Tuesday night is my Astronomy lab.
Or at least it will be for the next few weeks. I’m coming up unto the end of my time in “higher learning;” as of three weeks from now, I’ll hopefully be a college graduate, and therefore for the first time in my life prove that I am actually capable of finishing something painstakingly arduous.
But I’m not sure if I’ll be passing my Freshman-level Astronomy lab because I’ve skipped a large portion of it, the reason being that I have recently discovered that Astronomy annoys me.
That was not always the case; I used to love space. I played with model planets and moons, and my favorite show as a young teenager used to be Star Trek. But now, the blatant prideful elitism suffered by many scientists in the field of Astronomy boggles my mind.
If the history of scientific endeavors could teach any one thing to today’s scientists, it’s that they are almost certainly always wrong about whatever they think they’re currently right about. This ESPECIALLY applies to Cosmologists. The Earth is flat? JK! It’s really round. The universe revolves around us? Oh no, we actually spin around the Sun! And it turns out the Sun is just a retarded star in the back alley of our galaxy which, just when we thought that was as deep as the well goes, turns out is only one mid-sized galaxy amongst billions. And! To boot, the universe’s expansion isn’t slowing down, it’s speeding up! Not exactly what you might label a good battin’ average here, folks.
You’d think that today, scientists might review the past and say to themselves: “wow, history has shown us to be way way WAY off over and over again. Mayhap THIS time we should approach the situation with a little bit more care when developing hypotheses.”
But the tricky thing about science is that it almost by default creates the perfect atmosphere for unchecked puffery and arrogance amongst its practitioners. It’s almost effortless to adopt a “well that was then, this is now” mentality where the discoveries of the past are simply relegated to the trash-heap of the scientifically passé.
And scientists are left to draw themselves up by feeling vastly superior to any of their predecessors… Only to be smacked in the face once again by the fact that, superior though they may be, they STILL don’t know a bloody bit about anything.
And yet they solider on, blindly charging forward consumed with unrelenting pridefulness.
Which is why Astronomy in particular is so annoying: in arguably no other area of science is the overly-inflated sense of know-it-all-ness so apparent with so little merit (with perhaps Biology being the exception). Tonight we watched a History channel special on Dark Energy and Dark Matter. At the beginning of the program, the interviewed experts basically admit that they have no idea what Dark Matter and Energy are, have never observed them directly and can only know of their existence by layers upon layers of mere inference, but that in no way kept them from speaking for the rest of the program like they have it all EXACTLY figured out! They might as well call it “Magic” for all they know about it. (On a side note, tonight’s film at one point also declared the universe to be flat. I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony.)
How supremely frustrating.
It’s easy to forget that modern conceptions of Cosmology have only been on the table for some 80 years, and yet Astronomers strut about as if they’ve unlocked all of the deepest goings-on in our universe. They speak of the Big Bang as though they witnessed it firsthand. They tell of other galaxies as if they have vacation homes there which they visit on the weekends. They expound upon the origins of the universe, black holes, super nova, the properties of gravity and the apparent infinite nature of the universe, all when they’ve never directly experienced any of it and have the vantage point of some podunk planet in the supposed backwater part of some obscure spiral galaxy, completely dependent on (for the most part) American tax dollars and 1980’s technology.
To me, Science has a dire, unfathomably deep need for a dose of humility.
