Truth And Consensus Poem by Paul Hartal

Can we determine the truth by consensus?
I don’t think so.

Truth by consensus is the ambitious process
of arbitrating the truth by general agreement.
However, this process lacks reliability
because general agreement upon something
does not render it actually true.

The majority opinion of a popular vote in a poll,
for instance, does not really confirm its verity.
This is so because people are frequently
Ill-informed.

Furthermore,
people are prone to wishful thinking;
they are gullible and easily misled,
and consequently they can believe
that a fallacious assertion is correct,
in spite of the existing evidence and facts
to the contrary.

A case in point concerns
the great French chemist Antoine Lavoisier.
In 1772 Lavoisier had signed a memorandum,
with other scientists
of the Paris Academy of Sciences,
stating that “meteorites don’t exist,
because the falling of stones from the sky
is physically impossible.”

But, mind you, defying scientific authority,
one evening,
more exactly at 9: 30 p.m. on July 24,1790,
the meteorite Barbotan fell in le Gers
in the southwest of France
and the fall was witnessed by the mayor
and the city council.

Nevertheless,
the scientist Claude Louis Berthollet,
a developer of the theory of
chemical equilibriums,
reacted to the event with these words:
“How sad it is that the entire town enters
folk tales upon an official record,
presenting them as something actually seen,
while they cannot be explained by physics
nor by anything reasonable.”

Lavoisier was still alive at the time
that the meteorite hit le Gers.
Tragically, the discoverer of oxygen
and nitrogen in air,
the destroyer of the phlogiston theory,
was guillotined four years later
during the French Revolution.
He was executed for his involvement
with a tax collecting company.

As to the quest
for substantiating the truth by public accord,
it had famously been carried over, for example,
to the twentieth century
in connection with the rise of modern physics.
In 1931 contrarians to the Theory of Relativity
published a book in Leipzig, Germany,
titled Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein
(“A Hundred Authors against Einstein”) .

“But why 100 authors? ” Einstein asked.
“If I were wrong, then one would be enough.”