You can wear a white lab coat but that won't make you a scientist

There is an excellent show going the rounds now, called Cosmos, a newer version of a show originally by Carl Sagan, only this one with Neil DeGrasse. I think it originally was on Fox, but now it is going the rounds, NatGeo, maybe Discovery, The Science channel, the way these kinds of shows do. I never saw the Carl Sagan show, but I caught a couple episodes of this one and I really liked it.

What I really like about it is it tells the story of science from a historic viewpoint, first science believed this and then it discovered that, but then this, which I think is better than the litany of what it currently believes without any explanation of why we believe that.

Because science is not a collection of current theories, science is a method, the scientific method, you start out assuming nothing, you have an hypothesis, you have a test of the hypothesis, if it succeeds the hypothesis is confirmed that strengthens the hypothesis, if it fails the hypothesis is dead. I’m pretty sure they taught us this in Gage Park. I think they are still looking for the top quark, if it cannot be found, or more accurately if it is proved not to exist, the whole standard model goes out the window and they will have to go back to the drawing board.

There have long been philosophers, and you know how I feel about philosophers, but what we think of as scientists in the western world really didn’t show up until the late middle ages. Before that the church, which was the only learned body around, thought the whole world was made of air, fire, earth, and water, and things floated or sank depending upon how much of each they contained, and they believed that because some Greek had said it two thousand years previously and they had never bothered to investigate it.

Oh we’ve gone through the history of science before I am sure. Just because some guy calls himself a scientist doesn’t make him one. He has to have facts to back him up. Copernicus was a scientist because he had observations and calculations to back him up. Galileo actually did experiments, most famously dropping those balls off the tower, though that story may be apocryphal.

Those white supremacist guys were never scientists. They never had any proof of what they said. It was all the accident of history that at the current time the Europeans were at the top of the heap, and they had some snake oil head measurements or something. They may have had academic degrees and stature in their community, but when you asked them for proof their white lab coats were empty.

I remember taking sociology courses in college and they would spend the whole first period explaining why they were a science, but of course that made it even more obvious that they were not a science at all. They are just philosophers and politicians. And mental health people, outside of knowing some drugs work sometimes, they don’t know shit.

There. But I was a little troubled when I wrote that part about first science thought this and then when it discovered that was wrong it thought that, and I thought isn’t that pretty much what Beagles complained about them changing it. So let me say this about that. When we were kids we didn’t know much and as we grew we had to change what we thought as we found out about other things, so that at any point what we knew is the best we knew at the time. At any rate that’s the way it should be, it would be stupid to decide to believe something when we are 14 or 40 or whatever and just decide we were going to believe that for the rest of our lives no matter what. Science is like that, it is just our best knowledge at the current time.

As for your last sentence, I think the AMA is more political than scientific, but if, for instance, definitive studies showed that gay marriage was indeed going to take us all to hell in a handbasket, then I would have to be against it.