ozarque ([info]ozarque) wrote,
@ 2007-09-13 11:20:00
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Writing science fiction; getting stuck on an off-the-wall science question; part three...
I had said that I needed a fictional unit of measurement for prayer analogous to the calorie or the erg or the centimeter; and [info]crossfire commented:

"What if the scientists were to produce a...'prayer scale'... based on prayer's easily measured physical capabilities, and use it to calibrate their healing experiment? For example, they could produce a scale where they note that 1 person praying with prayer P for duration D can move a weight of mass M a distance X in time T (I am deliberately dissociating the duration (D) of prayer from the time (T) it takes to move the object, but you wouldn't have to if that doesn't make sense in your world). They could easily come up with a Standard Unit Of Prayer -- the 'Mary,' if you will -- which could be defined using these observations:

1 Mary is the amount of prayer it takes to move a mass of 1 gram a distance of 1 meter in 1 second. (Or whatever makes sense for your world.)

Then, they could apply this scale to their healing experiment... ... "

And then ...

"Actually, a better definition of a Mary would be this:
A Mary is the amount of prayer needed to exert a force of 10 Newtons.

I suppose some people might be extra good at praying, and may therefore be able to produce more Marys of prayer. The healing experiment could take that into account by 'calibrating' each of the people praying in a lab to determine what their Mary output is."


This is a useful and interesting comment; thank you, [info]crossfire. However, I would suggest that there are at least these three problems with the proposed name for the unit of measurement:


1. Calling the unit a "Mary" would be a disastrous public relations move, because so many devout individuals of various religious faiths would consider it disrespectful. For scientists who'd like to have any hope at all of getting additional funding for their research, getting their research articles published, keeping their jobs at their universities and research institutes, persuading dubious medical professionals to accept the results of their research -- and other real-world goals of that kind -- it would be a very bad choice.

2. The scientists in my story are determined to keep their research separate from the theological issues associated with it; calling their unit of measurement a "Mary" would link it permanently with theology and religion, defeating their purpose.

3. Calling the unit of measurement a "Mary" would link it with particular religious faiths, ruling out all others by implication, even if that was not the scientists' deliberate intention and was due only to Tin Ear Syndrome on their parts. Since there's no way to know the faith-origins of background prayer, this would be a serious error.


The scientists need a name for [info]crossfire's "Standard Unit Of Prayer" that is free of these encumbrances -- and one that doesn't turn out, phonetically, to mean something in another language that brings the same (or worse) baggage with it. The acronym SUOP [ehs-you-oh-pee, roughly] comes to mind...

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[info]istemi
2007-09-13 04:27 pm UTC (link)
Do you want it to sound objective and scientific, like an SUOP? Or can it sound human?

A "grace" would be respectful, and a reminder of the source of efficacy, but isn't free of baggage. Hmmm.


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[info]istemi
2007-09-13 04:29 pm UTC (link)
As I read through back comments, I see suggesting a source for efficacy is baggage too. Drat.

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[info]celticdragonfly
2007-09-13 04:27 pm UTC (link)
It would still have much of the same baggage (although not AS much) - but I can't help it, I find myself wanting to say "Can I have an A-MEN!" (Imagine it spelled in Revival Preacher accent, which I can't figure out how to do.)

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[info]dagoski
2007-09-13 04:34 pm UTC (link)
This is beginning to feel like Dungeons and Dragons. Not that I'm knocking it. I'm the product of thirty years of roleplaying games and look at me. Anyway, the ability to create standard, repeatable, verifiable units of faith has drastic and profound implications for the world you're creating. Depending on how you spin it, you're either creating a world in which Psi exists and is quantifiable or you're creating a world with an active god(s). In our world, we have to take things on faith because no religious or mystical experience is objective. The nature of the experience varies by the individual. We all see God in a different way, or, if you like, we all see a different aspect of God because we do not have the capability as mortals to perceive or comprehend God in its totality. In a world with an active god, faith is impossible because the actions of the god are real and quantifiable. They might call it faith, but the world would not have the same meaning as our own word has. I guess what I'm trying to point out here is that if you can calibrate prayer, you have to measure it and that means that the prayer affects some physical thing in a linear fashion. So, the outcome of the experiment is to some degree a forgone conclusion. The scientists would know that prayer effects the physical world because they could measure that effect. The experiment would then ask a different question. The question would be "How does prayer change patient outcomes and to what degree?" not "Does prayer change outcomes?"

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[info]lovecraftienne
2007-09-13 04:47 pm UTC (link)
The more I think about this, the more I believe this statement to be the most likely to be true. The word 'prayer' can have such an incredibly wide variety of meanings, it's hard to say what acts should be included. That fuzziness makes it extremely difficult to design any kind of experiment, particularly as the mathematics of the energies to be involved seem kind of...asymmetrical (i.e., that someone praying for 'all living things' could have a measurable effect compared to someone praying for a specific outcome for a specific person - the input energy could be the same, while the outputs come to vastly different levels).

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Response to dagoski...
[info]ozarque
2007-09-14 04:08 pm UTC (link)
"Depending on how you spin it, you're either creating a world in which Psi exists and is quantifiable or you're creating a world with an active god(s)."

Thanks for posting this comment; it's helpful. I would suggest only that it's also possible to create a fictional world in which psi exists and is quantifiable and there is an active god or gods. If I'm missing something -- if there's a reason why that alternative would logically (or in some other way) be ruled out -- please set me straight.

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Re: Response to dagoski...
[info]dagoski
2007-09-14 06:51 pm UTC (link)
That's why I mentioned D&D actually. I was going to elaborate, but work intruded. Darned work! The universe(s) of that game included both psi and gods of all sorts. At times it could get nonsensical because the Dungeon Masters would try to include everything listed in the rule books instead of viewing them as resources for designing their own settings. But, hey, back in the 1970s we were young and reckless and none of us really understood the games we were playing nor their potential as a form of literature. Not that I even understood what literature was back then. Anyway, now that I've digressed, you're right. It's not an either or proposition. The game, Mage has another interesting take on the power of belief. In this game you play what we might term sorcerors trying to hold their own in the modern world. The idea here is that consciousness shapes the universe directly and that perception equals reality. The Mages of the game can shape reality by force of will, but they're always up against the consensus reality created by the rest of the world's population. And then there are powerful consciousnesses from beyond the bounds of the world whose wills are so powerful that they can reshape reality over the protests of human gestalt. These are beings we would term gods. In this setting, magic can take the form of psionic powers, good old fashioned magick, faith, or even inspired technological tinkering. Darned hard game to run, but the authors did create a fascinating universe to set it in.

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[info]lovecraftienne
2007-09-13 04:36 pm UTC (link)
Perhaps going, as science often has, to ancient Greek or Latin? A "theo"? Or, to get around the uncommonness of "th" in world languages, a "deo"?

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[info]tanac
2007-09-13 04:38 pm UTC (link)
I would hope that, in addition to your prayer condition and your non-prayer condition, that you would also have a control condition of "good thoughts", measured on the same sort of scale as "prayer units". (beneficial thoughts for health and recovery without intercession to/from a diety) Seeing as it would probably be impossible to separate them physiologically anyways.

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Response to tanac...
[info]ozarque
2007-09-14 04:13 pm UTC (link)
"I would hope that, in addition to your prayer condition and your non-prayer condition, that you would also have a control condition of 'good thoughts' ... "

Yes, I would. And 'bad thoughts' as well. If I didn't do that, I would be excluding all the prayers from non-theistic religious faiths.

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[info]crossfire_
2007-09-13 04:46 pm UTC (link)
I wasn't proposing a name so much as just grabbing the first thing that came to mind so that there was SOMETHING. I was assuming you would come up with your own, something that wasn't biased. :)

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[info]crossfire_
2007-09-13 04:56 pm UTC (link)
That said, I think "Aum" would be a delightful name, but it may have the same problem as "Mary."

Standard units of measure are often named after their discoverers: Newton, Gauss, etc. So the name for the SUOP could easily be a person's name.

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Response to crossfire...
[info]ozarque
2007-09-13 05:50 pm UTC (link)
I understand. I apologize for not checking that with you before I did the post.

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[info]woodwardiocom
2007-09-13 04:46 pm UTC (link)
Possibly going with the Latin root, prayer might be measured in "prex"? (I suppose the plural might be "prexen" . . . "Holy Toledo, she's generating over 50 kiloprexen!")

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[info]crossfire_
2007-09-13 04:57 pm UTC (link)
1.21 GIGAPREXEN :)

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[info]dteleki
2007-09-13 09:46 pm UTC (link)
I love this suggestion... "prex" simply sounds wonderful all by itself, and so do its implications and derivatives. (I've been closely reading the labels of compact fluorescent light bulbs lately.)

The individual quantum-like particle of prexic energy is, obviously, a "prexon". Prexic flux is measured in prexons per second -- augustines? (Compare with lumens.) Prexilluminance is measured in prexic flux per square meter, augustines per square meter -- teresas? (Compare with lux.)

I'm also imagining that you can go to the hardware store to buy prexbulbs. The new compact pantheistic prexbulbs deliver nearly 4 times as many augustines per kilowatt as the older strings of votive candlebulbs did.

It used to be, when scientists tended to measure things in CGS (centimeter-gram-second) units, that the units were named after the thing being measured: erg, dyne. Then at some point, I have no idea why, they switched to MKS (meter-kilogram-second) units, named after a scientist who studied the thing being measured: watt, newton. If we're going to go the MKS route with scientists' names, it would be less controversial if the scientists were invented for the purpose of the story, even if we sacrifice some wonderful gags by doing so.

"Cap'n, I canna hold her together much longer! She's radiating over 50 million hailmaries per second!!"

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Possible Prayer Units
[info]ysabetwordsmith
2007-09-13 04:55 pm UTC (link)
Okay, SUOP immediately occurred to me too. I could also think of:

ben -- from "benefit," meaning "good."

deiter -- from "deity" and "meter."

theon -- from "the-" for "deity" plus "on" as in "proton" which is a nice scientific-sounding noun ending.

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Re: Possible Prayer Units
[info]rikchik
2007-09-13 05:21 pm UTC (link)
"-on"s are usually fundamental particles - the theon may be useful later but it's unlikely to be a unit of measurement (we don't generally measure electricity in electrons). Though I like the idea of the "scientific" name for the power of prayer being "theonic force" or similar.

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(Anonymous)
2007-09-13 05:09 pm UTC (link)
Well, how about "hail"? (My mind went there automatically from "Mary".) Hailing is the method of attracting what you want, like you hail a taxi, or the directions or the elements, or good vibrations. Or "call", if those sounds are more common.

Meg Umans

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Re: Possible Prayer Units
[info]janetmiles
2007-09-13 05:24 pm UTC (link)
I'd have trouble with "SUOP," because to me it looks too much like "soup."

SUP and SPU (Standard Prayer Unit) both look/feel right to me, but both have problems: SUP might be too easily confused with SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), and SPU has the verbal linkage to "spew," which probably wouldn't be helpful.

If I think about alternatives for the word "unit," though, I come up with SPQ (Standardized Prayer Quantum), DPQ (Defined Prayer Quantum), and DPA (Defined Prayer Allocation).

I think I'll just vote for [info]ysabetwordsmith's "theon."

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Re: Possible Prayer Units
[info]randomblade
2007-09-14 11:46 am UTC (link)
I like 'SUP', too. Because then the people generating could be 'suppers'. Or belief, with 'SUB' and 'Subbies'. Or Faith, which would be SUF, and... um.. 'suffers'... ha.

Generic Unit of Prayer could be 'GUP, with 'guppies'.

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[info]nolly
2007-09-13 05:24 pm UTC (link)
Mustard seed, or something derived from it -- "if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move." (Mt 17:20)

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[info]elfwreck
2007-09-13 08:30 pm UTC (link)
Same problem... tied to one particular faith's beliefs. Why would pagan prayers be measured in seeds?

(Also, the unit of energy shouldn't be easily confused with a shopping list. "4,200 seeds" sounds like something you buy, not something you measure with a prayoscope.)

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[info]basketcaselady
2007-09-13 05:37 pm UTC (link)
I felt he was suggesting a means and had used "Mary" simply as an example.

My take off on that idea...I like the word "puffs" as a measurement. Think of the puff that expels when you press an asthma inhaler. The prayers could be measured in puffs; the more puffs, the longer the prayer. As one prays, they would press a button that counts the "puffs." Because there is a "puffer" that was used, the prayee would record what the prayer was about and it could be verified if the prayers were successful.

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[info]bookery
2007-09-13 05:52 pm UTC (link)
In _Good Omens_, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman measure prayer on a scale of zero to one alps.

"They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion. On any scale of mountain moving it shifted at least point five of an alp. (It may be worth noting here that most human beings can rarely raise more than .3 of an alp (30 centi-alps). Adam believed things on a scale ranging from 2 through to 15,640 Everests.)"

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[info]voxwoman
2007-09-13 06:08 pm UTC (link)
If you look at units of measure (such as the Joule, Newton, Tesla, Gauss, Ampere, Volt, Coulomb, Curie, Ohm and more - I'm not getting my CRC handbook down right now) they are named after the scientist that either discovered the force or made huge advances in that field.

So you could have the unit be the "Jones" or "Smith" or something more prosaic sounding. It also gives it (IMHO) slightly more verisimilitude (since that's the way hard science has worked in the past), and also removes ANY vestige of religion or theology from the unit (since it's named after a person).

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[info]joxn
2007-09-13 06:13 pm UTC (link)
Ah, minds of similar quality think alike!

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[info]joxn
2007-09-13 06:11 pm UTC (link)
Just an observation that derived units usually end up named after the experimenters who played a big role in their development, and even some base units are:

Base units: Kilogram, meter, second, , mole, candela, ampere, Kelvin
Derived units: hertz, newton, pascal, joule, watt, coulomb, volt, farad, ohm, siemens, weber, tesla, henry, Celsius, becquerel, gray, sievert, curie,, katal, lumen, lux

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[info]plarash
2007-09-13 06:11 pm UTC (link)
The suggestions of "theon" (lovecraftienne/ysabetwordsmith) or "theonic force" (rikchik) are plausible given the conventions of scientific terminology, but I am concerned that the terms make assumptions about the *source* of the efficacy of prayer.

If you wanted to keep the pattern of using Greek roots, what about "aratic force" or "araon", from the root ara- meaning "prayer"? The noun "ara" can mean "prayer (for something good)" or "imprecation (for something bad)". This places emphasis on the act of praying itself.

The use of Greek (or Latin) roots in scientific terminology is so established as a convention that (as I perceive it at least) any cultural baggage particular to the ancient Greeks is so far in the background as to be absent. Seems to me that scientists just look for a very basic "flash card" definition of a Greek root. (so, "theos" = "god", "ara" = "prayer", no deep investigations into ancient Greek theology needed.)

Similar considerations apply for woodwardiocom's suggestion "prex", which has the added advantage of being a fun word to play with.




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[info]kawakiisakazuki
2007-09-13 06:36 pm UTC (link)
Shouldn't the equivalent be Joules rather than Newtons?

But if the definition of "Mary" or whatever is in terms of force or energy, then it doesn't really need to have separate units. Unless it was some historic artifact, and people could use both interchangeably, like they do calories and Joules, or millibar and hectoPascal. You could have someone use the Mary out of habit and someone else correct with kiloJoules or something, because nobody uses "Mary" as a unit in research funded by this organisation, etc...

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[info]bheansidhe
2007-09-13 07:21 pm UTC (link)
Ganking straight from Terry Pratchett: a thaum.

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[info]elfwreck
2007-09-13 08:31 pm UTC (link)
I would think thaums are units of magical energy, not divine energy. (If there's a difference.)

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[info]bheansidhe
2007-09-13 11:38 pm UTC (link)
You're correct. In that case: a theum!

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[info]bheansidhe
2007-09-13 11:39 pm UTC (link)
(There's not a difference in my personal cosmology / practice, but I recognize the point. :-)

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[info]ahistoricality
2007-09-13 07:33 pm UTC (link)
If the efficacy of prayer is grainy -- there's an irreducible unit of prayer -- you could use some form of "quanta" as an acronym element: Remote Theological Influence Quanta.

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[info]urbeatle
2007-09-13 07:43 pm UTC (link)
Another problem with 'Mary', which should be kept in mind when choosing a replacement, is that it's derived in this case from 'Hail Mary', a specific prayer that is meant primarily as praise. Presumably, you're only interested in prayers that ask for something to occur.

My thought was it should be "bene", pronounced "benny", from "benediction". Technically, the opposite would be a malediction, but the force of curses would be measured in the same units.

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[info]yaochi
2007-09-13 09:08 pm UTC (link)
How about calling it an E.M.U. short for a Efficacious Meditation Unit. Thereby the act of prayer is made more equivalent to a moment of intentful silence, or of word focused yearning or intent rather than a religion based measure of performance.

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[info]msminlr
2007-09-13 10:12 pm UTC (link)
"prayon"

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Two ways to resolve the background prayer problem
(Anonymous)
2007-09-14 01:43 am UTC (link)
Hi Suzette. I think you could resolve the background prayer problem in two complementary ways. First, I think you can assume that anonymous background prayer of the "every living thing" type or "all the children" type can be ignored, since it would be the same for everyone. It's true that you could not then measure the effect of no-prayer, since you couldn't assume that anyone was in a situation of no-prayer, but you could cancel out the differential effects of anonymous background prayer.

For background prayer by people who know the sick subject, you could map out a social network. That could be done in some detail - just think of facebook taken to the next level. You could map out a person's friends, acquaintances, and so on, and get a sense of how many people know the person and are thinking about them. This would be highly correlated with background prayer (ie., prayer coming from outside the study), and could be used to cancel background prayer.

Finally, there's also famous people to consider. If your sick person is famous for some reason, you can assume large numbers of people who don't know him or her would be contributing to background prayer. But here, again, there are ways that the person's fame could be measured. There would be some objective quantity that was an index of the person's fame, and also perhaps some quantity that could tell you how favorably they are viewed - polls are also an option. This, too, could be correlated to background prayer. It seems to me that if your study compares people with social networks and fame indices of comparable sizes, you can effectively cancel out the background prayer and look only at the prayer coming from the study.

(Justin)

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[info]ashnistrike
2007-09-14 06:20 am UTC (link)
If you want something relatively dry and technical sounding--and they might, to try and make the area seem respectable--maybe something like "response unit."

Then, of course, the press and laypeople would immediately give it a more exciting sounding name--probably one with all the problems the scientists were trying to avoid, hideous theological biases and all.

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[info]tablesaw
2007-09-14 11:57 am UTC (link)
I've been busy with television for the past few days, and I sadly missed this developing issue. Reading back over the posts and comments, it's fascinating. Please indulge me in addressing some earlier issues before proposing a new unit term.

First, I'm surprised that more commenters haven't brought up psi more strongly. Dagoski, above, thinks along my lines. If the scientists are truly trying to be independent of theology, magick, and occult formulas, then I would think that, working under Occam's Razor, any experiment would indicate human-human effects before human-diety-human effects. Under the ideally controlled experiment, if Actor A prays for Subject B and Subject B recovers, then we have shown some hitherto unexamined relationship between A and B, presumably initiated by A. I would consider this a psi/esper type of measurement before a Mary type of measurement.

Once you've got some basic working psi measurements, then you can add further studies varying theological or diety-related aspects. Are the psi levels different between an atheist active-psi group and a religiously devoted active-psi group? If one religously devoted group "prays" while a similar group merely "wishes," is the psi level different? Does the psi level change between two differently devoted active-psi groups? Somebody asked about timeline, so I don't know whether that's an issue that's raised here, but it seems that the issue of psi or human will should arise in scientific inquiry in advance of prayer and theology.

If we focus on individual will, then one could probably create an EEG-based measure based on the intensity of particular readings. These readings in the "praying" or "willing" individual could be rated on the "Willed Action Index" as a particular amount of WAIs.

Because, you know, where there's a will, there is a WAI.

The WAI would probably be correlated to a subjective scale of patient health. (I am definitely not an expert, but I think that this site has exampels of that type of thing.) Because we're dealing with one measure of possibly variable effectiveness (WAI) and one acceptably subjective measure (patient health/quality of life), I don't know how a SI-type unit could be defined. You might be able to identify some sort of WAI coefficient ("Willing Group A produced a combined WAI of 379.47 and Patient Group X had a combined increase of 143 points on the QOL scale. On this scale, then we will stat that Willing Group A had a WAI efficacy (WAIF) of 0.377.") If the QOL scale changes, the WAIF will too. (Also, I'm not entirely sure if my math is reasonable.)

Now, back to the question of the day (or yesterday). I don't know the background of your scientists, but I imagine that American scientists with at least a basic background of American Christianity would be familiar with the phrase "faith the size of a mustard seed." It's certainly what comes most readily to my mind when trying to come up with a small unit of prayer measurement. I can also imagine that scientists without tin ears would want to abstract this term, in order to remove it from the background of Christianity. I can further imagine a process among them that starts with "mustard seed" which is shortened, through frequent use, to "M seed." From there, the abstracted abbreviation "MCD" (pronounced \EM-seed\) arises, which is backformed over a lunch session to something like "Metaphysical Control Dose."

This probably isn't the ideal for an SI measurement, but if this is a new concept introduced by a small number of researchers, then a bit of leeway is probably expected and initially allowed. The officialy designated dwarf planet and moon Eris and Dysnomia were originally called Xena and Gabrielle by the original researchers.

For a more universal slant, I think that "metaphysical" might be a good word to initially incorpate in any sense, because either prayer or psi appear, in primary investigations, to be marked by their lack of physical connections. You could modify the greek letter phi ("MΦ" or "mφ") or simply use a shortening ("metaphys," "M-Phys," "metaphy").

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[info]kaasirpent
2007-09-14 05:31 pm UTC (link)
I haven't read all the comments to this entry, yet, so pardon if I'm reiterating something.

In Dungeons & Dragons (and similar games, I'm sure), the "unit" of "prayer" is a "mana point."

I'm not sure where they get "mana" from, but the way it works is this: Each cleric/priest character gets a certain number of "mana" points s/he can expend in a day, and each spell (cleric/priests cast "spells," but the power comes directly from their chosen deity) uses a certain amount of "mana."

So you could base it on that, and there'd be a good chance that a number of readers would readily identify the source and know what it meant from the get-go.

A powerful priest might have access to more mana than a novice. An extremely powerful intercessory prayer to, say, cure pancreatic cancer would certainly cost more than a "Please help me finish my homework on time" prayer.

In the world(s) of gaming, there is also the concept of multipliers. Maybe if a character had access to a particularly powerful symbol (such as an ankh used by a powerful pharoah or a sprig of mistletoe (Norse) or whatever, it would increase the power of the individual prayer or simply allow him/her to do more of it or for a longer period of time.

Anyway...there you have it. :)

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