Pope on a Rope

This has been around for a while... but it seems ever so apt now (and still makes me giggle)....

Nothing But the Truth

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."  Arthur Schopenhauer



"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Max Planck

I heard these two quotes today. I'm not sure that either of them describe the scientific community as it stands in the present day, but it's an interesting commentary on how the past and the present collide. Once the earth was flat and scientists were heretics who postulated otherwise. Then there was the  geocentric model of the universe with the sun and stars revolving around the earth. Proposing otherwise, directly went against the establishment and more importantly, religion, and that was what made it so hard for those brave scientists... but they did it.

Now though, there is a healthy process of discovery in the scientific community.  New ideas may be viewed with healthy skepticism, but only if the data doesn't support it. Prove it well enough and move on to new and bigger things.

Except... the uneducated and opinionated public is now the problem.   They're the ones who seem to fight the idea of scientific enquiry, research, education and endeavour.  It's fine to reap the rewards in medicine, military might, technology, and entertainment....  but they don't want the most basic scientific theories (that are the underpinings of so many of these developments they take for granted) to be taught to their children or given any credence/support in their society. It's like we are going back to the dark ages.  Sometimes I wish we had one giant isolated island that they could all be put on, to fend for themselves and live as they please - with no benefits from science or 'elite' (did you know educated is now a dirty word?) ideas to sully their otherwise perfect lives. What a science experiment that would be.  If nothing else, it would make a bloody good movie!

Maths is Cool

Game On!

Dominant Species?

Viruses are the most abundant lifeform on Earth. If you laid all the viruses on the planet end to end, they would form a line 200 million light years long.

Wow.

...

Hungry White Blood Cell

Kinda makes you feel sorry for the wee bacteria!

The Business of Understanding

Richard Feynman's comment about the kind of people who say they don't understand his lectures:

"and then there's a kind... saying that you don't understand it - meaning 'I don't believe it, it's too crazy, it's the kind of thing I'm just not going to accept'.

I hope you'll come along with me, and you'll have to accept it, because it's the way nature works. If you wanna know the way nature works, we looked at it carefully. ...that's the way nature works. You don't like it?.. go somewhere else. To another universe, where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help it, ok? If I'm going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to ... human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like, and I cannot make it any simpler. ... I'm not going to fake it. I'm not going to tell you it's something like a ball bearing on a spring - it isn't. I'm going to tell you what it really is like, and if you don't like it?.. that's too bad."

1979 Lecture from New Zealand

Stick THAT in yer pipe and smoke it!