“Well, once again, my friend, we find that science is a two-headed beast. One head is nice, it gives us aspirin and other modern conveniences. But the other head of science is bad. Oh, beware the other head of science, Arthur. It bites.” – The Tick
It sucks being the youngest clone – all your genes are hand-me-downs.
One of the things that I am really fascinated about is the limit of human knowledge.
Imagine, only a few decades ago:
- We had no proof that there were planets around distant stars,
- We had no idea that Neanderthal DNA was a part of modern humans, and
- We thought Jimmy Kimmel was funny.
As time goes on, human knowledge keeps increasing. We learn a lot more, well, stuff. That’s not to say that we’re any the wiser.
A typical adult male on a homestead in 1880 could understand nearly any device on his farm. Beyond that, he could fix many of them. My Great-Grandpa McWilder was an example of just that. He had a shop that smelled of oil, wood, and leather. The tools were, by today’s standard, ancient.
Grandpa McWilder’s power drill was cordless – that meant it was a drill bit in a chuck that was hand-cranked. The power to run it entirely off of McWilder power. The faster Grandpa cranked the handle and the harder he pushed the drill bit into the wood, the faster it would drill.
What’s my favorite drill dance? DeWalts®.
There was a certain intimacy with the wood that kind of drill gives, that’s lacking with a power drill. Of course I noticed that when I was drilling into the trim around the door, and the floor, and the workbench.
When I had complained that I didn’t have a suitcase to visit Grandpa (as a five-year-old would), he took an old suitcase that he had in the closet and gave it to me. “This doesn’t have a handle,” I complained. Within twenty minutes, Great-Grandpa had selected an old leather belt and braided it into a handle that still graces that suitcase today.
Life was simpler then.
Now, not one person in a thousand could explain how an old tube television works. The Internet we use today? Very few people understand even the basics of how it works.
And yet, we’re bombarded on all sides with information about things we should passionately care about, even though we don’t understand them even a little bit. Net Neutrality? Sure, a blog written by someone from Netflix® or Comcast™ tells you, “Hey, care about this.”
In reality? Network Neutrality is a fight between billion-dollar companies about who gets the spoils of our Internet and streaming fees. If that were our only knowledge problem, well, that’s something we could easily conquer, I mean, if we cared.
But it’s not the only thing we don’t understand.
The very fundamental parts of the Universe we live in are still quite a puzzle.
Step off the Trump Train, and onto the No-Fly List.
General Relativity is one of the most successful theories in the history of science. When Relativity predicts something, often our observations prove that Relativity is correct to as close as we can measure. Without Relativity, we couldn’t explain why Mercury orbits like it does. GPS would be impossible without making relativistic corrections. And, good heavens, how would I ever convert matter into energy in my kitchen?
Quantum Mechanics (QM) is similarly successful. Every time we make a measurement based on this theory, it’s also as close to theory as our instruments can measure. Lasers and transistors depend on Quantum Mechanics – they are well explained by that theory.
But both theories can’t be correct. And we have no idea why. Scale Relativity down to the QM world? Nothing makes sense. Scale QM to the Relativity world?
It doesn’t work, either. So, our two best theories in physics don’t really mesh.
Women are like an open book, but it’s about Quantum Mechanics and it’s written in Chinese.
There’s a gulf there in human knowledge. Sure, you don’t have to know how beams and columns work in order to build a house – otherwise we would have lived in caves until 1700 or so. But we just have no idea how two theories that interact to form the cutting edge of technology could ever be compatible.
So, there’s that. Okay, physics is messy. Surely biology is better, I mean, we can dissect pandas and giant turtles to see how they tick.
Sadly, biology is a lot messier, and that’s even before you carve the panda into steaks. Richard Nixon declared a “War on Cancer” back in the 1970’s, and cancer appears to be just as successful as the Viet Cong. It’s winning. Sure, we’re better at fighting it, but I’ve read about a dozen “silver bullet” cures for cancer over the last decade.
Biology is much worse than physics, because we can’t do proper experiments. I’ve made the point in conversations with friends that if we conducted controlled experiments on people with cancer and let the researchers have immunity from prosecution (on pesky Nuremberg-level crimes) for five years to a decade? We’d have real silver bullet cures for cancer.
But even outside of my war-crimes-level thought experiment, biology is a basket case compared to physics. Biology can’t explain some really, really basic things, like why I should care what a woman thinks.
Or, like DNA.
DNA is the most miraculous (word choice consciously made) molecule ever. DNA information density is far beyond anything humans have created. 0.141 ounces of DNA (four of some communist unit called a “gram”) could hold all of the information all of human activity from ancient Egypt to 2011, including the useless information like what The Mrs. asked me to get at the store.
Four grams = two zettabytes of data, Marty!
I tried to mix killer whale DNA with human DNA. What did I get? Banned for life from Seaworld®.
The idea that biology professors try to support is: DNA is the result of an accident in slimy pools at the beginning of the Earth.
DNA is the greatest level of information density in the known Universe. Heck, DNA represents the greatest level of information density conceivable in our world today. It’s just a coincidence that it’s able to be read and written by squishy cells in squishy people.
An accident.
Sure. Anyone who believes that probably voted (D) all the way down the ballot in the last election. Some of those people, presumably, were even alive.
But that’s not a question scientists can approach today (either elections or the origin of DNA). A big problem with science today is that it is just a larger, more grey-haired version of Twitter®. The questions before science aren’t small:
- Don’t believe in Global Warming®? Heavens! Heretic! Cancel them! Even little Swedish girls know better.
- Think that Dark Matter is more properly spelled Dubious Matter? Is Dark Matter the physics equivalent of bloodletting and leeches?
- Why aren’t we seeing or hearing aliens? Is it because they didn’t pay their cell bill? Did they block us because we made T.?
- Why do we sleep? I mean, not me, because I blog. But why do humans have to sleep?
- How are space, time, and gravity connected? Heck, we don’t even know how dementia, the Presidency, stairs, and gravity are connected.
Biden tried to get off of stairs, but it was a multi-step program.
In the first paragraph, I noted that we’ve learned a lot of things recently that would have been incomprehensible to people 100 years ago. And I stand by that. But here’s the paradox:
Even as we’ve learned so much, science is currently broken, and hopelessly politicized. The vast sums of money and decades required to run experiments that will give us a glimmer of the next revelation of science require that the scientists who design and run the experiments are from the orthodoxy.
To be a part of orthodox science means you have to ignore inconvenient facts. There are entire fields of study that cannot be researched because people might have their feelings hurt. Actual people who claim to be scientists say that there is no difference between men and women.
In 2021, you have to be politically correct, and heaven help you if the Woke Left doesn’t like your shirt choice. Remember that poor guy who wore a silly Hawaiian shirt? You know, the guy who just helped land the Rosetta probe on a comet in frigging space in 2014? In 2021 they’d have just taken and immediately burned him at the stake, live on Facebook™.
See, there’s an answer to every difficult question.
Guilty admission: I really did email the guy and asked to buy the shirt. I figured it was at least worth a shot.
As we advance in science, it seems we learn more and more about less and less. Yet, as we’ve learned more we’ve created a world that’s increasingly alienating to the individual through a haze of increasingly impenetrable technology. Perhaps the future of the human race is a VCR clock, flash 12:00PM endlessly?
The world has also become increasingly hostile to simple variations in individual behavior that fall out of the current norms. In the case of people like Abraham Lincoln or Dr. Seuss, they can be charged and found guilty in the court of public opinion because the ideas of 100 years ago or 160 years ago don’t agree with today’s ideas.
That’s okay. I still have the suitcase that Grandpa McWilder fixed for me. The handle he made from the leather belt is still doing its duty, better than anything made today.
Bonus: Here’s the pattern on the material that the guy’s shirt was made from: