"Our job is not to make up anybody’s mind, but to open minds, and to make the agony of decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking."
- Fred W. Friendly (1915-1998)

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you mad."
- Aldous Huxley

"If you have ever injected truth into politics, then you have no politics."
- Will Rogers

Monday, June 11, 2012

He Probably Was "One of Them"

If you ever saw the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind you might remember a scene as the World War II Air Force pilots disembark form the alien ship and one of the scientists marvels "They haven't even aged. Einstein was right." and the team leader replies, "Einstein was probably one of them." 

Well, Einstein just keeps being proved right -- there have been some minor areas where he was wrong, but he somehow seems to have gotten the "big stuff" right.  The latest challenge to his theories pretty much bit the big one.

That's one of the beauties of science -- ideas and theories only last until a better one comes along (or the theory is disproved) by peer review and experimentation.  Unlike politics, science just keeps self-correcting and honing itself to be ever closer to a new understanding of truth.  No wonder when politicians try to belittle science, they don't use the tools of science, but rather the prattle-brained rhetoric of people who long ago gave up any right to even a pretense of the pursuit of truth.    

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