The actual ghost of Sir Isaac Newton
There’s also the way in which scientists are often portrayed in
fiction that bothers me, which is as people who just obsessed with facts
and refuse to accept the things happening around them as they
contradict those facts. The oppsite of how it would be in real life. I
think it’s because in school science is taught like that – as a series
of facts kids have to memorise and regurgitate when they’re tested on
them. We forget that to arrive at those ‘facts’, scientists had to be
very creative and open minded. They had to form hypothesis, test them,
and often would be wrong so had to go back to the beginning. I mean
there have been times when a scientists personal beliefs have influenced
their conclusions and caused them to cherry pick which evidence to
accept and which not. But other time that’s usually exposed by further
testing by other people.
The point is though that if the actual
ghost of Isaac Newton were to float into a studio with Neil deGrasse
Tyson and Bill Nye and start chatting, I doubt they would dismiss him.
They would probably perform some sort of tests to make sure it was the
actual ghost of Isaac Newton and not a hallucination or hologram or
Michio Kaku playing a prank on them. But if they managed to rule out
every other contingency and are left with no other explanation than this
being the actual ghost of Isaac Newton, I think they would just be
really childishly excited about, not just because they can talk to Isaac
Newton, but it would mean there was a new layer of physics they didn’t
previously know about and that many things we previously thought might
be wrong. Or I could be wrong and really they’d just start peeing themselves.
It’s just unfortunately in real life people have been looking for proof of ghosts for centuries and not really found any.
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