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The more I learn, the less I know.
Anyone who starts to think that they are an expert on something really needs to have the top end literature on the thing nearby. Even if you’re reasonably competent, you won’t be making it through the titles of most of these papers without googling several of the words.
The thing is.
I know and I also expect from others that NO ONE is an expert anywhere.
However most of people do think there expertise is sufficient to be called like that.
While I am struggling through multiple dilemmas because the uknowns and complexity of everything is unbearable versus the self proclaimed experts are joyfully neglecting details…
The self-proclaimed experts really muddy the waters. As do those seen to be experts by virtue of their charm, charisma, fame, or actual expertise in bullshitting. Another issue is those who claim to be or are judged to be experts in one field by virtue of their legitimate expertise in another.
I think there are actual experts as long as we’re willing to define the term in a way that doesn’t confer wisdom or in relation to what remains unknowable. For me, a true expert is someone who knows more about something than the vast majority of people, is continually striving towards expertise and mastery, and can explain things to those with little or no expertise.
Also, I think expertise is a range, not an absolute. It’s completely reasonable to accept the expertise of your local accountant without also thinking that they could be the CFO of a Fortune 500 company.
For myself, I try to embrace the unknowns as new adventures or ignore them as irrelevant to the task at hand. I don’t know why there are so many joinery techniques in woodworking or how to choose the most appropriate for a particular situation, but I’m having fun learning. At the same time, joinery is irrelevant to many of my projects, where doing everything by eye with scraps on hand using nails and screws gets the job done quickly and effectively.
I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree.
Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.
At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes.
The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
-Richard Feynman
Art and science are two sides of the same coin. You cannot be a good scientist if you are not a bit of an artist.
Well said. He sounds like a smart fellow.
Hover text:
Honestly geometry’s pretty dicey, as are numbers larger than 1.
Bonus panel
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Just one more collider, bro. Please, bro
Nothing squashes wonder quite like asking about the nature of the universe and someone answering “a flying old man did it”.
Solving too many mysteries is not a complaint I have for the scientists… Not having free energy yet is
Not having free energy yet is
Have you not noticed the bright ball of gas that lights up the sky during the day?
It bathes the earth in free energy.
Nothing is free. Eventually Huītzilōpōchtli will consume the Earth to settle the debt we own him.
Based on current predictions that will happen in about 3.5 billion years.
So I think we will be fine.
Yeah, but you have to put energy into getting that energy.
Not if you are a plant.
I tried plugging my phone into the elm tree out back. Turns out it doesn’t work, and also it wasn’t an elm tree, it was the neighbor, and he was pissed when he woke up.
the elm tree
Well, there is your problem, it should be ash for apple products and Birch for Android.
If you are lucky and have a eucalyptus near by they work for all phones.
That’s why we’ve been trapping all this extra energy! Free real estate baby. It’s just good economics.
…I’ve just been informed that DC is now underwater
Only for the next 5 billion years! And then what???
If we haven’t made it off earth by then, well we are shit out of luck.
I wonder how much sunlight we can convert into stored energy until we are non-trivially detracting from the amount of energy that reaches the earth’s surface.
It’s probably an absurd proportion of solar panel coverage.
Surface area of the earth: 510,064,472 km²
So at any moment ~255…000.000 km² of the earth is hit with solar radiation. I think we have a while before it becomes an issue.
until we are non-trivially detracting from the amount of energy that reaches the earth’s surface.
I think I just found the solution to climate change boys 😎
nothing can be free in a capitalist society
unless you mean perpetual motion/magic energy in which case that was solved hundreds of years ago. It can’t be done
I am utterly confused by this comic, it makes sense and at the same time it doesn’t
It’s about the evolving picture of the universe over the past 300 years and how so much about that picture changed so quickly and is still left with very big open questions.
I feel like this comic exists as a bit of catharsis for the scientific folks, but I gotta say I appreciated the perspective as someone who’s struggled with this, philosophically.
I feel like “pop science” in particular just tries to say “Believe our experts. We figured out the right answer. What people thought for centuries was vast and full of wonder is in fact a gray room, and opinions to the contrary are uneducated and misinformed. Your artistic renderings and sci-fi is wrong.”
That smugness can be seen as trying to eliminate wonder and solve the joy out of things to flaunt one’s own intelligence…which seems to be rewarded heavily by our culture.
For those of us who didn’t get the opportunity for university, I wish the wonderous parts of science were more exposed.
Sadly it’s really hard to find that stuff among mountains of clickbait telling you they used the super collider to build a DOOM-esque wormhole to Hell. Lmao
Can I has an afterlife?
No. Go make your own.
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Science is a candle in the dark, it just exposes all of the cool shit to explore in the room that were hidden in the black.
A little bit in chemistry, too. But usually in the “oh, that’s bad. Let’s not do that” category.
