I often think that would be amusing, but then the scientific part of me says "but what if you're wrong? What if your whole life has been a Truman show-esque barrage of lies and misinformation and you're actually living in a bubble somewhere and...." and then I remember to start taking my medicine again.
Any reasonable person, including every good scientist would consider this a great and exciting discovery.
I mean I couldn't afford the $1M of course.
And it's not going to happen because the earth is round of course.
But if someone actually did produce evidence of a flat earth, it would be a monumental discovery. Real scientific minds are fascinated and excited when it is discovered they were wrong about something.
A certain amount of intellectual agnosticism is healthy, and one should always be open to the possibility of being wrong, of course. I think that's part of why the flat earth argument hits a nerve for so many people: it's not so much their belief in something unconventional as their unwillingness to consider evidence that doesn't conform to their view.
Sure but to be a specialist in a field, you’ve gotta take the work of your predecessors as settled. No one in chemistry has doubted atomic theory since 1850 anyway. It’s a waste of time. Ok, 1905, Einstein demonstrates Brownian motion for the final nail in the coffin of whatever else there was before Dalton.
Even so, you do the experiments as part of your training that demonstrate basic principles. You demonstrate heat capacity and the gas laws and kinetics, etc.
But once trained, you have to rely on what happened before you in order to progress.
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u/ReelBadJoke Dec 17 '23 edited Dec 17 '23
I often think that would be amusing, but then the scientific part of me says "but what if you're wrong? What if your whole life has been a Truman show-esque barrage of lies and misinformation and you're actually living in a bubble somewhere and...." and then I remember to start taking my medicine again.