We need to get this out of the way before we do any complicated stuff.

William of Ockham (1287 – 1347)

The trouble with Ockham’s razor is that it’s a two-edged blade and you can get a nasty cut if you start slashing about with it indiscriminately.

There are many ways of stating, or misquoting, the principle. It’s probably impossible to find out exactly what old William actually did say in the first place.

The basic idea is that, given a choice of two possible explanations for a phenomenon, the less complicated explanation is more likely to be true.

You would think this is a lad who needs to get out more. Actually, the boy led a very eventful life. You might also think that, looking back over his own life, he might have realised that any reasonable explanation of that in itself was woefully lacking.

Nevertheless, the idea stuck. And it isn’t a bad one. Go for the explanation with the fewest unnecessary complications. Unfortunately, your boy was too busy having an argument with the Pope and from what I can gather, most of the heavy hitters of  Europe in the early thirteen hundreds to get around to writing down a definition of “unnecessary.”

And that’s the problem, you see. You can’t tell what is a “necessary complication” until much later. And then it’s too late, you’ve all charged off up a blind alley and you have to go back a few centuries to get it right again.

Let me give you a little-known historical example.

About the time that Isaac Newton was fooling around with apples and thinking about gravitation, down the road, young Albert Newtonstein was  messing with the same problem.

Isaac whacked out his laws of motion and the rest is history, but, a few weeks later, young Albert came up with his Special and General theories of Relativity. It went down like a lead balloon. All that bending of time and space and tiny discrepancies in the orbit of Mercury, all just totally and obviously unnecessary complications. Albert never stood a chance. Ockham’s razor slashed him to the bone, not to mention cutting him to the quick.

Nobody had even invented instruments sufficiently sensitive to detect deviations from the behaviour that Isaac Cleverclogs predicted. In fact, and this is a long story cut short in a way that William would have adored, the instruments that showed the problem with Newton depended upon using Newton’s stuff in the first place to invent the instruments that would detect the …… Oh, squidgy bits, you get the picture. I’m not saying that Newton invented the instruments. I’m saying that his work, with its holes and weird bits that don’t quite fit, still allowed people to get a hold on the problem, to develop distantly related technologies that allowed them to improve and improve again.

Poor old Albert’s stuff, true though it might be, was indeed an unnecessary complication. At the time. At the time, what was needed was a comparatively simple explanation that would allow people to move their minds forward. They could pick up the clever bits later.

OK, it’s getting late, time to move on.

Ockham’s razor is not a definitive judgement upon the validity of an explanation. It’s a guide to where the next step might lie. If you’re lost in a wood and there are two paths, both going in the same general direction, one overgrown with brambles, one strewn with pretty flowers, which are you going to take? Shut up, the sadomasochists. You take the simple option. If you’re wrong, it’s easier to come back and take the route with the complications you now believe to be necessary.

What’s unnecessary today may be essential tomorrow. And unnecessary the day after.

Unfortunately, it’s the last bit that  you Earthlings keep forgetting. Your history is crammed with people getting it right. But getting it right at the wrong time. And you never seem to be able to hang on to that until the right time comes around. Again. It’s not just your planet that goes round in circles. You keep coming up with the same thoughts and then forgetting them.

Do try to sort it out. We can’t wait forever. At the moment you’ve gone haring off up the blind alley of technology. It’s going to take you ages to get out of that. If you don’t kill yourselves first.