Top 5 Basic Things Scientists STILL Don't Understand - Part One

He may be a badass, but he's no scientist.

If Stargate SG-1 is any indication, scientists are half Indiana Jones, half Wizard, and half Einstein. It almost seems unfair to use 150 percent to try and encompass the awesomeness of these butt-kicking, reality-twisting human calculators with the ability to create stable wormholes and force fields with little more than a toaster oven and an alien corkscrew. They are like epic typhoons of awesome that can do anything they want, when they want (and that means YES, they could do it yesterday) and understand everything important there is to know in the same way we can find our way around the mall after we’ve been there a few dozen times. 

 But wait, you might say. It’s not fair to compare the real deal scientists with the hyperbolic sci-fi depiction of scientists. Certainly “real” scientists aren’t drawn in such a fashion. And then you see reruns of Steve Irwin cramming his fist into a crocodile’s love canal, the Mythbusters guys making jet packs and car catapults out of scraps, and Bill Nye explaining concepts that had you scratching your head in high school with such simplicity that even Fox or MSNBC viewers could understand without captions. And then you think, ok, they aren’t walking supercomputers with nerdy glasses, but they are pretty amazing folks anyways.

So, we begrudgingly ignore the lessons of SyFy programming and admit that scientists may not be superheroes, but surely, we think, they have this “science” thing down pat. With all the real world banter about string theory and quantum physics and they’ve figured out the basics out to at least a billion decimal places, and understand the concepts of life, the universe, and everything to a degree that they can make an intelligent conversation about any science topic, right?

Well, unfortunately, that’s not quite the case. In fact, some of things they are ignorant about make you wonder how we got past rocks and twigs and moved on to video games and personal computers. In the next few sections we will look over some of those areas where scientists are truly as clueless as you are.

5. Gravity

Gravity is something you learned about before you could even speak. The first time you went to grab that shiny toy and fell on your bottom, your howls of pain reminded the world that the force is not always with you.

 You’d think with something like the Law of Gravity being bandied about, that we had that whole gravity debate figured once and for all. The truth is that using the Law of Gravity to understand gravity is like using the speed laws in your local community to understand how a car works.

 Scientists have been pondering gravity since the days of Plato and all those other Greek hippies who had nothing better to do with their days than contemplate the universe and what lay under the skirt of their latest boy assistant. Yet in the same era when they figured out atomic freaking theory, they had little more to say about gravity than “it sucks.”

It was several hundred years later before people got the idea to actually figure out to do experiments about gravity, and even then, it was just a bunch of science geeks like Galileo playing with their balls in a tall slanted shaft big stone erection famous building called “The Tower of Pisa”.

 It was around a hundred years later that someone came up with the ground breaking idea to actually try and measure how gravity worked. Bear in mind that math had been in vogue for a few thousand years at this point, so you have to wonder why the scientific community had made an oversight that was akin to not noticing you are on fire. So surely, it didn’t take a genius to try and measure something that people have been aware of since people have been aware of being aware, right?

Did not invent gravity.

 Turns out that our “unremarkable” scientist with a number fetish was a genius… a brainy dude named Newton, and no, he didn’t invent those fig-filled cookies your grandmother serves as dessert, but instead, he invented calculus, because apparently 2000 years of numbers wasn’t enough numbers to put actual numbers on gravity. He described the first serious model of gravity and probably went on to design the cover for Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album, because why the heck not.

His model of gravity went unchallenged for almost three hundred years, because apparently fact checking is one of those things that the science community procrastinates about. Just be thankful we didn’t need fact-checking for creation of the internet or we’d still be using the telegraph to send porn and cat jokes to our friends.

You’d think that with three centuries to improve on math that it wouldn’t take a genius to put together a formula to accurately model gravity. We had gone from oxcarts to automobiles, surely a run of the mill number cruncher could figure out gravity.

That run-of-the-mill simpleton was an ex-patent clerk named Albert Effing Einstein.

Yes, it took the greatest mind of this era, Einstein to get even close. It’s like finding out that Iron Chef Morimoto invented the grilled cheese sandwich.

Einstein’s once-in-a-generation capability for number crunching came up with a set of formulas so complex that only six people in the world at the time understood them. Fortunately, his equations not only described the motions of our planets, but established a theory that was the definitive work - absolutely right and unquestionable, until just about every scientist currently in existence agreed that he got it (almost) totally wrong.

Most Many Some number of modern scientists now are absolutely certain somewhat sure shrugging and hoping that string theory (or more accurately, M-theory) is the right way once and for all (wink-wink) to describe what gravity really is, at least until the next big thing comes along.

Of course, even if we could believe that M-theory is the end of the road, the math used to prove it makes Einstein’s equations seem like the wall fodder in a slow preschool math class. So it is unlikely that aside from supercomputers that anyone will be fact checking the math in string theory within the next few centuries.

Oh, and on top of that, string theory is incomplete. It may be impossible to ever complete, assuming that it is going in the right direction. And amazingly, even if it is, string theory doesn’t describe gravity with any more certainty than your grandpa could describe Justin Bieber.

So as far as gravity goes, scientists are still grasping at strings - but it in the final measure, their efforts are still just theory after all.