(January 10, 2014 at 7:39 pm)BadWriterSparty Wrote: Science is never pointless. Even if a discovery needs a few decades for there to be a practical application for it, the fact remains that there will be one.It reminds me of the story about Thomas Edison and how he dismissed his many failed attempts at inventing a light bulb as steps towards the successful attempt. There are scientific discoveries that came about accidentally, when scientists were researching something else. The microwave oven comes to mind.
You could come up with some version of "look how much progress we've made since" for almost any number of years back. We've made incredible leaps in understanding and progress in the past 1,000 years. But also in the last 100. And we've made them in the past 10. I can think back to the 1970s and just the improvements in day-to-day life are amazing to me. I wonder how many of the continuing improvements that we see today are being built on things we first learned 10, 100, or 1000 years ago.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
