For Professor Kouska has written a work that demonstrates that the following relationship of mutual exclusion obtains: either the theory of probability, on which stands natural history, is false to its very foundations, or the world of living things, with man at its head, does not exist. After which, in the second volume, the Professor argues that if prognostication, or futurology, is ever to become a reality and not an empty illusion, not a conscious or unconscious deception, then that discipline cannot avail itself of the calculus of probability, but demands the implementation of an entirely different reckoning, namely—to quote Kouska—“a theory, based on antipodal axioms, of the distribution of ensembles in actual fact unparalleled in the space-time continuum of higher-order events” (the quote also serves to show that the reading of the work—in the theoretical sections—does present certain difficulties).
Benedykt Kouska begins by revealing that the theory of empirical probability is flawed in the middle. We employ the notion of probability when we do not know a thing with certainty. But our uncertainty is either purely subjective (we do not know what will take place, but someone else may know) or objective (no one knows, and no one can know). Subjective probability is a compass for an informational disability; not knowing which horse will come in first and guessing by the number of horses (if there are four, each has one chance in four of winning the race), I act like one who is sightless in a room full of furniture. Probability is, so to speak, a cane for a blind man; he uses it to feel his way. If he could see, he would not need the cane, and if I knew which horse was the fastest, I would not need probability theory. As is known, the question of the objectivity or the subjectivity of probability has divided the world of science into two camps. Some maintain that there exist two types of probability, as above, others, that only the subjective exists, because regardless of what is supposed to take place, we cannot have full knowledge of it. Therefore, some lay the uncertainty of future events at the door of our knowledge of them, whereas others place it within the realm of the events themselves.
That which takes place, if it really and truly takes place, takes place indeed: such is Professor Kouska’s main contention. Probability comes in only where a thing has not yet taken place. So saith science. But everyone is aware that two duelists firing two bullets which flatten each other in midair, or that breaking one’s tooth, while eating a fish, on a ring which by accident one had dropped overboard at sea six years before and which was swallowed by that exact same fish, or—for that matter—that the playing, in three-four time, of Tchaikovsky’s Sonatina in B Minor in a kitchen-utensil store by bursting shrapnel during a siege, because the shrapnel’s metal balls strike the larger and smaller pots and pans exactly as the composition requires—that any of this, were it to happen, would constitute a happening most improbable. Science says in this regard that these are facts occurring with a very negligible frequency in the sets of occurrences to which the facts belong, that is, in the set of all duels, in the set of eating fish and finding lost objects in them, and in the set of bombardments of stores selling housewares.
But science, says Professor Kouska, is selling us a line, because all its twaddle about sets is a complete fiction. The theory of probability can usually tell us how long we must wait for a given event, for an event of a specified and unusually low probability, or, in other words, how many times it will be necessary to repeat a duel, lose a ring, or fire at pots and pans before the afore-mentioned remarkable things come about. This is rubbish, because in order to make a highly improbable thing come about it is not at all necessary that the set of events to which it belongs represent a continuous series. If I throw ten coins at once, knowing that the chance of ten heads coming up at the same time, or ten tails, works out to barely 1:796, I certainly do not need to make upward of 796 throws in order that the probability of ten heads turning up, or ten tails, become equal to one. For I can always say that my throws are a continuation of an experiment comprising all the past throws of ten coins at once. Of such throws there must have been, in the course of the last five thousand years of Earth’s history, an inordinate number; therefore, I really ought to expect that straightaway all my coins are going to land heads up, or tails up. Meanwhile, says Professor Kouska, just you try and base your expectations on such reasoning! From the scientific point of view it is entirely correct, for the fact of whether one throws the coins nonstop or puts them aside for a moment to eat knedlach in the intermission or go for a quick one at the corner bar, or whether—for that matter—it is not the same person who does the throwing, but a different one each time, and not all in one day but each week or each year, has not the slightest effect or bearing on the distribution of the probability; thus the fact that ten coins were thrown by the Phoenicians sitting on their sheepskins, and by the Greeks after they burned Troy, and by the Roman pimps in the time of the Caesars, and by the Gauls, and by the Teutons, and by the Ostrogoths, and the Tartars, and the Turks driving their captives to Stamboul, and the rug merchants in Galata, and those merchants who trafficked in children from the Children’s Crusade, and Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Robespierre, as well as a few dozen tens of thousands of other gamblers, also is wholly immaterial, and consequently, in throwing the coins, we can consider that the set is extremely large, and that our chances of throwing ten heads or ten tails at once are positively enormous! Just you try and throw, says Professor Kouska, gripping some learned physicist or other probability theorist by the elbow so he can’t escape, for such as they do not like having the falsity of their method pointed out to them. Just you try, you’ll see that nothing comes of it.
Next, Professor Kouska undertakes an extensive thought experiment that relates not to some hypothetical phenomenon or other, but to a part of his own biography. We repeat here, in condensed form, some of the more interesting fragments of this analysis.
A certain army doctor, during the First World War, ejected a nurse from the operating room, for he was in the midst of surgery when she entered by mistake. Had the nurse been better acquainted with the hospital, she would not have mistaken the door to the operating room for the door to the first-aid station, and had she not entered the operating room, the surgeon would not have ejected her; had he not ejected her, his superior, the regiment doctor, would not have brought to his attention his unseemly behavior regarding the lady (for she was a volunteer nurse, a society miss), and had the superior not brought this to his attention, the young surgeon would not have considered it his duty to go and apologize to the nurse, would not have taken her to the café, fallen in love with her, and married her, whereby Professor Benedykt Kouska would not have come into the world as the child of this same married couple.
From this it would appear to follow that the probability of the coming into the world of Professor Benedykt Kouska (as a newborn, not as the head of the Analytical Philosophy Department) was set by the probability of the nurse’s confusing or not confusing the doors in the given year, month, day, and hour. But it is not that way at all. The young surgeon Kouska did not have, on that day, any operations scheduled; however, his colleague Doctor Popichal, who wished to carry the laundry from the cleaners to his aunt, entered the aunt’s house, where because of a blown fuse the light over the stairwell was not working, because of which he fell off the third step and twisted his ankle; and because of this, Kouska had to take his place in surgery. Had the fuse not blown, Popichal would not have sprained his ankle, Popichal would have been the one operating and not Kouska, and, being an individual known for his gallantry, he would not have used strong language to remove the nurse who entered the operating room by mistake, and, not having insulted her, he would not have seen the need to arrange a tête-à-tête with her; but tête-à-tête or no tête-à-tête, it is absolutely certain in any case that from the possible union of Popichal and the nurse the result would have been not Benedykt Kouska but someone altogether different, with whose chances of coming into the world this study does not concern itself.
Professional statistician
s, aware of the complicated state of the things of this world, usually wriggle out of having to deal with the probability of such events as someone’s coming into the world. They say, to be rid of you, that what we have here is the coincidence of a great number of divaricate-source causal chains and that consequently the point in space-time in which a given egg merges with a given sperm is indeed determined in principle, in abstracto; however, in concreto one would never be able to accumulate knowledge of sufficient power, that is to say all-embracing, for the practical formulation of any prognosis (with what probability there will be born an individual X of traits Y, or in other words how long people must reproduce before it is certain that a certain individual, of traits Y, will with absolute certainty come into the world) to become feasible. But the impossibility is technical only, not fundamental; it rests in the difficulties of collecting information, and not in the absence in the world (to hear them talk) of such information to collect. This lie of statistical science Professor Benedykt Kouska intends to nail and expose.
As we know, the question of Professor Kouska’s being able to be born does not reduce itself merely to the alternative of “right door, wrong door.” Not with regard to one coincidence must one reckon the chances of his birth, but with regard to many: the coincidence that the nurse was sent to that hospital and not another; the coincidence that her smile in the shadow cast by her cornet resembled, from a distance, the smile of Mona Lisa; the coincidence, too, that the Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, for had he not been shot, war would not have broken out, and had war not broken out, the young lady would not have become a nurse; moreover, since she came from Olomouc and the surgeon from Moravská Ostrava, they most likely would never have met, neither in a hospital nor anywhere else. One therefore has to take into account the general theory of the ballistics of shooting at archdukes, and since the hitting of the Archduke was conditioned by the motion of his automobile, the theory of the kinematics of automobile models of the year 1914 should also be considered, as well as the psychology of assassins, because not everyone in the place of that Serb would have shot at the Archduke, and even if someone had, he would not have hit, not if his hands were shaking with excitement; the fact, therefore, that the Serb had a steady hand and eye and no tremors also has its place in the probability distribution of the birth of Professor Kouska. Nor ought one to ignore the overall political situation of Europe in the summer of 1914.
But the marriage in any case did not come about in that year, or in 1915, when the young couple became acquainted in good earnest, for the surgeon was detailed to the fortress of Przemyśl. From there he was to travel later to Lwów, where lived the young maiden Marika, whom his parents had chosen to be his wife out of financial considerations. However, as a result of Samsonov’s offensive and the movements of the southern flank of the Russian forces, Przemyśl was besieged, and before long, instead of repairing to his betrothed in Lwów, the surgeon proceeded into Russian captivity when the fortress fell. Now, he remembered the nurse better than he did his fiancee, because the nurse not only was fair but also sang the song “Sleep, Love, in Thy Bed of Flowers” much more sweetly than did Marika, who had an unremoved polyp on her vocal cords and from this a constant hoarseness. Marika was, in fact, to have undergone an operation to remove the polyp in 1914, but the otorhinolaryngologist who was supposed to remove the polyp, having lost a great deal of money in a Lwów casino and being unable to pay off his debt of honor (he was an officer), instead of shooting himself in the head, robbed the regimental till and fled to Italy; this incident caused Marika to conceive a great dislike for otorhinolaryngologists, and before she could decide on another she became betrothed; as a betrothed she was obliged to sing “Sleep, Love, in Thy Bed of Flowers,” and her singing, or, rather, the memory of that hoarse and wheezy voice, in contrast—detrimental to the betrothed—with the pure timbre of the Prague nurse, was responsible for the latter’s gaining ascendancy, in the mind of doctor-prisoner Kouska, over the image of his fiancee. So that, returning to Prague in the year 1919, he did not even think to look up his former fiancee but immediately went to the house in which the nurse was living as a marriageable miss.
The nurse, however, had four different suitors; all four sought her hand in marriage, whereas between her and Kouska there was nothing concrete except for the postcards he had sent her from captivity, and the postcards in themselves, smudged with the stamps of the military censor, could not have been expected to kindle in her heart any lasting feeling. But her first serious suitor was a certain Hamuras, a pilot who did not fly because he always got a hernia when he moved the airplane’s rudder bar with his feet, and this because the rudder bars in the airplanes of those days were hard to move—it was, after all, a very primitive era in aviation. Now, Hamuras had been operated on once, but without success, for the hernia recurred, recurred because the doctor performing the operation had made a mistake in the catgut sutures; and the nurse was ashamed to wed the sort of flier who, instead of flying, spent his time either sitting in the reception room of the hospital or searching the newspaper ads for places to obtain a genuine prewar truss, since Hamuras figured that such a truss would enable him to fly after all; on account of the war, however, a good truss was unobtainable.
One should note that at this juncture Professor Kouska’s “to be or not to be” ties in with the history of aviation in general, and with the airplane models used by the Austro-Hungarian Army in particular. Specifically, the birth of Professor Kouska was positively influenced by the fact that in 1911 the Austro-Hungarian government acquired a franchise to build monoplanes whose rudder bars were difficult to operate, planes that were to be manufactured by a plant in Wiener-Neustadt, and this in fact took place. Now, in the course of the bidding, the French firm Antoinette competed with this plant and its franchise (coming from an American firm, Farman), and the French firm had a good chance, because Major General Prchl, of the Imperial Crown Commissariat, would have turned the scales in favor of the French model, because he had a French mistress, the governess of his children, and on account of this secretly loved all things French; that, of course, would have altered the distribution of chance, since the French machine was a biplane with sweptback ailerons and a rudder blade that had an easily movable control bar, so the bar would not have caused Hamuras his problem, owing to which the nurse might have married him after all. Granted, the biplane had a hard-to-work exhaust hammer, and Hamuras had rather delicate shoulders; he even suffered from what is called Schreibkrampf, which gave him difficulty signing his name (his full name ran Adolf Alfred von Messen-Weydeneck zu Oryola und Münne-sacks, Baron Hamuras). So, then, even without the hernia Hamuras could have, by reason of his weak arms, lost his appeal in the eyes of the nurse.
But there popped up in the governess’s path a certain two-bit tenor from an operetta, with remarkable speed he gave her a baby, Lieutenant General Prchl drove her from his door, lost his affection for all things French, and the army stayed with the Farman franchise held by the company from Wiener-Neustadt. The tenor the governess met at the Ring when she went there with General Prchl’s oldest daughters—the youngest had the whooping cough, so they were trying to keep the healthy children away from the sick one—and if it had not been for that whooping cough brought in by that acquaintance of the Prchls’ cook, a man who carried coffee to a smoking room and was wont to drop in on the Prchls in the morning, that is, drop in on their cook, there would have been no illness, no taking of the children to the Ring, no meeting the tenor, no infidelity; and thereby Antoinette would have won out in the bidding after all. But Hamuras was jilted, married the daughter of a purveyor by appointment to His Majesty the King, and had three children by her, one of which he had without the hernia.
There was nothing wrong with the nurse’s second suitor, Captain Miśnia, but he went to the Italian front and came down with rheumatism (this was in the winter, in the Alps). As for the cause of his demise, accounts differ; the Captain was taking a steam bath, a .22-caliber sh
ell hit the building, the Captain went flying out naked straight into the snow, the snow took care of his rheumatism, they say, but he got pneumonia. However, had Professor Fleming discovered his penicillin not in 1941 but, say, in 1910, then Miśnia would have been pulled out of the pneumonia and returned to Prague as a convalescent, and the chances of Professor Kouska’s coming into the world would have been, by that, greatly diminished. And so the calendar of discoveries in the field of antibacterial drugs played a large role in the rise of B. Kouska.
The third suitor was a respectable wholesale dealer, but the young lady did not care for him. The fourth was about to marry her for certain, but it did not work out on account of a beer. This last beau had enormous debts and hoped to pay them off out of the dowry; he also had an unusually checkered past. The family went, along with the young lady and her suitor, to a Red Cross raffle, but Hungarian veal birds were served for lunch, and the father of the young lady developed a terrific thirst, so he left the pavilion where they all were listening to the military band and had a mug of beer on draft, in the course of which he ran into an old schoolmate who was just then leaving the raffle grounds, and had it not been for the beer, they would certainly not have come together; this schoolmate knew, through his sister-in-law, the entire past of the young lady’s suitor and was not averse to telling her father everything and in full detail. It appears he also embellished a little here and there; in any event, the father returned most agitated, and the engagement, having been all but made official, fell irretrievably to pieces. Yet had the father not eaten Hungarian veal birds, he would not have felt a thirst, would not have stepped out for a beer, would not have met his old schoolmate, would not have learned of the debts of the suitor; the engagement would have gone through, and, seeing it would have been an engagement in wartime, the wedding also would have followed in short order. An excessive amount of paprika in the veal birds on May 19, 1916, thus saved the life of Professor B. Kouska.
A Perfect Vacuum Page 15
