The Last Shall be First

It's a distinctive phenomenon of our century that the morons always have the last word. Were God to descend on a cloud and give us all the answers, you can be sure there would be live blogging and a Twitter crawl at the bottom of the screen.

Is there some greater meaning to the fact that advances in technology have made it possible to add new elements to the periodic table?  One can infer that science is still marching on in our ability to see existence as it is while the twits twitter about their superstitions about nature, but reading comments on the announcement that the 7th row of the table is now complete, it seems that the sort of people who love to lecture us on the power of crystals and mysterious energies and what the "universe" is telling them about our personal relationships feel that it's an indication of how imperfect science is when compared to ignorance.  Of course they don't call it ignorance.They call it "alternative" or "new age" but what the game is, is to assert that because science does not have all the answers, ignorance is an equivalent. Conjecture is as valid as science and fallacy can be sufficient support for any conclusion.

"I love this sort of thing as yet again science has to be changed. They love to claim that science is so exact and accurate and teach the periodic table as if that's it, there's no more and oh, whoops yes there is. 

It makes those scientists who claim certain things are totally impossible and then proved wrong to be the big headed fools they are"

writes someone on Facebook in response to the addition of 4 new trans-Uranium elements, which of course don't occur in the narrow segment of nature we can observe with our senses, but in massive particle accelerators and only for nanoseconds. One might consider them as phenomena rather than things one can use as a heavy paperweight or something heavy to throw at the posturing idiots who write such things.  Of course he has no idea what science is or what scientists say or do and sadly, he's not alone.. I hear people compare science to common sense, to conjecture, to imagination and to closed-mindedness in the same way Church men vilify the infidel.  

The reverse is true:  adding things to the body of knowledge that can be experimentally and repeatedly confirmed illustrates that science continues to be useful. 

I have to wonder about people who are desperate to show that scientists are blind, stubborn defenders of outmoded ideas. Are they blind stubborn defenders of fakery, shamanism, superstition and the empty mysticism that makes up popular religion?  Certainly people who sell bogus health and nutrition products tend to misrepresent and denounce any process that would require them to prove that copper bracelets tuned to "natural frequencies" do anything but make them wealthy. But people, many of them pretenders to Liberal thought, are less scientifically literate than can be attributed to lack of education. There's something more to the people who will ignore overwhelming contradictory evidence yet will believe something without any evidence at all because they read it in an advertisement or on a website.

the faith of people who believe vaccines don't work, Neil Armstrong never went to the moon, the Boston Marathon Bombing didn't happen, Aluminum pots cause Alzheimers, pyramids sharpen razors and a measureless array of fraud, hoax, scam and baseless rumor is almost always unshakable. So of course, science is laughable because some putz thinks Element 113 was right there on the lab bench and nobody noticed or that some guy in a white coat insisted there were no elements past Lawrencium.

It's not ignorance, it's madness -- one of those communicable mental conditions that infest our culture. That culture is filled with belief systems that strengthen the ignorant in their convictions, that flatter and sooth the people who fall into the trap. Anything that makes the left-behind, the unfit refuse of progress feel good about what they are is bound to succeed in an age where knowledge is rapidly expanding. I see it as something filling the niches abandoned by the shrinkage in traditional religions -- a kind of pure land transcendentalism promising transport to a "natural," spiritual and pure existence where believing is seeing and we don't need to show you no stinking science.