Trust 'The science' ... until it's discredited
Science isn't always so settled, is it?
During my 17 years writing a weekly column about magazines for the LA Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Trib (1989 to 2007), I wrote a lot about “science” and its many inevitable and inherent uncertainties.
Mostly I was deliberately casting doubt on the arrogance of the climate scientists and apocalyptic global warming enthusiasts who claimed that their sophisticated computer models accurately predicted the future temperatures and sea levels a hundred years from now.
Science, especially climate science, is extremely complicated and never settled. It’s a process, stupid. Not an immutable set of facts and conclusions.
We think we know lots of stuff for sure about the stars and planets, the influence of clouds and the Sun on Earth’s climate and what amazing processes go on in our own guts and brains.
But we keep finding out that we really don’t.
From 1992 this news flash in Physics Today about "dark matter” was probably my favorite example of the humbling limits of our scientific knowledge:
Physics Today is not exactly what you'd call your consumer publication. Maybe that's why its editors thought no one but fellow scientists would come upon the humbling news they published in "The Dynamical Evidence for Dark Matter."
It seems that scientists know lots of things about the parts of the universe they can see. The trouble is, some physicists have just realized that about 90 percent of the universe is made up of invisible stuff — the blackness that fills up all the not-really empty space between the billions of galaxies, the magazine says.
"Thus,” says Physics Today, “the material that makes up the stars that we see and the everyday world that we know is only a minor pollutant in a sea of invisible material of unknown nature."
And just to prove that “The Science” is just as fallible today as it was 30 years ago, here are three fresh — two are hilarious — items from 1440 Media that show we are still learning that we are not always as smart as we think we are.
Science & Technology
> Supposed closest black hole to Earth found not to exist; located 1,000 light-years away, astronomers now believe the HR 6819 system contains two stars, with one sucking the mass away from the second (More) |
> Archaeologists uncover well-preserved, 40,000-year-old Homo sapiens site in northern China with evidence of advanced stone tools, and production and use of pigments (More)
> New paper suggests known fossils of Tyrannosaurus rex actually represent three separate species; theory has sparked intense debate among paleontologists.