It took over 70 years to find the wreck of the Titanic, but only a couple days to uncover the wreck of the Titan submersible that went down to geek at the Titanic’s grave.
The Titanic drowned a few millionaires. The Titan squished two billionaires.
We’re getting better at some things down in the bottom of the ocean.
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Two people I know well and respect share a similar and to me quite unsettling view of what science is, and especially of who scientists are. They seem to look at the average scientist as a sort of low-level goofball hampered by a predetermined outlook on the world, their knowledge based on outdated theories and a blindered view of present concerns.
Real science is exactly the opposite: a wide-open search for the truth of how existence works. It’s easy to point out bad or pointless research – there’s enough of it out there, and it gets picked up as gospel by dunderheads like RFK, Jr. (that swishing sound you hear is his father whirling in his grave) – but scientists, like any other collection of human beings, range from brilliant to incompetent, from upstanding to scoundrels.
[I confess to viewing nearly all psychological research as a vast wasteland of half-baked approximations and low-tier grant-grabbing, and I know that kind of generalization reflects a failure of acceptance on my part. Part of my reaction is that I don’t consider psychology an actual science, just a collection of disorganized flapdoodle.]
But the physical sciences – the “hard” sciences – have long been focused on finding the physical laws behind everything from the universe to the human mind, and at no time have been more strenuously and widely studied than now.
Over the last century, and especially the last couple decades, the advances in health and disease prevention, in cataloguing the workings of the human nervous system, for example, have been astounding (though with the unfortunate side effect of quadrupling the human population).
At opposite ends of the physics spectrum, both cosmology and quantum mechanics have in the last decades brought us more knowledge of how the universe is governed and constructed than in all of previous human history. It’s interesting to set this progress against that of political and social behavior, which has barely evolved over tens of thousands of years.
I’ve been reading Science News magazine for the last 40 years. A less technical summary of current advances in the sciences than Scientific American, it goes to great lengths to present the widest array of research in all areas of science, and to hold it up to close examination, by discussing the experiments or advances with experts across the field – those who support and those who, often enough, point out the inherent shortcomings in the various researchers’ approaches.
I’d recommend a subscription to Science News for anyone with the slightest interest in the progress in understanding brought by the elegant use of the human mind. Under the current editorial staff, it has been especially good at shining the light on young researchers who are upsetting established views.
As a side comment, over the past half century, academic research has moved away from the time when graying university profs held all the power and often took sole credit for advances within their departments. It’s no long uncommon these days for grad students and post-docs to be cited as lead authors in academic journals. Also, ongoing studies can be accessed on free sites like arxiv.org or PLOS.org. These are wonderfully healthy developments.
Remember: Einstein was 26 and working in a patent office when he published his special theory of relativity.
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The Great Replacement Theory: A rightest sneer that there is a deliberate attempt to minimize the relevance – if not the existence – of white Americans through unleashed immigration.
If only it were true! I’d love to see the dingleberries who come up with such asinine conspiracies become the least uncommon denominator.
Which brings back memories of our World History class in high school. In those days (the late ’50s), “world history” was almost entirely Western Europe over the past roughly 2500 years. It started with ancient Greece and Rome, who saw everyone to the south and east as barbarians and looked down their aquiline noses at Northern European white trash. Too bad, because I kinda liked the Goths and the Vandals.
lickhaven 