Ian Dunt

You don't have the apparatus in your mind to have understood how everything works, even if you had the data with which to try and comprehend it.

I was humbled in the face of that drug.

Like, it really smacked me around.

And that humility helped get me out of that sort of sense of crunching, smacking, bullying dogma that I'd had for the years leading up to it.

The second thing that happened was that by incredible stroke of luck, I stumbled on a TV series called The Ascent of Man by the physicist Jacob Bronowski.

I remember that.

I'm very in my dim, dark childhood.

1970s, that went away?

That's exactly right, yeah.

And there's an episode, it's episode 13, I think, which is called Knowledge and Certainty or Knowledge or Certainty.

You can find the full thing on YouTube.

And I really hope that people do because it's a truly profound and beautiful thing.

And it's about the importance of doubt in human affairs.

It's about the scientific method and why that makes it preferable to dogma, to the assertion of certainty.

He's Jewish.

And it ends with him, you know, in Auschwitz, sort of saying, this is where many members of my family were killed.

And he says, they were not killed by science.

They were killed by ignorance that comes from certainty, by dogma.

Even today, there's a three-minute clip of it that you can see online, but I hope people watch the full episode.

It's just one of the most profoundly beautiful things, and it shattered me completely.