Fooling Houdini - Stone

 

Almost everyone has a fascination with magic.  When we were young, most of us received a cheap magic kit as a gift...and have subsequently given the gift of cheap magic to our kids..  The kit always contained a black wand with white tips from out of which you could pull 10 silk scarves.  Many kits also contained a plastic frame with a hidden compartment that could disappear a coin or split a card in half.  In the instructions, if you read them, it warns young would-be magicians to never perform the same trick twice and to never, ever reveal your secrets.  For most of us comprehending tricks inside would turn us off to magic...we realized there actually is no magic inside the box.  And maybe that’s the point...those of who want to believe in magic step away from the pursuit of a career in black arts preferring to be mesmerized by the amazing skills of the few practitioners while at the same time trying to forget the fact that in order to be mesmerized we had to be fooled, duped by the hidden secret.  Enter Alex Stone and his new book, “Fooling Houdini, Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, & the Hidden Powers of the Mind”.

The Amazing Alex Stone (he doesn't really have a stage name but all great magicians need one) is not satisfied with us simply believing in magic.  He want’s us to come to grips with the secrets of magic...to fully embrace the fact that sleight of hand and deception is the very essence of magic.  Most magicians call their tricks an illusion to avoid harsher terms.  Illusion is softer than deception.   And deception is softer than simply being a liar or a cheat.  Magicians that perform on stage are honest liars because you know where your money is going.  Magicians that perform off stage are con men and thieves who work with a few cheap tricks to separate us from our money illegally.  Ethically speaking, this is why The Amazing Alex really want’s to shed light on the profession of magic, and feels, as an honest magician, he can reveal some of it’s secrets and not destroy the foundation of magic for all time.  But that’s not the only reason he speaks to us frankly about the tricks behind the card tricks. Philosophically speaking, his recurring theme throughout the book is that if the layperson loves magic, and loves to be fooled by the trick, magicians love to be fooled even more. The crown jewels of magic are found when you are able to fool your very own, the magicians themselves, hence the name of the book, “Fooling Houdini”.  But just how do you fool the experts.  Houdini claimed no magician could fool him with the same trick three times.  In the book, Mr. Stone reveals the trick of the “Ambitious Card” which fooled Houdini seven times.  Practically speaking, it takes, not special powers, but hard work and a lot of skill.  Magicians work for years to be able to hold things in strange places, coins and cards, to be able to remember things, the order of an entire deck of cards, and to be able to shuffle, for instance, the entire deck of cards, perfectly (called a Faro shuffle), so that after the 8th Faro shuffle, every card returns to it’s original position.  That’s a skill, not unlike the skill of any professional athlete, who can magically score a goal or make a basket, Magic Johnson comes to mind.

But the Amazing Alex isn’t satisfied with ethics, philosophy, or even practical skill.  He want’s to dig deeper, into the heart of why magic works, and that search takes him into the heart of science…of all places.  Science is the antithesis of mysticism.  Mr. Stone want’s to unearth the first principles of science and tie them to the unifying theory of everything...with magic leading the way.   Mr. Stone, after all, has a Master’s Degree in Physics from Columbia.   Scientifically  speaking, then it is important to understand that while any good trick seems to defy the physical laws of nature, in can’t, and therefore must be a trick.  Levitation, for instance, or bending spoons with your mind.  But through the research of magicians trying to levitate things, trying to bend things with their mind, trying to pick the selected card out of a shuffled deck of cards, they have learned things about our physical universe and about the way the human mind works. 

These things have improved the human condition and our understanding of ethics, psychology, training, and of course science.  Magic has played a role in human development for thousands of years and Mr. Stone’s quest by giving us a glimpse behind the black curtain is simply to elevate the plight of magicians from the seedy underworld of con men and cheats and the “Three Card Monte”, or at best traveling entertainers and parlour mentalists, to highly skilled professionals providing a great service to society…which they have done, but with very little credit, worldwide, for centuries.  I’m giving “Fooling Houdini” four stars.  It was a fun and easy read, I learned a lot.  I don’t see this book having mass appeal but Mr. Stone is on to something...but he stops well short of fleshing it out. In particular his treatment of probability and information theory.  There are places he can go…my first suggestion would be to dig into “A New Kind of Science” by Stephen Wolfram.  If Mr. Stone is correct, a deck of cards is no doubt a representation of a discrete universe, potentially at the base of quantum theory, which could represent the New Science.  To jump to Mr. Stone’s punch line, spoiler alert, it takes seven shuffles of a deck of cards to fully randomize the deck...provided it’s not a perfect Faro shuffle, which would repeat.  A card deck represents in a perfectly discreet way going from order to disorder provided a flaw in the shuffle is introduced...that indeed could be the universal theory of everything.