Foebea is offline.

I love it though, using more common names results in quite a fount of inspiration.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean: the other day, for some reason, I suddenly had a flashback to my school days in the early ’70s, (in Liverpool, in the UK), when our chemistry teacher was off sick and we had a physics teacher as a stand-in.

The subject of the then recently revived theory of Continental Drift was raised and this physics teacher’d been scornful to the point of outright hostile to the idea: “The only reason the continents appear to fit in the first place is because of the current sea levels – in the past, when they were much lower or higher, they probably wouldn’t've appeared to fit at all.”

My first reaction, on watching this particular ‘video tape’ replay itself before my eyes and ears, was to dismiss him as a typical example of reactionary ‘science’ because, after all, history’d subsequently proved him wrong.

But the more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder if it had because while, yes, the theory of plate tectonics SEEMS proved as a possible mechanism for such a fit, that doesn’t automatically mean the fit is REAL.

But even if should prove the case there really IS sufficient “extraordinary proof” to authenticate the fit, it remains the case I, personally, am currently unaware of it and, ultimately, merely assumed the physics teacher was wrong because I love the idea of Continental Drift.

The point I’m getting at is if it’s true human beings have an innate disposition to derive meaning even where there supposedly isn’t any, then how much of what currently passes for science will be perceived, a thousand years from now, as meaningless products of precisely that tendency?

To put it another way, how much of what currently passes for science would survive as science if EVERYTHING was required to submit extraordinary proof of itself?

Finding meaning in random noise is a natural born human talent, but it’s hard to convince people that their interpretations such as the Bible Code or Nostradamus prophecies are just what they want to see…

Thanks for mentioning my little story about Max.