresh batch of scientists, using different microscopes and test tubes perhaps, deemed coffee healthy. Drink up, drink up, the paper all but said. What a rush there was to put away the tea set and retrieve the coffee plunger from cold storage. And now just the other day another batch of scientists has published a fresh set of findings, altered perspectives, on the benefits or otherwise of green tea... Moderation in everything never presented a stronger case, I think, for who can tell if today’s excesses are tomorrow’s rewards or disasters?
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia
