Mmm, but she blinded me with science.
She blinded me with science!
And failed me in biology, yeah…
— ‘She Blinded Me with Science’ by Thomas Dolby & Jonathan Michael Kerr, 1983.
Science can be so amazing. The more I learn about it, the more delighted I am to be living in 2024 instead of 1859.
I just heard about a company that builds shock absorbers into their ski bindings.
When you’re getting to my age, you need shock absorbers for practically everything. (I’m looking forward to shock absorbers for the next presidential election, for example.)
But you may be asking why I mention the year 1859?
That’s the year Charles Darwin blinded us with the scientific theory of evolution. He turned science upside down, so to speak.
It’s disorienting to find yourself upside down. And being blinded, while being upside down, is even more disorienting.
But then… you get shock absorbers on your skis!
In the 1983 pop tune, She Blinded Me with Science, singer Thomas Dolby implied that he was blinded by a female. We assume this was a biological female. But down through history, most of the blinding with science has been done by men. I came across an article the other day in Discover Magazine about ten important scientific theories that changed the world, and they almost all came from male scientists.
Like, the theory of gravity.
Long before Sir Isaac Newton came up with his theory of gravity, people had noticed that everything that went up came back down, and everyone had kind of gotten used to it. But Sir Isaac put a name to it — “gravity” — and suggested that even the Moon and planets were under its influence, even though they had not gone up or come down. This theory didn’t change the way the Moon and planets behaved, but it paved the way for other scientific developments, such as the manner in which nuclear bombs are delivered.
Another amazing scientific discovery was a theory about DNA, for which James Watson and Francis Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.
It turned out later that they had “borrowed” research, without permission, from chemist Rosalind Franklin. Thanks to her research, the double helix structure was realized, but her Nobel Prize was not.
Sometimes, when a female is blinding us with science, she gets no credit for it.
Thus, the beloved adage: “Behind every great man, there’s a woman… rolling her eyes.”
Down through history, however, certain great men (and great women) have denied science. Some of them are doing that, even today, by denying theories like vaccine theory and climate change theory.
They are not blinding us with science. Instead, they are blinding us with creationism and other non-scientific theories.
Either way, we end up blinded.
One of the popular claims from these “deniers” is that, even if climate change is happening, it’s actually going to be a good thing.
There’s some scientific support for that claim, which you wouldn’t notice if you were blinded by science. For example, in the distant past, CO2 levels in earth’s atmosphere have been much higher than today. Current levels are, like, 420 ppm. But 50 million years ago, the CO2 levels were maybe 1,600 ppm. There were palm trees growing in Antarctica.
I don’t have a deep attachment to Antarctica — it’s pretty far away, even as the crow flies — but I personally wouldn’t mind if we had bananas and mangoes growing in Pagosa Springs. There are, in fact, a couple of banana trees growing inside the Geothermal Greenhouse growing domes on South 5th Street. Those greenhouses are artificially warmed — by science — and everyone thinks that’s pretty special. So why not everywhere?
But of course, the people who are blinded by “climate science” are working long into the evening hours, dreaming up ways to keep Pagosa Springs — and most of America — cold in the winter.
I think snow is overrated. Just my opinion… perhaps influenced by the fact that I don’t own a snowblower.
I came across this scientific chart, below, on the Columbia University website, showing how the earth’s temperature has been changing over the past 66 million years. Looking at this chart, it would appear that we were headed into an icebox.
But maybe I’ve been blinded? By science?
This post was originally published on here
