Perhaps I'm Not So Smart After All

Reading Chooky's Blog and a recent visit with my girlfriend and her family to an excellent exhibit of Lewis and Clark maps have certainly dulled my opinion of myself. Chooky talks about three fellas - Erastosthenes, Aristarchus, and Anaxagoras - who happened to come up with the size, shape and relative distances before they knew the Earth and Sun were anything else than big flat platters being carried around on the chariots of Gods. Fine, they knew about pi but they certainly did not have any kind of confirmation about the shape of the Earth. Talk about novel thinking!

And Lewis and Clark, while not working from the same dearth of scientific knowledge, basically walked out into the world with absolutely no idea what was out there. I loved looking at those maps because I cannot think of another area where you would be the only person to put pen to paper and actually record the very first instance of something. (For those who would like to say the Native Americans were there first, I do not deny this, but they certainly did not cover as wide a scope as Lewis and Clark and did not affect all of the rest of the population of the US in the same way. Now if you want to bring up the Polynesian folks who sailed from Indonesia to Hawaii in basically a canoe, that's another story!).

Any how, I'm not quite so pessimistic as John Horgan declaring the end of all discovery, but it certainly feels like I am a lot further away from discovering anything that would affect our fundamental understanding of the universe. One may, semi-convincingly, argue that it is that process of discovery that truly identifies the geniuses. Yet what's left to discover without having multi-doctorates in high energy physics? It's not like I can just reach out any more and just discover gravity. It's there all the time! They don't even bother to turn it off on weekends...

D