|
 |
There are many strange things in life. Some can be attributed to chance -
but all?
Many truths, things that are completely clear and self-evident, are
overthrown in time. Because some known fools, wastrels and heretics did do
some thinking and, later, some experiments.
Once it was known as true that the earth is a disc. Jerusalem was the center
of the earth, the sun and the planets were proven to revolve around the
earth. Look into the old theories of epicycles and hypocycles which were
used to explain the movements of the planets scientifically. Today we know
better.
Or let's look at more recent scientific turnarounds: just ten years ago it
was known to everybody in the medical sciences that the one sure treatment
for stomach ulcers was to cut them out. Only fools could believe that a
bacterium could survive the hydrochloric acid found in our stomachs.
Self-evident fact. Only a complete imbecile, an idiot and a charlatan would
believe otherwise. Research in this area was, of course, a complete waste of
resources, better to throw the money down the drain.
And along came the discovery of Helicobacter Pylori. Today we all know
better - the surgeons were the bloody fools, in the truest sense of the
word. Instead of cutting people open and mutilating them we now take a
combination of two antibiotics and, given a bit time, we are cured.
Who am I to know what is really possible and what not?
Nothing can be faster than the speed of light? Proven fact!
Well - sorry folks, but the statement above is actually false, as any
physicist knows. There are things like group-velocities and
phase-velocities: the group velocity can exceed c, no problem. So currently
the accepted lore is "no signal can be transmitted at speeds faster than
light". But who knows what the next fool will discover?
There may be things like dark matter and dark energy. Astrophysicists know
that either currently accepted theories are very false (which is highly
improbable but certainly not impossible) or that more than half of the
universe is made of an energy and a form of matter which nobody has every
seen or detected but whose existence can be inferred from experimental
results - if current scientifical theories are valid.
Finally there is the unknowable. What was before the big bang? How did the
universe come to exist? And where does it exist in? If fluctuations of
vacuum energy really did cause our universe to be, why was there a vacuum in
the first place and where was it in? If "branes" did collide, where did they
collide in and how did they come to be into existence, and how came the
place they did collide in come into existence? I doubt we will ever know the
answer to those questions.
But to matters at hand: yes, I do believe that most psychics are frauds. But
I cannot prove that all are. And maybe some are not... I do not know. I
never met the genuine article.
However: today we can detect brainwaves. We can communicate on an extremely
basic level by thought alone (e.g. simple yes-no answers) - granted, we need
a lot of equipment, but it works. And given enough time and research, who
knows what we will eventually discover and what will be proven fact in a few
centuries time?
I find the idea of telepathy or other psychic phenomena much more probable
than the idea of the existence of an abstract "god - being" in general and
the validity of any existing religion in particular. However, billions of
people think otherwise...
Post a reply to this message
|
 |