POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Miracle products : Fools, science and things like "Helicobacter Pylori" Server Time
5 Sep 2024 07:25:32 EDT (-0400)
  Fools, science and things like "Helicobacter Pylori"  
From: TC
Date: 27 Nov 2009 21:26:11
Message: <4b108a43$1@news.povray.org>
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...


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