I was listening to some guy on Science Friday - he was talking about all this 'stuff', beginning of the universe, contemplated time travel, etc.
Then he started talking about how there are an INFINITE number of 'pasts' that lead up to our 'present'. And they all 'exist' in parallel? So, if you talk about time travel, you need to talk about which 'past' you choose to follow. Or something like that - I can't even begin to get my head around any of that.
It makes me wonder whether I am the idiot, or that guy.
Probably neither. Making science - especially physics - intelligible to nonscientists who mightn't have had all that much science education in school is a fairly difficult process, and unfortunately it isn't valued as much as it should be by scientists in general. Carl Sagan caught a lot of flak for "wasting" his time on the Cosmos series and other public-outreach work, and I think Stephen Jay Gould also started to get a reputation for spending too much time writing popular-science books.
Like samclem, I kind of wonder about the value of intelligent people investing their time this way. But then I think about some scientists spending time with a loop of wire connected to some energy source they didn't understand, and noticing a compass needle jumping. It didn't seem like a very useful thing to do. Not too many generations later, we were sending communications at near the speed of light, and lighting people's homes without fire.
Looking at a history of scientific discoveries, it seems as though a lot of the really basic ones were made by people doing what you were describing rather than people who were given a task of "find a way to send communications at nearly the speed of light." Unfortunately a lot of the basic stuff doesn't find this sort of application, but a lot of the time you can't tell in advance.
Down deep though, I still think it's just a scam to get another research grant Just like those guys studying particle physics. Every time they find what they were looking for, they say it indicates an even smaller particle exists, and they need more money to study that!
-ERD50
Yep - scientists, those well-known scammers. Makes you wonder how come scientists who aren't dependent on research grants ever do anything, doesn't it?
Last edited: