Many of us boomers grew up in the 1960s and can remember to our astonishment that the reason we could pick up our phone and call someone in Paris was the transAtlantic cable. Speaking for myself, it blew my mind that the technology of the day enabled us to navigate a boat across an ocean and spool out 4000 miles of thick wire (with even thicker insulation around it) from the East Coast of the United States to the shores of Europe.
As if that weren’t enough, there are similar cables that went back to the age of telegraphy in the mid-19th Century. On July 13, 1866 the cable laying ship Great Eastern sailed out of Valentia Island, Ireland and on July 27 landed at Heart’s Content in Newfoundland, completing the first lasting connection across the Atlantic. It was active until 1965.
I considered myself cool when I strung two cans connected by a string from my bedroom to my best friend’s in our neighbor’s house in 1961 or ’62. See photo below. My room: house on the left, second floor.
This may be a long way of saying that the graphic at left is total bulls***. The distance is 2700 miles, and the idea of transmitting energy for no reason is stupid beyond words.
There are so many tragic aspects to life in today’s United States that it’s hard to name them all.
For my money, one of the saddest elements to the American zeitgeist is its glorification of ignorance.
Up until recently, if you wanted to know what science believes about anthropology, climate change, or particle physics, you asked a scientist in the relevant discipline, who not only has a college degree, but normally a ton of education on top of that.
Now, you ask a congressional Republican, preferably, an evangelical Christian.
To the author of the meme here (if it’s an actual human being, vs. a Russian bot): to the best of my knowledge, the only actual major “scientific fraud” in world history was “Piltdown Man.” In 1912, a pseudo-anthropologist attempted to fool the scientific community into believing he had discovered the “missing link” between apes and humans.
Now, are there examples of instances when the science of the day turned out to be incorrect?
Of course, and new instances of this surface every day.
Think of how little when scientists believed 200 years ago is still intact today. Perhaps most obviously, Newtonian mechanics has fallen to relativity and quantum physics, but there are hundreds of other paradigm shifts in health and medicine, psychology, cellular biology, chemistry, and particle physics.
Contrary to what conspiracy theorists want you to believe, science is not a set of facts; it’s a methodology whereby we come to learn more about ourselves and the world around us.
Are there other methods by which we “learn?” Sure. Some uneducated guy goes on YouTube and becomes convinced that our consumption of fossil fuels is not causing the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans to rise. I would argue that this conduct is inferior to the scientific method.
Renewable Energy
Trump’s Only Real Talents: Attracting Attention and Controlling Morally Weak People
Trump is not an idiot. His IQ may not be too high, but he’s smart enough to know how to conduct himself in his lifelong quest to amass more wealth and power at the expense of everyone else on Earth.
Trump’s Only Real Talents: Attracting Attention and Controlling Morally Weak People
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