It seems to be characteristic of the human mind that when it sees a black box in action, it imagines that the contents of the box are simple. A happy example is seen in the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes”. Calvin is always jumping in a box with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and traveling back in time, or “transmogrifying” himself into animal shapes, or using it as a “duplicator” and making clones of himself. A little boy like Calvin easily imagines that a box can fly like an airplane (or something), because Calvin doesn’t know how airplanes work. In some ways, grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys like Calvin. For example, centuries ago it was thought that insects and other small animals arose directly from spoiled food. This was easy to believe, because small animals were thought to be very simple (before the invention…