A few days ago we ran “The Logical Explanation,” which was a contributed posting about one Anonymous Hero’s thoughts on how the ocean basins formed. It was a little offbeat in several ways, not at all typical of our usual science coverage here, but darned if it didn’t provoke the best discussion we’ve seen in a long time…the kind I wish we had all the time. Makes me wonder if I shouldn’t try so hard to present nice, neat logical science stories that are always backed up with links, and just plunge off sometimes on something so wacky (like WMD?) that people are compelled to write in to correct me….nah, can’t do that. If (when!) I make mistakes here, they’re gonna be honest ones and not planted ones…

In a brief post called “It’s a fun article,” Sweetwind wrote: “I think for that reason this was actually a very stimulating article to have at SciScoop (although it was hard to read) – it’s been a good exercise for us to refute it, but it didn’t take too much research. :-) And everyone’s taken different approaches. It’s been an interesting, multidisciplinary discussion. Thank you A.H.” I agree with Sweetwind. “The Logical Explanation” has been a fun article that has generated more discussion of the type we want to see here than just about any other one we’ve run.

However, I think it’s an IMPORTANT article to run, also. We ALL start out ignorant of the facts and the truth, both as schoolchildren and as a civilization. Science and education represent humanity’s effort to overcome such ignorance. The thing to be amazed at is not, “How can somebody be so blind to the truth?” but “How can somebody have a snowball’s chance in hell of moving from a state of ignorance to a state of enlightenment given the odds stacked against him?”

Our AH author here went through the educational system society provided to him/her which apparently didn’t do a particularly good job of providing him/her with a basic science education (no offense, AH!). Despite this, AH kept his/her curiosity and stayed plugged into our society’s free post-high-school science continuing education courses, namely, NOVA, Discovery Channel, etc. Commendable! Even more commendable is AH’s actions not to blindly accept what was presented in our generally non-interactive educational environment and, EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY, wonder if it was wrong.

As far as I’m concerned, people like AH are the reason science progresses – not the millions of drones who ACCEPT WHAT’S PRESENTED, in school or on Fox News, and NEVER QUESTION OR WONDER. As far as I’m concerned, those drones have only one purpose in life: to be taxpayers to buy the rest of us here on SciScoop the nifty expensive toys we need to figure out whats going on in the world and universe around us.

Scientific progress is performed in a hostile dog-eat-dog environment that is about fairly basic, peer-reviewed survival-of-the-fittest evolution of ideas. AH took a pretty good mauling in the jungle of his/her peers – but AH WAS IN THE GAME. And WITHOUT A CONTINUING POOL of bush-league people interested in and willing to play the game, then THERE IS NO GAME and there could NEVER be a SCIENCE MAJOR LEAGUES with superstars like Einstein and Watson and Crick and Orville and Wilbur and all the rest who RISE TO THE TOP OF THE GAME. We ALL start in the bush leagues, and that’s where we swing at our first ball. AH, you took a strike. Big deal. I say go read some more and come out to swing again.

When I was in seventh grade – at Ray Bradbury’s magical, mystical age of 13 – men from Earth went to the Moon for the first time. Talk about mythic – I was hooked and still am. And I wanted to be a part of it, and still do. I knew I could never build a Saturn V in my back yard, so I doodled endlessly on lined notebook paper about gizmos with electromagnets and springs and batteries and ball bearings and striker plates…stuff that I had access to and was similar enough to what I’d read about in Project Orion to have a chance to work and get me personally to the moon. If only I could have been smart enough to have the insight that I was convinced all the others had missed that would let a car battery have enough energy to get me to the moon! Seeing as how I didn’t have any nukes lying around to build an actual Orion ship (probably a good thing), a car battery was the most concentrated source of energy I had available…

I’m a little smarter than that now (though not by much) and some of my meager store of current (pun) wisdom comes from my intensive reading on electromagnets that summer and experiments teaching me about why you REALLY want to have a significant resistive load on that wire you blithely hook up across the terminals of an old car battery out under a backyard shade tree.

C’mon, what’s YOUR good-God-what-was-I-thinking story?

It’s easy to take sucker punches at somebody with weaker science backgrounds, and get that satisfying rush of at last getting to be the bully who once tormented some (most?) of us. (Though really, I thought everybody responding to “The Logical Explanation” was actually more or less civil.) It’s harder to remember we were once there, too, and that it’s okay and even necessary to be and start from there, and that science has a LOT of nooks and crannies outside our own areas of interest and expertise in which we are not experts but instead, ignorant. Articles like “The Logical Explanation” are important reminders of just what the creed of science is up against in our society.

THAT’S why I want there to be a SciScoop that covers ALL areas of science, and I want it badly enough that I pretend to be a jack-of-all-trades here and write about any science topic under the Sun, and beyond, even when I say some pretty dumb things sometimes. I want a forum where people can come to and hear about something new they didn’t know about and wouldn’t have ever known about otherwise. THAT’s how ignorance gets obliterated: one sentence, one fact at a time.

But what I REALLY want is for somebody else to explode MY ignorance! So….Submit! Post!