this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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This meme was circulated about 20 years ago by my reckoning.
It was clever back then, it's far less entertaining now in an age when people are discarding science and factual knowledge wholesale.
We have very, very good models of each of those "things" listed. We have such good models for it, that even since this meme first made rounds, we have created new kinds of telescopes that can see gravity, we have created computers that can calculate using individual particles in superposition, we have built tools to view the edge of space and time and have imaged the event-horizons around black holes and we have created conditions close to beginning of the universe in labs and discovered new particles that validate decades or centuries of theorizing.
These models only break down in extreme environments or when they intersect in certain conditions. But by "break down" we don't mean "scientists throw their hands in the air and become flat-earthers" we mean "we are missing some key data" to make different fields of science work together.
We still lack verification on right-handed neutrinos and the exact wave function for helium.
There are likely areas we will never have any greater insight on and phenomenon that will never be explained, but my point is just that people use these kinds of short-attention-span quips to go on to say that we don't know for sure about climate change and vaccines and such.
Recognizing our knowledge is limited does not mean we believe the earth is flat or that we have no reason not to believe it is not. Attempting to say that everything is pretty much explained just increases the confidence of someone believing in the flat earth, as that is very clearly false. There's a bunch of things we can not explain and there's a bunch of things that in theory we can explain and forecast, but in practice we can not. Go ahead and do some quantum mechanical calculations to describe a system with more than 3 electrons with the nuclei of the atoms moving...
Recognizing our knowledge is limited does not mean we believe the earth is flat or that we have no reason not to believe it is not. Attempting to say that everything is pretty much explained just increases the confidence of someone believing in the flat earth, as that is very clearly false. There's a bunch of things we can not explain and there's a bunch of things that in theory we can explain and forecast, but in practice we can not. Go ahead and do some quantum mechanical calculations to describe a system with more than 3 electrons with the nuclei of the atoms moving...
Except that's a completely made-up idea of how this goes. I have a lot of experience in this area... the idea here being explained is that there is a very real growing wave of anti-intellectualism, and this is not growing in the fields of science, but dumbasses who spend all their time online listening to cranks like Eric Weinstein or Anti-vaxxers who lean on the idea that we can't "calculate a system with 3 electrons" as evidence that since science doesn't know how to do X, then why should we believe that there's an accurate model for Y?? and people who don't KNOW anything about the topic connect with that rhetoric because it appeals to feelings, not reason.
People do not fucking turn anti science because someone who knows science tries to explain science any more than this kind of "change in values."
And nobody says that. I immediately know that someone is constructing a whole straw universe when someone claims anyone representing science ever claims "everything is pretty much explained" because that's not how science WORKS. it's just a word that means a process... we look at shit, we come up with ideas for why that thing is like that, then we do tests to see if that model works, and we collect those successes as facts. It's a process that doesn't even claim to "explain" anything.