Gravity is just a theory

Right. Newton’s Theory of Gravitation is a theory. It attempts to explain a phenomenon which we can all easily observe.  Everyone agrees that something, let’s call it “gravity”, keeps us from flying up into the air willy-nilly.  Even mentally ill people.  Even religious fundamentalists.  Even, and here I’m on thinner ice, Republicans.

Let’s not confuse ourselves by saying gravity is “just” a theory, or the jury is still out, or reasonable people disagree, or whatever.

I can find you a “scientist” who is willing to go on record as saying that tobacco has not been proven to be a risk factor for cancer.  It takes some doing, but, if you start with the Tobacco Institute, you can get it done.  Since some people who smoke don’t, in fact, get cancer, it’s “just” a theory (supported by a mountain of evidence).

It’s a little harder to find a scientist who will say human activity is unrelated to the observable phenomenon of climate change, but there are apparently 27 of them that have been identified.

I won’t question their integrity here by revealing who is paying for their “research”.  It doesn’t matter.  What matters is the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that human activity is accelerating climate change.

This, of course, makes no difference to most Republicans, or to the president-elect, and certainly not to his transition team aide, Anthony Scaramucci.  Speaking on CNN, Scaramucci said that the scientific community “gets a lot of things wrong”.

He said,  in the past “there was an overwhelming science that the Earth was flat”, and  “there was an overwhelming science that we were the center of the world.”

OK, there’s really no point in arguing with the willfully ignorant.  I get that.  But let me just get one quick point in here.  It is simply not the case that there was “overwhelming science”  showing the earth was flat or the sun revolved around it.  There was overwhelming superstition and religious conviction that these things were true.  The mission of science is to either prove or disprove them.

He said the “Trump team wanted common sense solutions – non-ideological”.

That’s the heart of the problem right there: to these idiots, science is ideological.  And why shouldn’t they think that?  After all, if you can fund a scientific study that shows tobacco is not so bad, well, that kind of proves science is for sale, right?

Who knows?  With enough funding, maybe we can disprove the Theory of Gravitation.  And we’ll all fly away.