Flight of the bumblebee

You’ve probably heard the adage that scientists proved that the bumblebee can’t fly. You may have even repeated it yourself, right?

As far as we know that story originated in 1930’s Germany. Supposedly an engineer and a biologist were talking at a dinner party and the engineer scribbled some quick notes/formulas to show the biologist how the insect could fly. But alas, the math didn’t work; he’d assumed fixed and smooth wing, unidirectional flapping, and so on. The engineer knew he’d have to study the situation more, and get into heavier math, but the biologist repeated this failure as proof of the superiority of nature to mere engineering, and the story was set free in the wild. This wasn’t really proof of the failure of science, but proof of the bias of it. How one scientists agenda was able to corrupt truth and perpetuate a misconception (fraud) on the masses, who gullibly repeat that story, until everyone thinks it is true. The popularity of the story doesn’t make it more accurate; consensus is not truth. That’s the problem with science; it is just as loaded with politics and disinformation or most often only partial information (lacking full understanding and context) as the rest of humanity.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040911/mathtrek.asp

Basic understanding is often wrong! “No two snow-flakes are the same”. Do you know why we think that? Because in 1880, Wilson A. Bently received a microscope as a birthday gift. He combined it with a camera and took pictures < 6,000 snowflakes. He found that a certain type of snowflake (flat) from certain warm-front storms produced the best crystals, so focused mostly on those. The best of these pictures were retouched and published in 1931. Someone observed that no two looked alike, and the press and public spread their “knowledge” of nature and of all the world’s snow, because they’d seen a few pictures from one guy, whose total observations wouldn’t amass to a single snowball, and thus concluded they understood all the snow flakes that have ever fallen on the earth. Ponder that arrogance and stupidity for a moment, and how often you’ve heard it repeated. We are taking complex issues and trying to simplify them, editing them down for brevity and understanding. But then we edit out the reality and core parts necessary for understanding. Take something simple you were taught in school like: “Heat rises”. Bzzt! Wrong! Heat radiates outward (in all directions, not just up). Well, maybe more specific, “Hot air rises”. Bzzt! Wrong! Hot air isn’t anti-gravity. Put a balloon of hot air in space, next to a large mass, and see what happens; it is going to fall, not rise! What really happens is that heavier things settle down in a fluid/gas, and cooler air is denser, thus pushed the lighter/warmer air upwards (towards the top of the atmosphere). The problem is that partial information is often disinformation and leads to misperceptions. Simplifying is editing and altering the truth, and hoping that the result isn’t a complete lie. The more complex the theory or issue or models at the start, the more likely the editing will result in a misperception, and the easier it is to delude lazy people into believing it because they don’t want to do the work/research themselves. And remember, we’re all lazy. (Economy of motion and all that). http://web.archive.org/web/20010803021834/http://members.home.net/kfuller/myths.htm#myth1 This explains why science is so rife with hoaxes, gaffs, bias, and mistakes. People are lazy, including scientists. People are biased, including scientists. People are deceptive, and want fame, money, or to think they’re smarter than others by being able to trick them; including scientists. And most people aren’t going to question enough, or be skeptical enough — and those that are, are usually drowned out by the bleating masses, parroting their mistruths as fact. For Hoaxes. In the 1800’s we had scientific proof that moon-men existed with elaborate details. Elaborate descriptions of man-bats and bipedal beavers living in harmony on the moon that not only managed to run in many newspapers, but had supporters and advocates from Yale. More recently we had Cold Fusion, cloning frauds, and dozens of other “breakthroughs” that weren’t. http://www.historybuff.com/library/refmoon.html http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/moonhoax.html Now hoaxes are intentional deceptions for nefarious purposes, far more common are just scientific blunders. People that think they know what they’re talking about, make a hypothesis, test it out, and sometimes get popular support, but it still turns out to be wrong. Do you remember piltdown man? We were sure we discovered the missing link because a scientist had found a human skull and an ape jaw in the same place, put them together, and said, “look”. Many people believed him for generations! In fact, as a 40-something person, many of the Dinosaurs I studied as a child are flat out wrong; they changed names (and assorted parts) with other animals, were misconstructs from a mishmash of other fauna of the day, and so on. Many look to scientists as if they’re somehow smarter than the rest of us. But science gave us things like the hubble telescope, where someone missed on a basic calculation, and a hundred other people failed to catch it, for a billion dollar snafu. NASA blew a few martian orbiters, one was because they miscalculated using metric instead of standard, and no one caught it, and thus another billion dollar catastrophe. NASA misplaced the picture from the original moon landing. We’ve had a couple space shuttles go plunk, and so on. This is a huge group of our best and brightest. So don’t tell me scientists are somehow smarter than the rest of us, that’s an insult to humanity! Even worse is the fraud that there’s no bias in science! Please, please, puhlease rent a clue! Science is as rife with politics and bias and bigotry’s as every other part of humanity, because guess what, last time I checked, they were human. In fact, maybe more so. Imagine you’ve spent your entire life being funded for research into one area, and that subject (or your area) is proven wrong. Your entire ego, identity, income and reason for being is being questioned; are you more or less likely to be objective because you call yourself a scientist? And if you are going to fight, you know that only a handful can understand it, and you can defraud the rest. How quick and flexible are you going to be, and the industry of knowledge in which you reside? Imagine you work for an agency or institution, in fact entire culture/industry where your reputation is everything, and the most popular concepts get the money, and the counter-culture views get ostracized and far far fewer funding opportunities (with associated fame, wealth, security). Which side are you going to be on, the one that leads to truth, or the one that leads to self-interest? Scientists are almost all specialists, getting minutiae and missing the bigger picture, with pressures, politics and agendas that I certainly wouldn’t want to deal with. But they are just as flawed as the rest of humanity, and in a few ways, maybe more so. Which brings me to the point of what is science? Now I know we’re taught in 6th grade that scientific method is the basis of science, the hypothesis-experiment-conclusion cycle, but that reflects on the quality of education we’re getting. Explain how that works with paleontology, astronomy, or creating new instruments or technologies that increase mans knowledge. Science doesn’t show us things, experience does. Science doesn’t teach us things, experiments do. Science is often about math, and math is a construct. You observe something, then you create a formula to approximate that reality, then you may explain why (hypothesis) and you may test (if possible). But it is all built on constructs and models that may or may not be truth. But remember, everything you know about science was either proven wrong in the past, or is going to be proven wrong in the future. Newton was wrong (when he wasn’t off studying alchemy). Einstein was wrong. Darwin was wrong. And so on. Their constructs work fairly well in limited circumstances, and worked well enough for the time; but we’ve found exceptions or places where they fail. Then we make more constructs to explain those conditions and revise it, or find out where it doesn’t work at all, and throw the whole thing away, or use it anyways because even though it is wrong, it still works well enough. So most theories are just simplified constructs of what really happens as tools to help us understand or predict more. But never confuse those constructs with reality. What science does is try to explain things and create formulas or proofs so that others can repeat them. But the quality of science is always based on the quality of instrumentation that we have at the time, the body of knowledge we have, the quality of the thinkers, and the desire for honest understanding (and a willingness to face alternatives). That willingness is all too rare. Most often we need to wait for the current generation of scientists to die off before a new theory can take root, because the old individuals are so rooted in the established concepts and what they do. This is far from the paragon of flexibility, adaptability, or lack of mistakes. It is however a paragon of inflexibility, where new ideas rarely fight to the surface, only because of overwhelming proof, or because of the incredible popularity or sensationalism they’ll get (especially in the media) because of politics or public interest.

Conclusion

Now look at today’s scientific “conclusions”, as reported by the media, with a little more objectivity. Realize that science is political, science is biased, science is mathematical and logical constructs made by men, science is often an over-simplification of things, and very often, science is wrong!

Realize that there are HUGE disputes over issues like AIDS, Stem Cells, or global warming. The same scientific and media community that is today claiming overwhelming consensus in something like Global Warming, was the same community that was claiming overwhelming consensus for Global Cooling in the 1970’s. When I was in school during the oil crisis of the 1970’s they were teaching us that all the world’s oil would run out by 1987. Now it is 2006 and they say we may reach the point where half of the entire world’s oil supply is used up in another 20-40 years, but that doesn’t count sources like oil-shale, oil-sand, and undiscovered resources or improvements in efficiency or slow-downs do to economic incentives and alternatives.

Personally, global warming is one of my pet-peeves. We’re bombarded with so many stories about how conclusive it is, that the truth is stifled. In some studies more than 25% of all scientists disagree that man is major catalyst for what is happening. But popular isn’t correct, it was popular scientific opinion that the work was flat at one time. How many media stories offer any balances like other likely causes, or about how little we actually know about major parts of the question like carbon sequestration (where is all the carbon normally getting sequestered, the carbon sinks, and why is this changing)? The truth is the oceans are warming and that is effecting climate, but CO2 (one of the least common of the greenhouse gasses, and one we’ve contributed very little to) does almost NOTHING to contribute to this. They talk about issues like this is “the hottest year in recorded history”, but ignore that we have under 100 years of data, and that past data wasn’t very accurate, with a far greater margin of error than the .3 degrees celsius that it was hotter by. 100 years is a nano-second in geological time. They don’t point out that they used to grow wines in England, which we couldn’t dream of today, or that our CO2 Ice-core-samples are highly disputed, and that all the models of how things would heat up (and why) have been abysmal failures. For now, it is all crap, construct and political hypothesis.

So there are constructs that we call science. There is truth, which is nature. Consensus is what is believed by most people. But those three are not close to the same thing. New York City had a reputation in the 19th century as being a place where suckers were ripe for picking. New York got the nickname Gotham, after the mythical “land of fools” by the same name. It seems that with globalization, this tradition of gullibility has spread over the entire country and the entire world (with it’s capital being somewhere in California). Now we are all living in Gotham City, some of us just realize it more than others.