That's only scratching the surface. Lindy, science knows nothing. It isn't the answer, it isn't the magic bullet. I've seen enough advance just in astronomy since I was a student that I would be a fool to think we're starting to wrap it all up, to know it all. The wider the sphere of our knowledge, the greater is the boundary of our ignorance, and that's just not a glib phrase. The further out our telescopes look the more weird things we can't explain turn up. We're wading into an ocean of knowledge miles deep and we dont even have our ankles wet yet. Now one knows this better than scientists, what we have to learn yet is staggering compared to the crumbs we do know, and half of what we know now is probably going to be proven wrong tomorrow.

This is why scientists seem so hidebound, so impatient with other ways of knowledge, why they dismiss what they view as superficial and undisciplined and just too good to be true and too easy to be right. Scientists aren't arrogant, they know better than anyone how bloody hard it is to know anything. They can't help but be infuriated at the arrogance of those who don't have a clue as to what they're up against when they start making claims about things they not only don't understand, but couldn't understand--things they've barely thought about. Mother nature does not give up its secrets easily, it takes every bit of creativity and phenomenally hard work to squeeze even the slightest bit of knowledge out of the bitch. It's not a cakewalk, you don't stick wires into a potato and get an insight, you don't sit around and read a paperback or scan a website and discover the secrets of the universe. It's excruciatingly hard work, and most of the time you turn up nothing and you have to go back to the drawing board. And when you finally think you've succeeded, your colleagues tear it apart and show you what you missed.

All knowledge, and I mean all, comes from the creativity and insight of the human mind. The problem is that the mind is also a vast universe filled with dead ends and blind alleys and nonsense. The only way we have to weave through this infinity of possibilities and cul-de-sacs is scientific method, a set of procedures that have shown themselves to be useful at getting at those nuggets of truth that lie scattered out there amongst the debris. It doesn't always work, and sometimes it leads us astray, and sometimes it fools us into a trap where we get bogged down and spin our wheels in ignorance. But the system works often enough that we have come to rely on it, because there is no other we can trust. It gets results, and that's all that counts: that fuzzy image on a photographic plate, that wiggly line on a graph, that moment when the fluid in the test tube changes color: that's reality, that is truth, that is the hard earned reward of years of training and hard work and clever experiments, including all the ones that didn't pan out. That's why it's called a laboratory. It's the place you work your ass off with no guarantee of getting anywhere.

The law gives the accused the benefit of a doubt, it assumes innocence until guilt is proven. Often the guilty go Scot free, but it's the price we're willing to pay to make sure the innocent are not condemned. And as we know, sometimes the guiltless get punished too. Something isn't so just because we can't prove it isn't. It works the other way round.
In science, you are always guilty until you're proven innocent.

This thread is not science. We aren't learning anything here, we're not discovering anything new. We are speculating, brainstorming, arguing, discussing. To do science you have to look at nature, you have to experiment, you have to come up with theories that fit the facts and then go out and do your damnedest to try and prove they're wrong. Perhaps this kind of discussion can suggest an idea to an investigator, something worth checking out. Or perhaps someone can point out why another idea won't work, that perhaps it's a blind alley that has already been explored and shown to be barren. What we do in threads like this is an exercise to shake the mind up and maybe dislodge an idea that hasn't been thought of before. If we can do that this type of discussion can be very helpful. But even if we succeed, we have to get that idea and do everything we can to break it. Scientists do this to each other all the time and if you want to play the science game you have to be ready to do it too.