A Quote by Gavin Schmidt
You can get good science out of stupid questions. If someone says the world is flat, maybe in proving them wrong you can calculate the curvature of the Earth more precisely.
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At one time, the earth was supposed to be flat. Well, so it is, even today, from Paris to Asnieres. But that fact doesn't prevent science from proving that the earth as a whole is spherical. No one nowadays denies it. Well...we are still at the stage of believing that life itself is flat, the distance from birth to death. Yet the probability is that life, too, is spherical and much more extensive and capacious than the hemisphere we know.
When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
I always thought my questions were wrong questions because no one else asked them. Maybe no one thought of them. Maybe darkness got there first. Maybe I am the first light touching a gulf of ignorance... Maybe my questions matter.
When someone like Richard Branson goes up there and starts doing chartered flights... and you can look back on Earth and see the Earth's curvature, I'll believe the Earth is a globe.
There is, even today, a Flat Earth Society that meets every year to say the Earth is flat. The science about climate change is very clear. There really is no room for doubt at this point.
Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by observation and experiment, gets thrown out like yesterday's newspaper.
We've discovered that the earth isn't flat; that we won't fall off its edges, and our experience as a species has changed as a result. Maybe we'll soon find out that the self isn't "flat" either, and that death is as real and yet as deceptive as the horizon; that we don't fall out of life either.
I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.
If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?
Science is science. Science is what is. After discovery, tests, trial, if a consensus of scientists today said that the sun orbits around the earth, would we say that they're right simply because there is a consensus? No. Because we know the earth orbits around the sun just as if there were a consensus that the earth is flat would we agree with them? No. So there can't be a consensus on something that hasn't been proven. This is a political movement. This whole global warming thing is a political movement.
SCIENCE: a way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it's wrong.
The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth.
When people ask me really stupid questions or get it really wrong, I feel embarrassed for them. I don't really feel angry at them.
Dilbert: You joined the "Flat Earth Society?" Dogbert: I believe the earth must be flat. There is no good evidence to support the so-called "round earth theory." Dilbert: I think Christopher Columbus would disagree. Dogbert: How convenient that your best witness is dead.
The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the Earth on the moon, and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.
Don't we get it? To put our arm around someone who is gay, someone who has an addiction, somebody who lives a different lifestyle, someone who is not what we think they should be... doing that has nothing to do with enabling them or accepting what they do as okay by us. It has nothing to do with encouraging them in their practice of what you or I might feel or believe is wrong vs right.It has everything to do with being a good human being. A good person. A good friend.
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