Really, I love scientists. That the other choice is creationist climate-change-deniers isn't even part of the equation. Scientists are our knowledge people, and that's where the fun is.
They do rile me now and then, though. Like those who say that dreams last only 1.2 seconds. Hello? They need better experiments. Or the one who recently wrote that the human brain, which apparently he confused with a Z80 processor, can only do one thing at a time. Or those who think humans must be the preeminent form of intelligent life in the universe because... well, because more intelligent species haven't contacted us, for example (like, would you?). Even the scientists who are at a much higher level, like Stephen Hawking, seem to get boggled down, at times.
My theory is that it's the arrogance of knowledge. Scientists themselves aren't especially arrogant (outside of academia, anyway), but knowledge itself is. It's "The Chris Evert Syndrome". Back in the day when tennis was hot and Chris was the goddess of women's tennis, it occurred to me that to become that good at her game, she had to give up a lot of other things, like life. To be noticeably successful in any widely pursued endeavor, you have to focus on that endeavor to the exclusion of other interests, unless you're just freakishly intelligent, and who is? (I'd have put my money on Richard Feynman, if I were betting.)
Chris Evert eventually recovered, in part because human bodies wear down, so she couldn't be great at tennis anymore. But do scientists recover? My theory is that they become so immersed in their disciplines that eventually they lose sight of the larger picture. One of those forest/tree types of thing.
Take Mr. Hawking, whom I admire greatly on many levels. I heard him say once that we're on the verge of finding the final key to "The Grand Unified Theory of Thingies", after which we'll know all there is to know about the universe (this one, anyway), so we'll have to move on to thinking about other stuff.
...
Darn, I knew that this would get long once I got started, and it's already happening. My original plan was to break the idea into several posts, an "ignorance series" (not to dis ignorance, but to praise it). Fortunately, I think, I eventually realized that the more I blabbed on about ignorance, the more people would think I have it, so I decided to be more subtle about the subject, an approach that so far is failing. I'll jump ahead, but I might slip back some other day to fill in the blanks.
I, with the insight that comes with being much less educated than most physicists, think it is a huge conceit to think that we know even 1% of what there is to know about the universe. All of our knowledge is, after all, based only on what we know. Any new discovery could completely upend everything, instantly.
Even those scientists who might be willing to agree about our general lack of knowledge about the universe would most likely have said that we do, at least, know a great deal about our own galaxy, the Milky Way. I mean, it isn't a gadzillion light years away, it's where we are!
And then this [link] appeared:
The horizontal white pancake in the middle of the picture is the Milky Way, about which we know a lot. The purply balls popping out from the center of the galaxy are giant bubbles of energy that contain the equivalent of 100,000 supernova explosions. How long have we known about them? - a few weeks. My favorite comment so far:
"Wow," said David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who was not involved in the work.
"And we think we know a lot about our own galaxy," Dr. Spergel added, noting that the bubbles were almost as big as the galaxy and yet unsuspected until now.
Yeah, wow!
1 comment:
The famous philosopher Donald Rumsfield once said, "there are the known knowns, things we know we know.
Then there are the known unknowns, things we know we don't know.
And finally, there are the unknown unknowns."
Its all about relative sizes of the above sets. You might say they're light years apart.
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