Occam's sword and Occam's chalice

Occam's sword and Occam's chalice

With torment in her eyes, tears running down her cheeks, and lips trembling, she said,
“The phones are bugged, and the neighbors follow me everywhere I go.”

I hugged her silently.
Nothing I said could make her delusions go away.
I desperately wanted them to.
Then she would not suffer so.

The need to help my mother is why I think Occam’s sword spoke to me—and why it leapt from the pages of Joseph Campbell’s Creative Mythology: The Masks of God into my hands.
I saw in it a way to cut through her delusions, make them go away, and make her better.

Those same delusions made me question reality and our relation to it.
I need to know what’s real and what isn’t.
I need to hold up a mirror to the world and see it accurately.
What Shakespeare did with art, I seek to do with science—and like a scientist, I want to understand how that mirror works.

Science is the mirror we hold up to the world to reflect what’s in it.
Objects that exist appear in that mirror, and scientists record them and catalog them in their taxonomy.
But the language scientists use to describe their observations is not to be confused with the objects themselves.
In other words, we cannot turn our thoughts and words into physical objects—at least not without technology.

Occam’s sword tells us that we cannot use words and thoughts to multiply or eliminate objects to or from the world.
And the conservation laws tell us why:
It would violate the conservation of matter and energy as applied to us.

Occam's sword creates the impression that our scientific mirror reflects a static image of the world—an illusion created by language.
But the world itself changes, and as it does, new objects appear and disappear in the mirror.
We create all kinds of things that never existed before—only for them to return to that from which they came.
Cars, computers, rockets: none of these existed two hundred years ago.
And it’s not just us.
Nature creates and destroys too.
Birds didn’t exist before dinosaurs, and dinosaurs no longer exist.

So, we need another set of principles—ones that tell us how objects can be added to and subtracted from the mirror of science as they appear and disappear in the world.

But there’s a problem:
How do we say that we can and cannot create and destroy objects without contradicting ourselves?

To answer this, we must look at how objects are created and destroyed.

One way is through construction and deconstruction: objects are built from components into structures, and broken down again.
I did this as a child into my adult life: building cars with Legos, castles with plaster blocks, and polyhedra with paper polygons.
Just as we created principles and laws for a static mirror using Occam’s sword, we can do the same for a dynamic mirror.

We can model these dynamic principles on Occam’s sword:

Occam’s sword — The Conservation Laws

• 
  Objects cannot be multiplied.
  

• Matter cannot be created.
  

• Objects cannot be eliminated.
  

• Matter cannot be destroyed.
  
  

Table 2: Occam’s chalice — The Dynamic Laws

• 
  Objects can be added.
  

• Matter can be constructed.
  

• Objects can be subtracted.
  

• Matter can be deconstructed.
  
  

Using the symbolism of the Grail quest, we can call these new, creative principles Occam’s chalice, since the chalice symbolizes creation and creativity.

When applied to science, Occam’s sword, Occam’s chalice and the laws of matter together explain how and why chemical equations work. We cannot arbitrarily add or subtract atoms on either side of a chemical equation (Occam’s sword). However, by synthesizing or analyzing different atoms and molecules in a chemical reaction, we can create something new or different (Occam’s chalice).

If we only have Occam’s sword and the conservation laws, then it would be like trying to describe chemistry with only the periodic table or a database of molecular structures without any chemical equations that describe chemical reactions.

Or if we only have Occam’s chalice, then we could add and subtract atoms and molecules to our chemical equations, however we please, thus distorting reality and violating the conservation laws.

Only together do Occam’s sword and Occam’s chalice offer a complete scientific mirror of reality, balancing what is reflected in that mirror with what exists and how objects come into and go out of existence through processes of construction and deconstruction.

Together, Occam’s sword and Occam’s chalice provide a clear understanding of how and why our scientific mirror works as a reflection of our world. Occam’s sword, with its static catalog, tells us what must not be included or excluded in that reflection, while Occam’s chalice, with its dynamic equations, shows us how those elements change and transform over time.

My mother’s delusions were false beliefs about the world.
In a sense, her mirror was broken: she could not tell the difference between her thoughts and the world around her.

As a child, I wish I had these principles, laws, and the clarity they offer because if I had, perhaps she might have found a way to heal herself, as I have tried to heal myself.
But I know they would have been useless to her.
She had a Humpty Dumpty mirror, shattered beyond repair, and all the science and all the doctors in the world couldn’t put it together again.

If that were all to this story, then it would be a personal reflection—a quiet meditation on my own need to understand the scientific mirror, to grasp how and why it works.

But we live now in a world where that very scientific mirror is under siege. Its legitimacy is questioned.
Without it, lies, falsehoods, and distortions of reality have sprung up like weeds: conspiracy theories, fake news, AI deepfakes.

We need to defend the mirror of science, not as a perfect thing, but as the clearest reflection we have of what’s real.
Occam’s sword and Occam’s chalice offer a way to do it.

They ground the mirror not in opinion, but in the physical laws of reality.
They are not arbitrary, not random; they are hard-won, empirically tested truths—truths that can be trusted because they can be verified, challenged, and verified again.

If we’re to repair our shattered world, we must first learn to see it clearly. That begins with the scientific mirror—and the tools to ensure it reflects truthfully.