Arthritis sufferers feel more pain in cold weather. This is something almost everyone knows. This knowledge, according to Michael Lewis in The Undoing Project "could be traced back to Hippocrates, who wrote, in 400 BC, about the effect of wind and rain on disease." Doctors regularly recommended that arthritis patients move to warmer climates and I have met many Jamaicans who lived in England for a long time who claimed that one reason they moved back was because of arthritis.
WEATHER-SWING CORELATION
No such thing as fair weather for swing
India's batting implosion on Day 1 of Lord's Test was put down to the overheads. © Getty
Only, researchers have long proven that there is no connection between arthritis pain and the weather. It is simply not true that patients stricken with the disease feel more pain when the temperature drops, though many of them are convinced of this. Even after showing patients proof, as researchers Don Redelmeier and Amos Tversky did, the vast majority of them still clung to the belief that their level of pain had something to do with the weather.
Reporting on Redelmeier's and Tversky's research, Lewis writes that patients used a few random moments to underpin their belief. "For arthritis," wrote Tversky and Redelmeier, "selective matching leads people to look for changes in the weather when they experienced increase pain, and pay little attention to the weather when their pain is stable... [A] single day of severe pain and extreme weather might sustain a lifetime of belief in a relation between them."
In cricket, there is a strongly held belief that the ball's tendency to deviate through the air is affected by the weather. The ball swings more, it is believed, in moist conditions under cloudy skies.
Only, this is not true either. Aerodynamics experts, such as Dr. Rabi Mehta, NASA scientist and former new-ball partner of cricket legend and current Pakistan Prime Minister, Imran Khan, have long established that overcast conditions do not accentuate swing. And despite years of studies, publications, and interviews on the matter, his findings have fallen overwhelmingly on deaf ears.
Fans and pundits alike, some of whom who Dr. Mehta has had conversations with personally, remain convinced that there is a connection between swing elicited and the weather. On this topic, many of us in cricket are like members of the modern flat earth societies, who hold that the earth is flat and not a sphere despite truck-loads of evidence to the contrary.
Like many arthritis sufferers, we engage in selective matching. Those who argue that there is a correlation between swing and weather, have tended to latch on to instances that confirm the theory while ignoring instances that seem to contradict it. We are quick to recall the occasions when the ball swung under cloud-laden skies in Headingley or Lord's, but forget the days when it went through gun-barrel straight in similarly dank conditions. Or, we remember
